Hurricane Names Erika, Joaquin and Patricia Are Struck Off World Meteorological Organization's List

There were three hurricanes that occurred last year, and The World Meteorological Organization's hurricane committee has eliminated all three---from the names list!

They announced that the destruction caused by hurricanes Erika and Joaquin prevents the future use of the names of these tropical storms or hurricanes in the Atlantic. The name Patricia will also not be used for hurricanes in the eastern North Pacific.

Patricia is the 13th name that has been removed from the eastern North Pacific list while Erika and Joaquin are the 79th and 80th names that were deleted from the Atlantic list.

During the 2021 hurricane season, during the use of the names list of 2015, Erika will be replaced with "Elsa", Joaquin with "Julian" and Patricia with "Pamela."

The WMO reuses storm names after every six years for both the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific basins. However, if the storm is deadly or costly, they tend to retire the names, as they feel that the future use of the name would not be sensitive. Hence, all the three names of heavy hurricanes fit that bill. None of them struck the US so far, though the same cannot be said of other countries.

For instance, Tropical Storm Erika was at first thought to be a Category 1 hurricane with Palm Beach County, Fla., in its path, but it went off in the Florida Straits. Still, it brought about torrential rains causing a lot of damage on the Caribbean island of Dominica and generating mudslides in Haiti. With more than a foot of rain falling in Dominica, it caused 30 deaths. In Haiti, a mudslide that occurred after Erika disappeared as a tropical cyclone left one person dead in its wake.

Hurricane Joaquin, a Powerful Category 4 storm, formed in late September, lashed out on central and southeast Bahamas islands, killing 34, including 33 crew members of the cargo ship El Faro. It sank northeast of Crooked Island in the Bahamas.

Finally, Hurricane Patricia, a late October storm, became a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale just a day after it had been a Category 1 storm. Being the "strongest, most intense, hurricane on record," there was some debate on whether it needed to be in the hypothetical Category 6 storm or not.

Check out more about the historical background.