MIAMI – Herbert Saffir, an engineer who created the five-category system used to describe hurricane strength and warn millions of an approaching storm's danger, has died. He was 90.
Saffir died Wednesday, said his son, Richard Saffir.
A structural engineer, Saffir created his scale in 1969 – laying out for the first time what kind of damage could be expected from an approaching hurricane. It has since 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.
Saffir's innovation was ranking storm destruction by type, from Category 1 – where trees and unanchored mobile homes receive 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.
Saffir's scale was expanded by former National Hurricane Center director Robert H. Simpson and became known as the Saffir-Simpson scale in the 1970s.
