Hurricane Season Opens June 1. The Myths Are Already Circulating.

Every hurricane season, the same dangerous misconceptions circulate through coastal communities — repeated by neighbors, shared on social media, and acted upon by people who trust them. Some of these myths lead people to stay when they should evacuate. Others lead them to shelter in the wrong location. Some cause people to underestimate a storm that doesn’t fit their mental model of what a dangerous hurricane looks like.

The consequences of acting on hurricane myths are not abstract. Storm surge — the wall of ocean water pushed ashore by hurricane winds — kills more people in Atlantic hurricanes than any other hazard. Most of those deaths are preventable. They happen when people misunderstand what a storm’s category means, believe their location is safe because of geography, or decide that staying through a previous storm without harm means staying through the next one is equally safe.

Hurricane season opens in four days. Getting the facts right now, before any specific storm is in the forecast, is the kind of preparation that actually matters.

Myth: The Hurricane Category Tells You How Dangerous the Storm Is

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale — the Category 1 through 5 system used in virtually all hurricane coverage — measures only one thing: maximum sustained wind speed. It does not measure storm surge, rainfall, storm size, or inland flooding potential. These omissions are consequential because several of the most deadly and destructive Atlantic hurricanes in recent history were not Category 4 or 5 storms at landfall.

Hurricane Harvey, which killed 68 people and caused $125 billion in damage in 2017, made landfall as a Category 4 storm but its death toll and damage were driven almost entirely by unprecedented rainfall — 60 inches in some locations — that had nothing to do with wind speed. Harvey would have been equally catastrophic as a Category 2 storm if its rainfall characteristics had been the same.

Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 people in 2012, had weakened to post-tropical status by the time it struck New Jersey and New York. Under the Saffir-Simpson scale, it wasn’t even a hurricane at landfall. Its catastrophic storm surge — driven by its enormous physical size rather than its wind speed — flooded the New York City subway system, destroyed entire neighborhoods, and produced a death toll that Category 5 storms have sometimes not reached.

Hurricane Florence, which killed 54 people in North Carolina in 2018, made landfall as a Category 1 storm. Its catastrophic flooding was driven by extreme rainfall from a storm that stalled over the region — wind category told essentially nothing about what Florence would do to communities inland from the coast.

The category is one piece of information about one characteristic of a storm. Storm surge forecast, rainfall forecast, storm track, and storm size are all as important or more important for assessing a specific storm’s threat to a specific location. The National Hurricane Center provides all of these in its official products. The category alone is not an adequate basis for evacuation decisions.

Myth: Storm Surge Only Affects the Beachfront

Storm surge — the abnormal rise of water generated by a hurricane’s winds pushing ocean water toward shore — is the deadliest hurricane hazard, responsible for the majority of hurricane fatalities in the United States. And it extends far farther inland than most people realize.

Storm surge is not a wave — it is a sustained rise in sea level that can persist for hours and penetrate miles inland wherever water has a pathway: estuaries, bays, rivers, inlets, and low-lying terrain. The surge from a major hurricane striking a low-lying coastline can extend 10, 20, or even 30 miles inland depending on topography. Communities well away from the beach — communities that residents don’t think of as flood-prone — can be inundated under 10 feet of water from storm surge.

The surge is also not evenly distributed along the coast. The highest surge occurs to the right of the storm’s eye at landfall — the right-front quadrant, where winds are blowing directly onshore and are strongest. A location 50 miles to the right of where the eye crosses the coast may experience dramatically higher surge than the community at the eye crossing itself.

Storm surge maps and inundation projections produced by the National Hurricane Center — specifically the SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) model output — show the specific surge threat to specific areas based on storm characteristics. These maps, available through NHC and reproduced in local emergency management materials, are the correct tool for assessing surge risk — not proximity to the beach, not past flood experience, and not the storm’s category.

Myth: I Rode Out the Last Storm, So I Can Ride Out This One

The survivorship of previous storm decisions is one of the most dangerous influences on hurricane evacuation behavior. People who stayed through a previous storm and experienced no significant damage frequently conclude that staying through future storms is similarly safe. This conclusion fails to account for several realities.

Hurricane tracks and intensity vary enormously between storms. A previous storm that tracked slightly offshore may have produced minimal impact at a location that a direct hit storm would inundate with catastrophic storm surge. The previous storm’s benign impact tells you nothing about what the next storm’s different track and intensity will produce at your location.

