Part 10

Most of these great storms move forward rather slowly--often only ten to twelve miles an hour. A boy on a bicycle could keep ahead of the whirling gales if the road took him in the right direction. Automobiles carrying news reporters and curious people travel the highways far enough in advance to avoid falling debris, listening to the radio broadcasts from the weather office to learn of the progress of the storm. Of all places, the most dangerous are on the immediate coast and on islands near the coast, where the combination of wind and wave is almost irresistible. But even here an occasional citizen chooses to remain, in spite of the warnings, and when he finally decides to leave it may be too late to get out and no one can reach him. There have been many instances of men being carried to sea, clinging to floating objects, and after describing a wide arc under the driving force of the rotary winds, being thrown ashore miles away from home. But in other cases, people are trapped and drowned in the rising waters. In 1919, at Corpus Christi, warnings were issued while many residents were at their noon meal, on a Sunday. Many delayed to finish eating while the only road to higher ground was being rapidly flooded. Of these 175 were drowned.

The native knows all of the preliminary signs well enough, and it is not necessary to urge him to take precautions after the moment when the ominous gusts of the first winds of the storm are felt. He has been in these situations before and has looked out to see palm trees bent far over and the rain beginning to blot out the view as the fingers of the gale seemed to begin searching his walls and roof for a weak spot. Many prefer not to stay and watch. They board up their windows and doors and go back to a safer place in the interior. And so this is the time when the sound of the hammer is heard and streams of refugees are seen on the highways.

In the early thirties, the increasing population in the hurricane states caused an annoying shortage of communications in storm emergencies. For many years the Washington forecasters had sent warnings by telegraph and the men in weather offices along Southern coasts had talked to each other by telephone, to exchange notes and opinions, but there were frequent delays and failures after 1930 because, when a hurricane approached the coast, the lines became congested with telephone calls and telegraph messages between relatives and friends worrying about the dangers, and by residents making arrangements for evacuation, in addition to emergency calls of many other kinds.

In 1935, the Weather Bureau found a very good answer to the communication shortage in emergencies. A teletypewriter line called the "hurricane circuit," running around the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast of Florida, was leased on July 1, with machines in all weather offices. Another line was installed between Miami and Washington and eventually extended to New York and Boston. No matter how congested the public lines became, the weather offices were able to exchange messages and reports without any delay. At the same time, three hurricane forecast offices were established in the region--at Jacksonville, New Orleans, and San Juan. After that time, the Washington office issued forecasts and warnings of hurricanes only when they came northward to about 35° north latitude and from there to Block Island, where the Boston office took over.

The first violent tropical storm to strike the coast of the United States after the hurricane circuit was set up came across the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935. It was spotted in ship reports and by observations from Turks Island on August 31 as a small storm. It moved westward not far from the north coast of Cuba on September 1 and turned to the northwest on September 2, having developed tremendous violence.

This hurricane is worth noting, for its central pressure, 26.35 inches, was the lowest ever recorded in a tropical storm at sea level on land anywhere in the world. The average pressure at sea level is about 29.90 inches. The biggest tropical storms have central pressures below 28.00 inches, but very rarely as low as 27.00 inches.

The strongest winds around the center of the Labor Day hurricane probably exceeded two hundred miles an hour. About seven hundred veterans of World War I were in relief camps at the point where the center struck. A train was sent from Miami to the Keys to evacuate the veterans ahead of the storm, but it was delayed and was wrecked and thrown off the tracks as the veterans were being put aboard. The loss of life among veterans and natives on the Keys in the immediate area was nearly four hundred. There was much criticism in the press. In 1936, a committee in Congress carried on a long investigation of the circumstances which led to the establishment of the relief camps in such a vulnerable position, the failure of the camp authorities to act on warnings from the Weather Bureau, and the delay of the rescue train. There was much talk in the committee of increasing the Weather Bureau's appropriations, to enable it to give earlier warnings, but nothing came of it.

The new teletypewriter circuit served well. After this violent hurricane crossed the Keys, it went through the eastern Gulf and then passed over Western Florida and overland to Norfolk. In spite of intense public excitement, communications between weather offices were maintained without serious interruption. This improved service continued in the years that followed. Radio circuits to the West Indies and a teletypewriter circuit to Cuba by cable helped to bring the reports promptly and at frequent intervals in emergencies.

