h urricane is a furious, spiraling tropical storm system that can smash buildings apart and hurl trees,

cars, and massive chunks of debris far into the air. Wind speeds in a hurricane can reach more
than 150 miles (250 kilometers) per hour. The wind brings with it torrential rain and
thunderstorms. A hurricane roars in from the ocean and lashes the coast for hours, causing terrible
damage, but dies down quite quickly as it moves farther inland.
Angry gods and “big winds”
Tropical storm systems in the Americas are called hurricanes, but they are known by different names
around the world. People in the Americas call them hurricanes after the ancient Mayan and Taino god
of wind, storms, and destruction, Hurakan or Jurakan. In southeast Asia, where tropical storms come
from the Pacific, people call them typhoons, from the Japanese tai foon, meaning “great wind.” In India
and Australia tropical storms are called cyclones.

▲ Sand whips through a parking lot in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as Hurricane Katrina (2005) hits
the United States.
A tropical storm can be officially classed as a hurricane, typhoon or cyclone if it has winds that blow
faster than 74 miles (118 kilometers) per hour.
Hurricanes in history
Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons have always happened, but because many strike areas where people
did not keep written records, we do not have detailed accounts of them going back very far in time. As
soon as Europeans began to visit South and Central America, they encountered hurricanes. Christopher
Columbus’s ship sheltered from a hurricane in a bay in 1502, but 20 other ships were sunk by the storm
on their way back to Spain.

▲ A hurricane and resulting sea flood in Galveston, Texas, in 1900 destroyed the town and killed
around 8,000 people.
CASE STUDY
The Great Hurricane, 1780
Three hurricanes struck the West Indies in 1780, the worst of which killed 22,000 people over eight
days, making it the deadliest hurricane ever to strike the Western Hemisphere. It destroyed nearly
every building in Barbados, flattened St. Lucia, demolished St. Pierre, the capital of Martinique,
and on St. Vincent it sent a storm surge 19.8 feet (six meters) high that washed villages out to sea.
Most of the British fleet at St. Lucia was sunk, as well as 15 Dutch ships in Grenada. It would be 200
years before another hurricane would claim more than 10,000 lives in the Atlantic.