Last October, Patricia came ashore in Mexico with the strongest hurricane winds ever recorded on Earth, at over 200 miles per hour. Then, this February, Winston broke the windspeed record for the southwest Pacific Ocean basin, when it devastated one of Fiji’s main islands with winds topping 180 miles per hour. On Monday, it was Fantala’s turn to break that record for the Indian Ocean basin, as it ominously churned just off Madagascar’s northern coast, sitting pretty at 175 miles per hour, according to the U.S. military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.
That makes Fantala equivalent to a category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale used in the Atlantic basin. Reliable satellite-based records for the Indian Ocean only became available in 1990, but 2015 and 2016 have already yielded the first- and third-most powerful cyclones in 26 years of record-keeping. FULL REPORT
On September 11th,1992 (yes 9/11),Hurricane Iniki leveled the island of Kauai, Hawaii. It was a Class 5, and the winds were clocked by the military at 227 mph, and their instruments broke! I was there, in my house with my children. The Hawaii Visitors Bureau did a great job of hushing up Iniki, as tourism in Hawaii was down due to Desert Storm in the Middle East, (people were afraid to fly due to threat of terrorism), and the economy was also way down in Hawaii in the early 90’s. I once found a military site on line with those statistics for Iniki, but have since been able to locate it. Those statistics were broadcast on the radio repeatedly after the hurricane, but now the info seems to have disappeared.
*unable to locate it.*