They have roared out of the tropical reaches of the Atlantic Ocean without letup since June: Allison, Barry, Chantal, Dean, Erin, Felix, Gabrielle, Humberto, Iris, Jerry, Karen, Luis, Marilyn, Noel, Opal, Pablo, Roxanne, Sebastien. Eighteen hurricanes or tropical storms, and counting.

Each began as a line of African rainstorms, rode out over the ocean on westerly winds, picked up energy from the warm water and built into a tropical storm. Ten have become hurricanes, spun by the Earth's rotation and fueled by tropical warmth into whirling masses with sustained winds of at least 74 mph.

No one can say whether there were busier hurricane seasons in the centuries before 1900. In fact, [Frank] Lepore said, until the 1940s, when pilots began flying into the big storms, hurricane records were spotty at best. The government had to stitch together disjointed reports from sea captains, pilots and islanders unlucky enough to be in the storms' paths. Huge hurricanes could have escaped notice simply by staying away from people -- or wiping out all witnesses. Not until weather satellites became widely used in the mid-1960s did records of hurricanes and tropical storms become truly reliable, Lepore said.