Say goodbye to Ida: Name of deadly hurricane retired

Ida will join the ranks of retired storm names after the Category 4 hurricane claimed dozens of lives and wrought widespread destruction across the nation, even when weakening into a tropical rainstorm, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hurricane Committee ruled Wednesday.
The panel maintains the rotating lists of names that are used in each tropical cyclone basin, only altering the list to remove a name in the case of a particularly deadly or costly storm. Hurricane Ida met the criteria two-fold.
With a catastrophic path that carved hundreds of miles from Louisiana through New Jersey, 91 deaths were attributed to Hurricane Ida in late August 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Just this month, the hurricane was ranked the fifth-costliest storm on record at $76.5 billion, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the National Hurricane Center. AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers had estimated in late August, the total damage and economic loss from the hurricane would fall between $70 billion and $80 billion. After the storm caused catastrophic damage in the Northeast, he revised his estimate to $95 billion.
Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans 16 years earlier to the day, remains the costliest storm on record at $180 billion, with the 2022 CPI-adjusted cost. It’s followed by Hurricane Harvey ($143.8 billion in 2017), Hurricane Maria ($103.5 billion in 2017) and Hurricane Sandy ($80 billion in 2012). The costliest hurricane in the Atlantic Basin that hasn’t had its name retired was Hurricane Sally in 2020 at $7.9 billion, which ranks 32nd on the list.