It’s That Time Again …

The NHL’s Carolina Hurricanes may have just been swept out of ice hockey’s Stanley Cup playoffs, but the real storms are about to sweep in for their 2009 season.

Although the official “hurricane season” doesn’t begin until next Monday (June 1), the season’s first tropical disturbance has formed off the coast of Rhode Island. Should it gain strength, it would become Tropical Storm Ana – the first named storm of what meteorologists are saying will be a “normal” 2009 season.

That means anywhere between four and seven named hurricanes.

In 2008 there were eight named hurricanes, five of them “major,” i.e. Category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale. These storms – and eight other tropical systems that didn’t mature into hurricanes – did $54 billion in damages, according to information released by the National Climatic Data Center.

We’ve written in the past on South Carolina’s emergency preparedness efforts, but this year our state could be operating at a deficit as it prepares to deal with hurricane season.

No, we’re not talking about budget cuts, we’re talking about the $37 million that lawyers yanked from the S.C. Insurance Reserve Fund to pay for recurring expenses in the state’s $20.6 billion budget.

Gov. Mark Sanford vetoed the funding “raid,” but lawmakers overrode him.

That decision could come back and bite South Carolinians should a “big one” make landfall like Hurricane Hugo did twenty years ago.

Anyway, just as we did last year, count on FITS to keep you in the loop on the latest tropical developments affecting South Carolina.