This is not particularly surprising. Hopefully our predictions will be improved this year and we can better prepare for landfalls.

Reuters:

"We have reason to fear that 2006 could be as bad as 2005," Jan Egeland, the undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs who coordinates U.N. emergency relief, told Reuters on Wednesday.

"We have had a dramatic increase in climate related natural disasters and at the same time we have more vulnerable people, so it's a double effect," he said in Guatemala, where he is meeting Central American leaders to plan for future disasters.