His scale lets us assess hurricanes

MIAMI - Herbert Saffir, 90, a structural engineer who created the five-category system used to describe hurricane strength and warn of an approaching storm's danger, died Wednesday (Nov. 21, 2007).

Mr. Saffir died of a heart attack, according to his son, Richard.

He created his scale in 1969, laying out for the first time what kind of damage could be expected from an approaching hurricane. It has become the definitive way to describe intensity for storms that form in the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific.

Before the scale, hurricanes were simply described as major or minor.

Mr. Saffir's innovation was ranking storm destruction by type, from Category 1 - where trees and unanchored mobile homes suffer the primary damage - to Category 5 - the complete failure of roofs and some structures. The five descriptions of destruction were then matched with the sustained wind speeds producing the corresponding damage.

His scale was expanded by former National Hurricane Center director Robert Simpson and became known as the Saffir-Simpson scale in the 1970s. Simpson said the system helped him communicate the power of an approaching storm.

"We had a lot of requests before the scale, how many resources of what kind would be needed to deal with the storm," Simpson said this year. "I couldn't tell the Salvation Army, for example, how much and what materials they should be shipping. The scale gave them a much better handle on that."

Mr. Saffir was born in New York in 1917. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in civil engineering in 1940 and served in World War II before moving to South Florida to become a county engineer. He arrived just in time for two 1947 hurricanes a month apart.

He quickly became an expert in how hurricane-force winds affect buildings and helped write and unify building codes in South Florida. He began working on the hurricane intensity scale in 1969 as part of a U.N. project. He had been asked how the U.N. could lessen hurricane damage to low-cost buildings worldwide.

He presented his system to Simpson, who began to use the rankings internally and later for a weather report meant largely for emergency agencies. The scale was so useful, however, that others quickly adopted it.

It was later used for public hurricane forecasts, making the pair's names synonymous with the Atlantic hurricane season.

Mr. Saffir continued to work as a structural engineer at his Coral Gables office past his 90th birthday.

Local officials said he was instrumental in developing South Florida's post-Hurricane Andrew building code, widely viewed as the most storm-resistant in the nation.

Saffir said the region had no choice, repeatedly warning that South Florida remained vulnerable to the Big One, a storm as powerful as Andrew but larger and lingering longer over the region, inflicting unimaginable destruction.

"I certainly think Katrina is a wake-up call to all of us," he told the Miami Herald in 2005.

Mr. Saffir's wife died about five years ago. In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, Barbara.

Information from McClatchy Newspapers was used in this report.

Fast facts

The scale

Category 1: Winds 74-95 mph. Storm surge 4 to 5 feet above normal.

Category 2: Winds 96-110 mph. Storm surge 6 to 8 feet above normal.

Category 3: Winds 111-130 mph. Storm surge 9 to 12 feet above normal.

Category 4: Winds 131-155 mph. Storm surge 13 to 18 feet above normal.

Category 5: Winds greater than 155 mph. Storm surge greater than 18 feet above normal.

[Last modified November 24, 2007, 00:50:42]