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Hurricane Delta headlines today's show. That's not a name that's in the regular rotation. We'll explain why in a moment. But first, the storm. It's powerful and it got that way quickly. Rapid intensification occurs when a hurricane's wind speeds increase by 35 miles per hour or more over a 24 hour period. By Tuesday afternoon, Hurricane Delta's wind speeds increased by 85 miles per hour in a day. And that hasn't happened since 2005 when Hurricane Wilma struck Cancun, Mexico. That same city was in the direct path of Hurricane Delta.
It was expected to make landfall Wednesday morning as a Category 4 storm. Forecasters predicted its sustained wind speeds would be between 130 and 156 miles per hour. That makes Delta capable of catastrophic damage. And it's storm surge, the rise in sea water levels blown ashore by a hurricane, was expected to be six to nine feet higher than normal tide levels. This has been an active hurricane season. Atlantic storms have used up all 21 names on the annual list and Delta is the 25th storm that needed a name. So forecasters are using Greek letters like Delta and Gamma to identify the new systems.
It's the first time they've had to do that since the record hurricane season of 2005. And Delta could become the first hurricane with a Greek letter ever recorded to strike the United States. After hitting Mexico, forecaster predicted the storm would then move into the western Gulf of Mexico and possibly hit the U.S. Gulf coast on Friday or Saturday. They say there's still a lot of uncertainty about where the storm will go and how strong it will become once it's in the Gulf.
