Tropical Labor Math

It was coming, it wasn’t coming. On again, off again. Voluntary evacuations, all clears, and then the rushed mandatory removals. When Hurricane Bonnie finally made landfall, it left people more angry than usual with these kinds of storms. Weather officials just didn’t know where it would end up. In eventually would smack right into Virginia’s Tidewater region, after wreaking variable havoc as far south as South Carolina.

Norfolk spokesman Charles Hartig agreed. “This just underlines how unpredictable hurricanes are,” he said. “With all our technology and ability, we still can’t match wits with Mother Nature. A lot of fingers are being pointed, but I don’t think that’s fair”.

An official from Virginia Power put it simply, “It was a bigger wallop than we thought.”

Bonnie, reaching a peak intensity of a Category 3 storm, was just the first of many during that 1998 Atlantic hurricane season. The year would see more storms than typical, more even than we have had in recent years. At the same moment, Bonnie was wrecking the mid-Atlantic coast, Danielle was lurking offshore and looked for a time like it might follow with Category 2 winds and surge.

While Danielle never did reach the coast, Georges would in September 1998. This storm would rake over Cuba, blast Key West, head into the Gulf eventually slamming into Mississippi with sustained winds of 105 mph.

And yet, when you look at the Employment reports for either August or September 1998, the BLS doesn’t mention any of the ten tropical storms and hurricanes spinning around near and occasionally onto the US mainland at some point during those months. The August payroll report was stellar (originally estimated at +365k, which would be +445k in today’s terms), while the September update wasn’t (just +69k since revised to +218k).

Maybe it was a sign of the times, neither the employment report nor the tropical situation receiving as much attention. Perhaps the lack of a fully populated and exploited internet kept the interest to a minimum.