In this modern drama of fear and violence, the hurricane warning has become the signal that may cause desperate actions by hundreds of thousands of people. Colossal costs are entailed in the movement of populations in exposed places and in the protection of property and interruption of business. Now, in this emergency, a civil service employee not used to making decisions involving large sums of money finds himself in a position from which he has no escape. He has to make up his mind--to issue the warning or not to issue it. If he fails to get it out in time, there will be much loss of life and property that might have been avoided. If he issues the warning and the hurricane turns away from the coast or loses force, very large costs will have been entailed without apparent justification. In either case, he will be subjected to a lot of criticism.

The hurricane hunter and forecaster who stepped into this responsible position at a critical time was Grady Norton. Born in Alabama, in 1895, Grady joined the Weather Bureau shortly before World War I, then became a meteorologist in the Army, after taking training at A. & M. College of Texas, where a weather school was established early in 1918. But he had no wish to be a forecaster or to send out warnings of hurricanes.

Nevertheless, the people in Washington were unable to get out of their minds the fact that whenever Norton made forecasts for practice, his rating was very high, especially for the southeastern part of the country. The Bureau encouraged him at every opportunity because he was one of those who are born with the knack of making good weather predictions--which is an art rather than a science, even in its present stage of development.

Then in 1928, Grady went on a motor trip and arrived in southern Florida just after the Palm Beach hurricane had struck Lake Okeechobee, killing more than two thousand people. He saw the devastation, the mass burials, the suffering, and determined to do something about it. By 1930 he was at New Orleans, getting experience in forecasting Gulf hurricanes. After five years, the hurricane teletype and the centers at Jacksonville and New Orleans were established and Grady was put in charge of hurricane forecasting at Jacksonville. There, and later at Miami, his name, Grady Norton, coming over the radio, became familiar and reassuring to almost every householder in the region. For twenty hurricane seasons he took the brunt of it in almost countless emergencies. In some instances, he made broadcasts steadily and continuously every two hours, or oftener, for two days or more without rest, his microphone having direct connections to more than twenty Florida radio stations, and by powerful short-wave hook-ups to small towns all over the state. As the hurricane threatened areas beyond Florida, he continued the issue of bulletins, warnings, and advices. In the last ten years of this service, he was warned by his physicians to turn a good deal of the responsibility over to his assistants, but the public wanted to know his personal decisions.

In 1954, after Hurricanes Carol and Edna had devastated sections of the northeast with resultant serious criticism of the Bureau in regard to the former, a fast-moving blow that allowed very limited time for precautions, Norton died on the job while tracking Hurricane Hazel through the Caribbean. A tall, thin, sandy-haired Southerner, Norton had a slow, calm way of talking that put him, in the public mind, at the top of the list of hurricane hunters of his generation. And it was generally conceded that to his efforts were to be credited in a large degree the advances in hurricane forecasting in the years after 1935. But the outstanding progress was gained from the use of aircraft to reconnoiter hurricanes, in which Norton played a very important part.

In Grady Norton's place, the Bureau put Gordon Dunn, who was an associate of Norton's at Jacksonville when the service began and who had more recently been in charge of the forecast center at Chicago.

By the end of 1942 it was plain that the weather offices of the Army and Navy would have to join with the Weather Bureau in hunting and predicting hurricanes. It was agreed that the combined office would work best at Miami. For the 1943 storm season, the Weather Bureau moved its forecast office from Jacksonville to Miami, with Norton in charge, and the military agencies assigned liaison officers there for the purpose of coordinating the weather reports received and the warnings issued. All the experts felt that military aircraft would have to be used to get the reports needed. In August, 1943, the news of Colonel Duckworth's successful flight into the center of the Texas hurricane was the decisive factor. Reconnaissance began in 1944.

