Hurricane Gonzalo damaged roofs, knocked out power in Bermuda
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Hurricane Gonzalo hit Bermuda Friday night, leaving damaged roofs and electricity outages in its wake, catastrophe modeling firm AIR Worldwide said in a statement Monday.
The eye of the storm made landfall as a category 3 storm with 115-mph winds but then quickly slipped to a category 2 with 110-mph winds. Gonzalo is just the third recorded category 2 hurricane to pass directly over Bermuda since 1851, the first year for which storm information is available from HURDAT, the NOAA hurricane database, according to Scott Stransky, manager and principal scientist at Boston-based AIR Worldwide. The others were in 1895 and 1922, he added.
“The storm weakened prior to landfall due to both lower sea surface temperatures and higher wind shear in the vicinity of Bermuda,” said Mr. Stransky in the statement
Initial damage reports were dominated by downed trees and utility poles, which made roads impassable, said AIR, while the Bermuda Electric Light Company, or Belco, said Gonzalo left 31,700 households in the dark.
“Damage may also have been mitigated by the very fact that the very large — and very calm — eye of Gonzalo passed over Bermuda, which reduced the total number of hours of significant winds. Nevertheless, roof damage — ranging from a few blown off tiles to, in some cases, loss of nearly the entire roof — is fairly widespread,” Mr. Stransky said in the statement.
Hurricane Fabian, which in 2003 passed west of the island, caused approximately $300 million in losses then, with AIR estimating that similar damage today would run to about $650 million, the company said in its statement.
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