We're now in the heart of tropical season, and it's been a strange one so far. There have been eight named storms, slightly above average to this point. But it's not the number of storms that's caught my attention; rather it's how far into the list of names we went before any storm strengthened to hurricane status.

This year, none of the first six tropical storms became hurricanes. It wasn't until last Tuesday that Gustav, the seventh named storm of the year, did so. Even then it was a weak hurricane that had little impact on the U.S. Never before had we reached the letter "G" without a storm becoming a hurricane. Prior to this year, the farthest we'd gone into the alphabet was "E." There have been a few years in which no hurricanes were reported, but that was in the early 1900s before we named storms and when many undoubtedly went undetected over the open ocean.

Of course, I've said it before and I'll say it again. It only takes one landfalling hurricane or tropical storm to cause a major disaster. And there's still plenty of hurricane season to go.