_9._ WINGS AGAINST THE WHIRLING BLASTS

_Said the black-browed hurricane Brooding down the Spanish main "Shall I see my forces, zounds! Measured in square inches, pounds? With detectives at my back When I double on my track! All my secret paths made clear! Published to a hemisphere! Shall I? Blow me, if I do!"_ --Bret Harte

After Joe Duckworth flew into the center of the hurricane near Galveston on July 27, 1943, there was much excitement about the remarkable fact that he had experienced no very dangerous weather or damage to his plane on the trip. But the experts realized that hunting hurricanes as a regular business would be different. Men who had flown the weather in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the tropics and subtropics, and those who had just thought about it, had visions of undulating seas stirred by soft tropical breezes, white clouds piled in neat balls on the horizon, blue water, blue sky, and lush palm-covered coasts and islands. And yet they knew that nowhere is the sly trickery of wind and storm more dangerous. Suddenly and with no apparent reason, the soft breezes turn into quick little gusts and wrap themselves around a center, with gray clouds spreading and rain coming in brief squalls. The whirl spreads, gathering other winds into its orbit, and hard rain begins. Soon there are violent gales and the power of the storm is apparent in the roaring of the wind and sea.

And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as being like an oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf is bigger in proportion but lacks the skillful handling of a youthful crew, alert, fearful and resourceful, straining desperately to keep it from rocketing steeply into the wind-torn sea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in 1943 to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautious about it. They went into it at a high level--usually as far up as the plane would go--and came down by easy stages, in the calm center, if possible, ready to turn around and dash for land the moment anything went wrong.

The next after Duckworth and his associates to look into a hurricane was Captain G. H. MacDougall of the Army Air Forces. The second fully-developed storm of 1943 came from far out in the open Atlantic and passed east of the Windward Islands on a north-northwest course toward Bermuda. MacDougall wanted to have a first-hand view of its insides. Ships in the Atlantic were reporting extremely high winds and waves fifty to sixty feet high and five hundred to six hundred feet in length. MacDougall went to see Colonel Alan, who said he was ready to pilot the plane. So the two took off from Antigua on August 20.

According to the report by MacDougall, they came in at a very high level and began to explore the outer circulation of the storm. He said: "We ran into rain falling from overcast. There were broken cumulus and stratus clouds below us. As the sun became more and more blotted out, we seemed to be heading into a bluish twilight. In spite of the low visibility due both to rain and moderate haze, it was impossible to make out the ocean through the wind-torn stratus below, and while we were yet to see the teeth of the storm, the snarl was already too evident. A surface wind of forty to fifty miles per hour from the southwest was probably a good estimate in this part of the storm. Colonel Alan now began to let the plane down and we stopped taking oxygen. At the same time, the wheels were let down to minimize the turbulence, and the plane leveled off at an elevation of one thousand feet which was below the stratus.

"For those of us who had spent enough time in the Caribbean to be familiar with the magnitude of the waves usually encountered, it was hard to believe what we saw below. The seas were tremendous and the crests were being blown off in long swirls by a wind that must easily have exceeded seventy miles per hour. The long parallel streaks of foam streaming from one wave to another made it evident from which direction the wind was blowing."

About a month later, a tropical storm formed in the western Gulf of Mexico, not far from Vera Cruz. Shortly afterward, it moved toward the Texas coast, increasing rapidly in force, and there was general alarm. People began to abandon the beaches and protect their property in the coastal towns. At this time there was a young officer, Lieutenant Paul Ekern, at Tinker Air Field near Oklahoma City, who was anxious to see the inside of one of these big storms. This one looked like his last chance for 1943 and he began talking it up. He found Sergeant Jack Huennekens who was ready to go and they looked for a plane and pilot. Time went by, but the hurricane center slowed down to a crawl and described a loop off the coast, taking three days to turn around. Excited conversations about the storm created interest, and about the time that Ekern and Huennekens found an Air Force pilot, Captain Griffin, anxious to go, a Navy man came over from Norman, Oklahoma, and said he had some instruments he would like to carry into the hurricane and get records of conditions encountered. He was told that anybody crazy enough to go was welcome. He introduced himself as a Navy Aerologist, Gerald Finger, and they all shook hands and got their things ready.

On the afternoon of the eighteenth, with the hurricane still hanging ominously off the coast but with some loss of violence, the crew took off for south Texas, carrying the Navy man and his instruments. They came into the storm area at about thirty thousand feet and proceeded cautiously toward the center. At this level there was very little turbulence, but the view was magnificent. There were mountainous thunderclouds, some extending fifteen thousand feet above the plane. Carefully they explored the region and finally came into a place where they could see the surface of the Gulf white with foam and piled-up clouds ringing a space where the sky was partly clear. This, they decided, must be the center.

Cautiously they went down to twelve thousand feet, circling around as they descended, and keeping records of temperature, humidity, and pressure. At times they flew through clouds on instruments in the rain, and now and then there was light icing. After about three hours, they began to run low on gas, so they flew through the western part of the storm and back to Oklahoma.

