As Hurricane Dorian drew near to the Abaco Islands in the northwestern Bahamas early Sunday morning, the National Hurricane Center said in a bulletin that the maximum sustained winds around the eye of the storm had reached 160- miles an hour, making it a “catastrophic” storm with “devastating winds.”
It is moving westward fairly slowly — 8 miles an hour — and would soon be moving over Grand Abaco. The bulletin said storm surge as much of 15 to 20 feet was possible, enough to swamp many low-lying areas of the islands, and that as much as 24 inches of rain could fall before the storm passes.
This is pretty much a nightmare scenario. A storm originally forecast as a Category 3 or 4 has strengthened to a Category 5 in the balmy warm waters just south of The Bahamas. A weak jet stream, and unusually high temperatures of the waters have only strengthened the storm as it slowly creeps toward The States.
The devastating wind and sustained rain is going to pummel the tropical islands before reaching Florida on September 2, Labor Day at 2am. The NWS precipitation forecast says it all:
There will be widespread flooding, intense surf, and damaging sustained winds. As a reminder, climate change is real and it will only get worse and worse every year until we make systemic changes to roll back greenhouse emissions, and protect our only weapon in this fight — the rainforests of Earth.
The full list of Category 5 storms (data from Wikipedia) as of August 2019:
| Name | Dates as a Category 5 | Sustained wind speeds |
|---|---|---|
| “Cuba” | October 19, 1924 | 165 mph (270 km/h) |
| “San Felipe II Okeechobee” | September 13–14, 1928 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| “Bahamas” | September 5–6, 1932 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| “Cuba” | November 5–8, 1932 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| “Cuba–Brownsville” | August 30, 1933 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| “Tampico” | September 21, 1933 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| “Labor Day” | September 3, 1935 | 185 mph (295 km/h) |
| “New England” | September 19–20, 1938 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Carol | September 3, 1953 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Janet | September 27–28, 1955 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Carla | September 11, 1961 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Hattie | October 30–31, 1961 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Beulah | September 20, 1967 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Camille | August 16–18, 1969 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Edith | September 9, 1971 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Anita | September 2, 1977 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| David | August 30–31, 1979 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Allen | August 5–9, 1980 | 190 mph (305 km/h) |
| Gilbert | September 13–14, 1988 | 185 mph (295 km/h) |
| Hugo | September 15, 1989 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Andrew | August 23–24, 1992 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Mitch | October 26–28, 1998 | 180 mph (285 km/h) |
| Isabel | September 11–14, 2003 | 165 mph (270 km/h) |
| Ivan | September 9–14, 2004 | 165 mph (270 km/h) |
| Emily | July 16, 2005 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Katrina | August 28–29, 2005 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Rita | September 21–22, 2005 | 180 mph (285 km/h) |
| Wilma | October 19, 2005 | 185 mph (295 km/h) |
| Dean | August 18–21, 2007 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Felix | September 3–4, 2007 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Matthew | October 1, 2016 | 165 mph (270 km/h) |
| Irma | September 5–9, 2017 | 180 mph (285 km/h) |
| Maria | September 18–20, 2017 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
| Michael | October 10, 2018 | 160 mph (260 km/h) |
| Dorian | September 1, 2019 | 175 mph (280 km/h) |
Another way to read this table — in nearly a a century of record-keeping, roughly 30% of all Category 5 hurricanes have been recorded since the New Millennium.