Hurricane Mayhem By: Luke Simmons

This time of year is the infamous period of time when the news is constantly portraying horrifying scenes and clips of intense rain and winds obliterating houses, trees, and towns all together. This is known as hurricane season, or where hurricanes are most common and happen most often. While it is currently the tail end of the season, there were many serious hurricanes that occurred and made landfall, with the most recent being Hurricane Michael. This specific storm made other hurricanes look like nothing once it made landfall in Florida on October 10 of this year.
Hurricanes are put into categories based on how strong the winds are as the storm circles around the eye, with category 5 having the strongest winds and category 1 having the lowest winds. Most commonly, hurricanes are somewhere around category 2 or 3 once they hit land due to the decreased speed that is caused by the change from the storm being over the ocean to now being over land. What made Hurricane Michael unique was that it was a category 4 hurricane when it made landfall, which made the wind speed at about 155 miles per hour. This is almost unheard of when it comes to hurricanes on land, because as hurricanes hit land it is typical for the hurricane to greatly decrease in terms of wind speeds. This is due to how the hurricane loses momentum once it reaches land without the ocean under it fueling the storm. What made it even more surprising was that it was just on the cusp of being a category 5 storm, which has hardly ever been recorded in hurricanes in the recent years.

Michael made its way through Florida and up the Atlantic Coast up to around southern New Jersey before it stopped. Although it lasted only about four days total on land in the United States, it reeked havoc on almost everything that it came in contact with. Houses were destroyed, businesses lifted off of their foundations, and cars and other objects thrown and destroyed in the intense winds. Local citizens of the afflicted areas came back to nothing if they decided to return back to their homes, and were devastated to see that everything that they had ever known had dissipated with the storm.
Within my life, the most scary part of all of this was knowing that our family friends were in Florida while the hurricane was obliterating a path to the northern part of the coast. Even thought it was predicted that the storm was not going to come near them, it was still very nerve-wracking knowing that they were so close to such an intense act of nature. Just to add to the situation, weather specialists did not suspect that it was going to be very close to a category 5 at landfall, yet it was, so who was to say that the path of the hurricane couldn't change at any moment?
Although this was a very intense time, thankfully my family-friends were not harmed, yet an immense amount of others were. For days after the end of the hurricane there were numerous frightening headlines of missing people, deaths, and destruction. All of these things are inevitable when it comes to hurricanes, which is what makes them so stressful. After going through the hurricane this year and being under an immense amount of stress without even being physically near the storm, I hope that no other hurricane is as strong as Hurricane Michael, because if so then much more devastation is at hand in the near future.