At the end of the hurricane season, these flights were reported to the Weather Bureau and recommendations were forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that military aircraft be used routinely to explore hurricanes and improve the accuracy of the warnings. The Joint Chiefs referred this to their meteorological committee, with representatives of the Army Air Corps, the Navy and the Weather Bureau, and on February 15, 1944, a plan was approved for the coming season. As far as possible, crews with experience in flying the weather were selected. Some of these had been on daily missions on the Atlantic, for the protection of convoys. By the beginning of the 1944 season, planes and men were at their posts in Florida, ready to go on instructions from the joint hurricane center in Miami.

Probing of hurricanes by air came to a sharp focus in September, 1944. On the eighth, signs of a disturbance were picked up in the Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. As it approached the northern Bahamas, its central pressure was extremely low, below 27.00 inches--estimated at 26.85--and it covered an enormous area with winds of terrific force. From here its center crossed the extreme eastern tip of North Carolina, sideswiped the New Jersey coast, doing vast damage, and then hit Long Island and New England with tremendous fury. On account of the war, ships at sea were not reporting the weather and the hurricane hunters had a real job on their hands.

On the morning of the tenth, Forecaster Norton at the Miami Weather Bureau studied the weather map, grumbled about the lack of observations from the West Indies, and decided to ask for a plane to go out and report the weather north of Puerto Rico. He had little to go on, but he thought it was a very bad storm. On the afternoon of the ninth, the Air Corps had sent a plane out from Antigua. They had reported winds of eighty miles, very rough seas, and center about 250 miles northeast of San Juan. Very little information had come from the area since that time, except the regular weather messages from San Juan. After trying to get the Navy office on the telephone half a dozen times, Norton gave up. Every time he started to dial, the phone rang and he answered it, making an effort to hang up quickly and get a call in before it rang again. But many people had learned about the storm and were anxious for more information, hence the phone was constantly busy.

"I thought this was an unlisted phone," he complained to the map crew. "It is," replied an assistant. "We gave the number only to the radio, press, and a few others, to make sure we could get a call out when we had to, but these restricted phone numbers leak out. We'll have to change the number again."

Norton squeezed between the map man and the wall and sat down at the teletypewriter in the corner after the operator had stepped out into the hall. The office was crowded and when one man wanted to leave his place, nearly everybody else had to stand up to make room. Norton rang a bell, rattled the teletypewriter, and finally got Commander Loveland on the line down at the Navy office.

This was an exclusive line--Weather Bureau to Navy--and Norton pecked out a message. "Looks like a bad hurricane out there. It's maybe three days from Florida if it comes here, but it probably won't. Looks like it would go up toward the Carolinas. We can't be sure. Maybe we should have a recco this morning. What do you think?"

"Think we can get one up there from Puerto Rico this morning," came the message from Loveland. "I'll see what I can do. Did you check with the Army?"

"Yes, the Major talked to Colonel Ellsworth and he says they expect to get a plane out there from Borinquen this afternoon. Also, I asked for clearance on a public message yesterday and got an OK last night."

At that time, because of the war, public releases about storms along the coast were still restricted and had to be cleared with Naval Operations in Washington. If enemy submarines learned that planes were being evacuated from airports on the seaboard, they were emboldened to come out in the open and attack shipping along the coast. Oil tankers and other ships would have a bad enough time in the storm without running into submarines openly on the prowl. But the Chiefs of Staff had to balance this against the possible loss of life and property in coastal communities.

On their mission to explore the storm, the Navy crew from Puerto Rico ran into heavy rain and turbulence. Visibility was nil as they approached the center. They stayed down low to keep a view of the ocean but found the altimeter badly in error. As soon as they broke out of the clouds, they found the sea was much closer than they had figured. The plane was almost completely out of control several times. They changed course, got out of the storm, sent a message to Miami, and returned to Ramey Field in Puerto Rico.

Steadily the hurricane kept on a west-northwest course, increasing in size and violence. As it went along, the aircraft of the Navy and Air Forces were on its heels and driving toward the center, like gnats around an angry bull. It was headed for the Carolinas; everybody was agreed on that now. Ships were in trouble, running to get from between the hurricane and the coast as the winds closed in, and anxious people waited for the next report.