World News | Fiona, Ian withdrawn from list of tropical cyclone names

MIAMI, March 30 (AP) — Weather officials announced Wednesday that they are removing the names Fiona and Ian from their rotation list of Atlantic tropical cyclone names because of the death and destruction caused by recent storms with those names.

Farrah will replace Fiona on the list, while Idris will replace Ian, the World Meteorological Organization said in a release. As tropical cyclones intensify into tropical storms with winds of 63 km/h, they are assigned names in alphabetical order. The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30. If a season sees more than 26 named storms, forecasters use the Greek alphabet.

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Storm names have long been used to help convey warnings and alert people to potentially life-threatening risks, officials said. These names are usually repeated every six years, unless a storm is so deadly that the name is no longer in use. Since the current storm naming system was adopted in 1953, a total of 96 names have been retired from the Atlantic Basin List.

Last September, Hurricane Fiona hit the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos Islands before moving north across the western Atlantic and hitting Canada as a strong post-tropical cyclone. The storm caused more than $3 billion in damage and 29 direct and indirect deaths in the Caribbean and Canada.

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A few days after Fiona’s death, Ian hit western Cuba as a severe hurricane and made landfall in southwestern Florida as a Category 4 storm, causing massive storm surges and flooding. Ian was responsible for more than 150 direct and indirect deaths and over $112 billion in damages in the United States. It was the costliest hurricane in Florida history and the third costliest in the United States. (Associated Press)

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