The strongest hurricane of the season, Hurricane Dog, reached the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir Simpson scale, and caused extensive damage to the Leeward Islands.
Their home in Destin was damaged by Ivan, the strongest hurricane of the 2004 season.
Only three previous observed tropical storms have formed later in the calendar and Sandra became the strongest hurricane recorded so late in the season.
In the middle of his careful survey, the remnants of Patricia, the strongest hurricane on record in the Western Hemisphere, deluged Pensacola.
The most recent was Hurricane Patricia, the strongest hurricane ever recorded at sea, which swept across the region at the end of October, but caused less damage than anticipated.
The US National Hurricane Center predicted that peak winds of 200mph would be sustained when the storm struck land, which would be the strongest hurricane ever recorded, exceeding super typhoon Haiyan, which struck the Philippines with 195mph winds in 2013.
MEXICO CITY — The strongest hurricane ever known to assault the Western Hemisphere slammed into Mexico's southwest Pacific Coast on Friday, transforming hotels into makeshift shelters, shuttering schools, closing airports and sending inhabitants racing to bus stations to flee inland.
As Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, says: "It isn't a coincidence that we've seen the strongest hurricane in both hemispheres [western and eastern] within the last year".
The category 4 storm, the strongest hurricane to hit Haiti in 50 years, is expected to surge northwards towards Florida's east coast and up the south-eastern US coast by the weekend.
At one point the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the western hemisphere, Patricia weakened when it made landfall on Friday on Mexico's Pacific coast and caused less damage than feared.
"This is the strongest hurricane to threaten the Northeast and New England since Hurricane Bob in 1991," Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center, told The Associated Press.
