Right now I am thinking of all those trying to sort out the damage left in the wake of Idalia. The name is so pretty, but the destruction she’s leaving behind her is not.

Here are three things I never knew, but have picked from the various reports on the hurricane. The first is the exact location of the ‘Big Bend’. It’s an undeveloped natural area, in the wide indent near the top edge of the west coast of Florida. Maps will explain it better than me, but the main point is that it’s not usually where hurricanes make landfall.

The second piece of information is that the reason some of the most dangerous hurricanes begin with the letter ‘I’ is that by the mid-point of hurricane season – June to November – the storms are usually at their most deadly, and the naming tends to have reached the middle of the alphabet.

The final piece of new knowledge for me, is that storm surges can often cause more destruction than high wind strengths due to the weight and volume of water. In Idalia’s case the situation could be made worse by the large tidal range in the area combined with the gravitational pull of this week’s super moon.

It looks a hazardous combination. I just hope that Idalia will prove gentler than expected. Thinking of everyone.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023