ATLANTA — Fact: It's been 110 years since a major hurricane made landfall in Georgia.
Myth: The state's coastal "bight," or concave shape, prevents a direct strike.
The curve helps, but hurricane experts say Georgia's just been lucky.
"We certainly wouldn't want anybody lulled into a false sense of security that they'll never see a hurricane in their lifetime," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman and meterologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "It's not like Georgia is immune."
Three major hurricanes — with winds of at least 111 miles per hour — made landfall on the Georgia coast in the late 1800s, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two of them struck in the 1890s. The last, in 1898, was one of the deadliest in American history, killing 179 people.
Savannah gets hit by a Category 3 hurricane, which means winds of 111 to 130 mph, once every 79 years on average, Feltgen said. If you count less powerful hurricanes, the frequency rate is one every 14 years.
Still, the Georgia coast takes a direct hit far less frequently than Florida and the Carolinas, and the position of its coastline does play a role.
If the Southeast were a punching bag, Georgia would be on the hard-to-reach part. The Georgia coast cuts in almost 100 miles west of the eastern-most part of Florida.
The sweet spots would be the Florida Panhandle and Cape Hatteras, N.C. Florida's the sore thumb in the Atlantic, and North Carolina's string of barrier islands and shoreline stick out like a bloody nose.
Feltgen said a minor hurricane strikes Cape Hatteras once every five years, on average.
Steve Lyons with The Weather Channel said it would take a well-aimed hurricane to strike Georgia, because of the typical direction of the tropical storms as they move up through the Caribbean and Atlantic Ocean. More than 90 percent are going to fall short, or overshoot.
"It's a very rare event," Lyons said.
Also, the state's eight large barrier islands and 378,000 acres of tidal marsh can absorb a storm's impact.
The bad news about the coast's geography is that its long, shallow shelf offshore, and narrow mouth mean that Georgia is the most vulnerable to storm surges of any state on the Eastern Seaboard, said Georgia Climatologist David Stooksbury. Even an off-shore hurricane can create 20-foot storm surges, Lyons said.
Patrick Welsh, executive director of the Advanced Weather Information Systems Lab at the University of North Florida said Georgia's low hurricane frequency rate has more to do with the atmosphere above the coastline than the state's shape. A high pressure ridge of air helps steer storms away from the Georgia coast.
"It just happens to be that the South Atlantic bight curvature is similar to the ridge, and at about the same latitude," Welsh said.
But, he added: "Take no comfort at all. . . Any single storm can follow any track."
Stacy Shelton writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. E-mail: sshelton AT ajc.com