Florida hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan & Jeanne (2004)
Aug 2004: a documented market event that overlapped the wholesale price windows of 1 tracked ingredient — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
What happened
Four hurricanes struck Florida within roughly six weeks in 2004 — Charley (landfall Aug 13), Frances (Sept 5), Ivan (Sept 16, flooding the Indian River district), and Jeanne (Sept 25-26), three of them direct hits on citrus-producing regions. High winds and flooding uprooted and defoliated citrus trees, knocked ripening fruit to the ground, and USDA/industry reports noted the storms further spread citrus canker. USDA reported the 2004/05 Florida orange crop was roughly 27-31% smaller than 2003/04, and the grapefruit crop fell about 63-68% to its smallest size since the 1930s.
Documented account from our open, cited registry (sources below). Shown as context beside the price record — co-occurrence in time, never an asserted cause.
Affected ingredients
Why these ingredients were exposed
Each affected ingredient's public supply structure — where it comes from and how much it leans on imports. Context that makes the co-occurrence with a documented event legible, never its cause.
- GrapefruitDomestically sourced comes almost entirely from domestic production, with little import buffer (reliance ~21% by value). Its exposure runs through domestic production structure, not import origins — a domestic event overlaps its price window.
Reliance is a share of import value, a rough exposure proxy, not a supply-security score. It explains why an ingredient sits in the path of a documented event — not that the event caused any price move. Co-occurrence in time, never a cause.
The detected moves that overlapped
Each figure is a wholesale reference against its own ±26-week normal — a market move, never a delivered price.
No sustained wholesale move in our detected set falls inside this event's window. The event is documented; our public price series simply didn't flag a notable departure from normal for these ingredients then — an honest absence, not a hidden one.
What moved together
Co-occurrence, not cause
Grapefruit
In Grapefruit's 6 notable moves, these ingredients ran the same direction in the same weeks:
Moving in the same weeks is not one thing causing another — many of these share a growing region, a shipping lane, or an aisle. It is a directed, bounded count: in K of an ingredient's own notable moves, another ran the same way.
Sources
3 sources
- The Impact of Four Hurricanes in 2004 on the Florida Citrus Industry — University of Florida IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center
- Hurricanes squeeze Florida's citrus crops — Lawrence Journal-World (Associated Press)
- Florida Citrus Forecast, December 2004 — USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
Documented events come from our open, cited registry (CC‑BY). Price moves are detected from public history (USDA/BLS/FRED) and shown as co-occurring context, never asserted as the cause. How events are picked.