Herbert Saffir, 90, Dies; Created Hurricane Scale

MIAMI, Nov. 23 (AP) — Herbert Saffir, an engineer who created the five-category system used to describe hurricane strength and warn millions of an approaching storms potential danger, died Wednesday in Miami. He was 90.

The cause was complications from surgery, said his son, Richard Saffir.

A structural engineer, Mr. 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 basin and parts of the Pacific Ocean. Before the scale, hurricanes were simply described as major or minor.

Mr. Saffirs innovation was ranking storm destruction by type, from Category 1, in which trees and unanchored mobile homes receive the primary damage, to Category 5, which involves the complete failure of roofs and some structures. The five descriptions of destruction were then matched with the sustained wind speeds that would produce the corresponding damage.

Mr. Saffirs scale was expanded by a former National Hurricane Center director, Robert H. Simpson, and became known as the Saffir-Simpson scale in the 1970s. The scale is now so well known that many coastal residents toss off shorthand like Cat. 1 and few need to be told that it refers to Mr. Saffir and Mr. Simpsons creation.

Mr. Simpson, 95, said the system was invaluable in helping him communicate the power of an approaching storm.

We needed that type of thing desperately at the time, he said Thursday in a phone interview from his home in Washington.

Speaking in an interview earlier this year, Mr. Simpson said he had a hard time before the scale explaining the kinds of damage each storm could cause.

I couldnt tell the Salvation Army, for example, how much and what materials they should be shipping, said Mr. Simpson, whose contribution was adding possible storm-surge heights for each category. 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 then served in World War II, later moving to South Florida to become a county engineer.

Because of the areas vulnerability to hurricanes, Mr. Saffir quickly became an expert in how hurricane-force winds affected buildings. He helped write and unify building codes in South Florida.

Mr. Saffir began working on an intensity scale in 1969 as part of a United Nations project. He had been asked how the United Nations could reduce hurricane damage to low-cost buildings worldwide. To help officials understand the full range of hurricane damage, Mr. Saffir proposed rating storms from 1 through 5. Scales for rating earthquake damage were already well known, and Mr. Saffir believed hurricanes needed their own system of ranking.

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

It was later used for public hurricane forecasts, and each mans name was later attached.

Mr. Saffir did not talk about the scale much, his son said. While his mother and sister sometimes got upset when the category system was referred to without Mr. Saffir or Mr. Simpsons name, it wouldnt seem to bother him, his son said.

Mr. Saffirs wife, Sarah, died before him. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Barbara Saffir, and a brother, Leonard Saffir.

Mr. Saffir continued to work as a structural engineer at a Coral Gables office until he entered a hospital four weeks ago, his son said. He also traveled to inspect storm damage, producing reports on the performance of structures during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Despite devoting much of his life to thinking about hurricanes and preparing buildings for them, Mr. Saffir acknowledged earlier this year that his own home was not completely protected from a storm with hurricane shutters. He had done studies on the glass in the windows and found it was relatively shatterproof, he said.

At the same time, he told The Associated Press, I confess I only have partial shutters.

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