Last year's hurricane season was the most destructive on record. Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana and Mississippi and was blamed for more than 1,570 deaths among Louisiana residents alone.
It also was the busiest in 154 years of storm tracking, with a records 28 named storms and a record 15 hurricanes. Meteorologists used up their list of 21 proper names — beginning with Arlene and ending with Wilma — and had to use the Greek alphabet to name storms for the first time.
This year, however, meteorologists have said the Atlantic is not as warm as it was at this time in 2005, meaning potential storms would have less of the energy needed to develop into hurricanes.
Last year's first named storm was Tropical Storm Arlene, which formed June 9 and made landfall just west of Pensacola in the Florida Panhandle.
Kunstler: In Training
June12, 2006, After sitting on airplanes for two days, like a mummy in a casket, I took the Amtrak train from Bellingham, Washington, down to Seattle. It was an extravagant relief from harsh inanities of aviation. The train cars were new, clean and luxurious, very unlike the beat-up rolling stock on my usual Hudson River line (Albany to New York City). The seats were better than first-class airplane seats. There was a cafe car serving up hot beverages. The conductors were cheerful, as if they actually liked what they were doing.
The view out the (clean) windows was supernaturally beautiful. Loveliness everywhere. The tracks ran along Puget Sound most of the way. Dark fir-covered mountains spilled down to rocky bays where, here and there, people were digging -- for clams, I supposed. I saw three bald eagles along the way. Also scores of some kind of stately, long-necked wading bird with a vivid black-and-white blaze on its cheeks. At other times we passed through farm fields and orchards. White and pink foxgloves grew wild along tracks most of the way along with yellow broom and phlox.
As we got closer to Seattle, you saw more people in the bays, clamming, running their dogs, hugging their girlfriends. Almost all of them waved at the train as we passed, as if to say, "Notice how glad we are to be here!"
When the train got to the station in downtown Seattle, it just stopped and we got off, without ceremony or painful delay. There was no standing around waiting to be squeezed out of tube, the way they unload an airplane. I caught a taxi outside the station door, and five minutes later I was at my hotel. This line along the Pacific Northwest corridor is one of very few extant passenger rail lines in the whole USA. There is only one train a day each way between Seattle and Vancouver, Canada and back -- on which Bellingham is a stop. The people in charge would probably just as soon not even run those trains.
But why Americans do not demand to have railroad service all over the nation is one of the abiding mysteries of these crack-up years. What a pleasure it was to travel on that train yesterday. What an amenity it would be if people could travel that way between Cleveland and Columbus, or Atlanta and Birmingham, or Dallas to Denver, or Albany and Boston.
What a drag it is struggling to get to the airport, getting processed through like a piece of meat in a grinder, and then struggling off to your destination once you land twenty or thirty miles outside the city you've traveled to -- not to mention the alternative insanity of driving a car three hundred miles, or more, whenever you have to go somewhere in this moronic republic.
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