Why Bermuda is unusually resilient to hurricanes

Despite hundreds of tropical storms passing close to the island, a decision made 300 years ago has made the island unusually resilient to hurricanes.

Transcript

00:00Beautiful Bermuda situated in Hurricane Alley, the most frequent path taken by

00:05Atlantic hurricanes. So you would think Bermuda gets slammed every hurricane

00:08season. Well think again because on average Bermuda experiences as only one

00:13damaging tropical cyclone every six or seven years with most of the activity

00:18at higher likelihood with landfall falling into September and October. Part

00:22of the reason while the high-pressure zone east of Bermuda in the summer it

00:25can deflect storm systems to the north and when the Bermuda high is strong and

00:29extends westward it can also force hurricanes to move around it. Since 1850

00:35130 tropical storms or hurricanes have come within a hundred miles of the

00:40island but only eleven have made landfall. In October of 2014 it was

00:45Hurricanes Fay and Gonzalo both making landfall which made that season the

00:50first to produce two landfalls. Now when storms do make landfall into Bermuda the

00:56islands hold up pretty well thanks to its coral reefs but also some of those

01:00well-built structures and it was after the storm of 1712 that destroyed most of

01:06the wooden structures the decision was made to build with stone. Now hurricane

01:11deaths pretty uncommon it was 129 people that died in Bermuda due to the storms.

01:16110 of them were results of shipwrecks along the South Shore in 1926 and four

01:22people died in 2003's hurricane Fabian the only tropical storm to cause a death

01:27in Bermuda since 1947. Now all of this being said there is a risk to lives and

01:32property in Bermuda from Ernesto as we head into Friday and Saturday some of

01:37those big impacts on the accurate the real impact scale for hurricanes this is

01:41a three in Bermuda you can see that scale of less than one to five and again

01:45a three from Ernesto.