Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 23, 2021

Track of the storm

The 1916 Texas hurricane was an intense and quick-moving tropical cyclone that caused widespread damage in Jamaica and South Texas in August 1916. A Category 4 hurricane upon landfall in Texas, it was the strongest tropical cyclone to strike the United States in three decades. Throughout its eight-day trek across the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Texas, the hurricane caused 37 fatalities and inflicted $11.8 million in damage. Becoming a small tropical storm by August 12, it skirted the southern coast of Jamaica as a hurricane on August 15, killing 17 people and causing extensive damage to crops and buildings. The storm then moved into the Gulf of Mexico and intensified into the equivalent of a major hurricane on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson scale. On the evening of August 18, it struck South Texas near Baffin Bay with winds of 130 mph (215 km/h). The storm's evolution has been inferred from scant historical weather data analyzed by the Atlantic hurricane reanalysis project in 2008. (Full article...)