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The hurricane did far less damage than its leftovers

Hurricane Cindy was a modest-looking storm that ended up causing an outsized mess. It formed from a tropical wave in early July 2005, crossed the Yucatán Peninsula, and strengthened over the Gulf of Mexico before hitting the Louisiana coast near Grand Isle as a Category 1 hurricane. At the time forecasters only classified it as a strong tropical storm, and it wasn't reclassified as a hurricane until a reanalysis of the data the following year. After a second, weaker landfall in Mississippi, it fell apart into a remnant low that drifted up the East Coast, merged with a cold front, and eventually faded out over eastern Canada more than a week after it began.

The real story is in the damage it left behind as it crossed the Southeast. Flooding and downed trees knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people, including the worst outage New Orleans had seen since the 1960s, and six people died in rain-related traffic accidents across several states. As the weakening storm's remnants pushed inland, they spawned a sprawling outbreak of over forty tornadoes across six states, with the Carolinas and Georgia hit hardest. One of those tornadoes tore through the Atlanta Motor Speedway, wrecking planes and helicopters at a nearby airfield, shattering windows in a condominium tower, and shutting the racetrack down for two months. Rain damage stretched as far north as Vermont, where a single day's rainfall broke a local record.

In the end Cindy was remembered less for its own strength than for being an uneasy preview. It was the first of an unusually long run of hurricanes that year to bring damaging winds to the United States, a season that would soon include Dennis and then Katrina. Several of the same Louisiana parishes battered by Cindy were struck again within weeks by Katrina, which overwhelmed the modest federal disaster declarations Cindy had triggered. The storm's quiet reclassification as a hurricane, made only after the season ended, left it as something of a footnote compared to the far more destructive systems that followed close behind it.

Cindy knocked out power across the New Orleans area more extensively than any storm since Hurricane Betsy in 1965 — and Katrina was still weeks away.

Read the whole of Hurricane Cindy (2005) on Wikipedia

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