By RYAN MCILVAIN
As Hurricane Rita gathered strength off the Gulf Coast, Rita Wright started finding headlines plastered all over her workspace. They were made up of words mixed and matched from different newspapers: ?Rita Whips Students,? ?Rita Whips Students Daily,? ?Rita Pummels Students,? all variations on a theme.
An educator at BYU?s Museum of Art, Wright says the messages, of the cutout collage, ?serial killer? variety, began as light teasing from museum security guards and co-workers about a week ago. Which teasing, she now says, laughing over the phone, has only gotten worse since the hurricane hit.
?Even the head of security got in on it,? says Wright as she rifles around her office, looking for other, even choicer examples.
?Oh, here?s one,? she says. ?This was cut out straight from a newspaper. ?Rita?s testing us. God is testing us, that?s all it can be.??
She laughs again. ?It?s not every century you get a hurricane named after you.?
As Wright?s example amply demonstrates, major hurricanes can be far-reaching. In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, some big questions still loom, and some little ones too. Among the biggest little questions are: how do they come up with hurricane names anyway, and what about all the unfortunate namesakes left in the hurricane?s wake?
In the same way Rita Wright is now the butt of jokes, Katrina Barker, a broadcast journalism major from Ohio, has likewise suffered in the name of ? well, her name.
?I?ve totally been harassed,? she says. ?The first week when [news of a hurricane] came out and they used Katrina, I thought, ?Well, that?s kind of cool.? And then it hits over the weekend and I come into work and people say things like, ?Oh, don?t get on Katrina?s bad side.??
Barker says she too has gotten her share of quoted headlines??Katrina leaves thousands homeless,? ?Katrina ravages coast,? among others.
Then, waxing serious a moment later, she points out some of the less comic aspects of sharing names with a major destructive event.
?To have your name associated with something that has caused so many people stress isn?t very fun,? she says.
And Barker isn?t alone in voicing that opinion, at least not historically, anyway.
According to the National Hurricane Center Web site, the prepared lists from which hurricane names used to be drawn featured only female names up until 1978, when alternating men?s and women?s names began to be assigned to the storms.
?I think women kind of got upset back in the ?70s with the Women?s Liberation Movement and everything,? says David James, a part-time professor in the BYU Geography Department and local weather guru.
James says many women chafed at the practice of associating exclusively feminine names with something as negative as a hurricane.
Today, the World Meteorological Organization, part of the U.N., handles all the naming and retiring of hurricane names.
When a hurricane is particularly destructive, its name is ?retired? from the rotating lists and hung from the rafters of hurricane history, as it were.
Matthew Bekker, who also teaches in the Geography Department, recalls the early days of hurricane naming when storms in the West Indies were known by the saint?s day on which they occurred??Santa Anna? and ?San Felipe,? for example.
These days, if a hurricane season were ever prolific enough to churn out a storm for each of the 21 letters on a list (the letters Q, U, X,Y, and Z aren?t included), Bekker says Greek letters would be pressed into service, as in ?Hurricane Alpha,? ?Hurricane Beta,? etc.
And while that?s never had to happen before, Bekker says it isn?t entirely out of the question this year.
?We just had an R, so we?ve got four letters left,? he says. ?But we?re nearing the end of the really active part of the season.?
Bekker points out that the current system recycles the lists of names?which can be found on the National Hurricane Center Web site, among others?every six years. He also maintains that next year?s hurricane season won?t necessarily be more active than this year?s.
Still, it couldn?t hurt to look to the future, perhaps with an eye to a name change if necessary, lest the plight of Rita Wright and Katrina Barker befall other innocents like Alberto (2006), Barry (2007), Cristobal (2008), Danny (2009), and Earl (2010), to name only a few.
