Hurricane Michelle Anniversary

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NASSAU, BAHAMAS – Summer is over and the seasons are changing, but there’s one season that isn’t over yet- hurricane season.

Twenty-one years ago this week, the strongest storm of the 2001 season, hurricane Michelle, made landfall in Cuba and, eventually, The Bahamas.

While the hurricane season doesn’t end until November 30, most people don’t expect trouble from the Atlantic after the peak of the season passes in mid-October.

That was the mindset in 2001, but in the end, November churned out the strongest storm of the season – hurricane Michelle.

More than 700,000 people evacuated before hurricane Michelle tore through Cuba as a category 4 – the strongest storm they’d seen in almost 50 years – with heavy storm surge and reports of 15-foot waves.

Thanks to the early evacuations, casualties were relatively low with five lives lost, but damages amounted to almost $2 billion.

We were also impacted here in The Bahamas, once hurricane Michelle had weakened.

Even as a category 1, news reports from the time talk of storm surge and flooding, causing some Nassau residents to move to the second floor. And for more than one generation of Nassuvians, hurricane Michelle was their first experience with a direct hit.

While we were spared the full strength of hurricane Michelle’s force, she didn’t breeze through unnoticed. Across the archipelago, reports of roofs torn off, flooding, and dangerous windblown debris came out after the storms passage.

Earlier this week, hurricane Lisa hit Belize as a category 1 hurricane, and just this morning, the National Hurricane Center marked a disturbance over The Bahamas with a 40 percent chance of development – a reminder to stay prepared until the official end of hurricane season on November 30.