The variability in storm surge by track position is extreme. The difference between a storm that passes 30 miles to the east of your location versus 30 miles to the west can mean the difference between inconvenient flooding and 15 feet of storm surge, depending on coastal orientation. Staying because you survived the last storm is implicitly assuming the next storm will track the same way — an assumption with no meteorological basis.

Evacuation compliance data consistently shows that people who survived a previous storm without evacuating are significantly less likely to evacuate for subsequent storms. Emergency managers call this the “cry wolf” problem — but unlike false tornado alarms, hurricane non-events are often not false alarms but storms whose impacts were limited by track, not by the storm’s actual danger. The dangerous storm will eventually come to that location. Statistical probability doesn’t care about personal storm history.

Myth: Inland Areas Are Safe From Hurricanes

The threat from landfalling hurricanes does not end at the coastline. Tropical systems that move inland retain significant wind and, more importantly, rainfall and flooding potential for hundreds of miles from the coast.

Inland flooding from hurricane rainfall has become an increasingly recognized threat as population has grown in areas once considered safely distant from coastal hurricane impacts. Hurricane Floyd in 1999 produced catastrophic flooding across eastern North Carolina more than 100 miles from the coast. Hurricane Ivan in 2004 produced significant tornadoes across multiple inland states as its remnants tracked northward. Hurricane Irene in 2011 caused its worst flooding in Vermont, more than 500 miles from its landfall in North Carolina.

Tornadoes are a frequently overlooked inland hurricane hazard. The outer rain bands of landfalling hurricanes generate significant tornado activity — typically weak tornadoes that develop rapidly with minimal warning. States hundreds of miles from the coast can experience tornado outbreaks associated with hurricane remnants, and inland residents who don’t associate their location with hurricane risk may not have the preparedness mindset that coastal residents have developed.

People living in river valleys and low-lying areas hundreds of miles from the coast should monitor the rainfall forecasts associated with approaching tropical systems, as flash flooding and river flooding from hurricane rainfall have killed people in locations they never considered to be at hurricane risk.

Myth: Category 5 Storms Are Always the Most Dangerous

The counterpart to underestimating lower-category storms is overestimating Category 5 storms — assuming that a Category 5 is always more dangerous than a Category 3 or that the category alone determines whether evacuation is necessary.

Category 5 storms with extremely high wind speeds can actually produce smaller storm surge than Category 3 storms of significantly larger physical size, because surge is driven by wind stress applied over a large area of ocean — a large, slower storm pushing water for a longer time can produce higher surge than a smaller, faster, more intense storm. Hurricane size — measured in the diameter of tropical storm force winds — is a better predictor of storm surge magnitude than category.

The practical implication is that a Category 3 or even Category 2 storm should not be dismissed as manageable simply because it isn’t Category 4 or 5. The appropriate response to a hurricane is determined by the storm’s specific characteristics — track, size, rainfall potential, surge forecast — not by where it falls on a five-category wind speed scale.

Myth: Taping Windows Protects Them From Hurricane Damage

Taping windows before a hurricane — applying masking tape, painter’s tape, or duct tape in an X pattern — provides essentially no protection against hurricane-force winds and debris. The tape does not strengthen the glass, does not prevent shattering, and does not prevent shards from flying when the window fails. It does, however, create a significant cleanup problem after the storm when the tape’s adhesive has baked onto the glass.

Window protection against hurricane damage requires impact-resistant glass or physical shutters — plywood, aluminum, or purpose-built storm shutters — installed over the window opening. These are the measures that building codes in hurricane-prone coastal areas increasingly require and that actually prevent window failure and the structural damage (internal pressurization of the structure) that window failure enables.

If proper shutters or impact glass aren’t in place when a storm approaches, interior shelter — an interior room on the lowest floor, away from windows — is the appropriate response. Taped windows provide false confidence without providing protection.

What Actually Protects You

Hurricane safety comes down to following official evacuation orders without second-guessing them, understanding that storm category is one piece of information among many, knowing the storm surge risk for your specific location before any storm is in the forecast, and having a plan that doesn’t depend on last-minute decisions made under the influence of previous non-events.

The National Hurricane Center’s official products — the track forecast, the surge forecast, the wind speed probability products, and the storm surge watch/warning system — are the authoritative sources for specific storm threats. Local emergency management evacuation orders translate those threats into specific geographic action requirements. Following those orders when they are issued — rather than evaluating them against personal storm history and mythology — is what the evidence consistently shows saves lives.

Hurricane season opens in four days. The storms of this season will be what they are, not what past experience suggests they should be.