Moore carried his worries to James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, who decided that they should go to the President. At the White House, they soon had an audience with McKinley, and Wilson presented the case. Moore had maps, charts and data on hurricanes and the disasters they had caused in the West Indies. Also, he had sketched a plan for a cordon of storm hunters on islands around the Caribbean, to protect the American fleet. He said that armadas had been defeated, not by the enemy, but by the weather. He thought it probable that as many warships had been sent to the bottom by storms as by the fire of the enemy. The President listened respectfully at first, then with impatience at the lengthy discussion. He had made up his mind. Interrupting Moore, he got up, sat on the corner of his desk and declared:
“Wilson, I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish Navy. Get this service started at the earliest possible moment.”
Moore ventured to say, “Yes, indeed, Mr. President, but the Weather Bureau will need the authority of Congress to organize a weather service on foreign soil.”
The President told Wilson: “Report to Chairman Cannon of the Appropriations Committee at once. They are preparing a bill to give me all necessary powers to conduct the war and this authority can be included.”
It was soon done. As a part of the plan, a fast cruiser was stationed at Key West, to carry the news to the fleet immediately, in case the Weather Bureau predicted a hurricane. In that event, the fleet might have abandoned the blockade, to get sea room and avoid the center of the storm.
With this authority, the Weather Bureau moved swiftly to station men and equipment on the islands. Letters had to be written to European countries for permission to send observers into their possessions. But although the bill containing the authority only passed Congress on July 7, observersarrived as follows: July 21—Kingston, Santiago, Trinidad, San Domingo, St. Thomas; August 11—Barranquilla; August 12—Barbados; August 18—St. Kitts; August 29—Panama.
Land fighting continued in the West Indies until August 12, but the Spanish fleet was destroyed on the morning of July 3. They made a desperate effort to escape from the harbor at Santiago, were shelled by American warships, and all were disabled or beached. Up to that time there had been no tropical disturbances in the region. A small one hit near Tampa on August 3. Another small but vicious hurricane swept the coast of Georgia on August 31. The first big one of the 1898 season raked Barbados, St. Vincent and St. Lucia on September 10 to 11, and disappeared east of the Bahamas.
The stations set up by the storm hunters in 1898 formed the backbone of the hurricane warning service which exists today as a greatly improved system, including squadrons of aircraft that fly into tropical storms to obtain essential data for the forecasters. Before storm hunting could be operated on a practical basis, however, it was necessary to find new means of communication. Dependence on messages by cable from scattered islands was not good enough.
“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again.”—F. D. R.
“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again.”—F. D. R.
In the 1930’s there was a strange turn of affairs in hurricane hunting. It had long been the purpose to keep ships out of trouble, first by giving the mariner a law of storms and then by sending warnings by radio. One morning in August, 1932, an indignant citizen came into a Weather Bureau office on the Gulf Coast and wanted to know where the hurricane was. The weatherman told him that there were no ship reports in the area but the center seemed to be somewhere in the central Gulf.
“What’s the matter with the radio reports from boats?” he asked.
“Because of the warnings we issued yesterday, all the ships got out of the area and apparently there are no ships close enough this morning to do any good,” the weatherman explained.
“Say, what kind of a deal is this?” demanded the citizen. “The only way we can tell where the center is located is to get radio reports from boats out there and you fellows chase all the boats away from the storm.”
“Well, that’s our business,” replied the Weather Bureau man in astonishment. “We are required by law to give warnings to shipping.”
“I don’t see it. I’m going to write to my Congressman and to the White House, if necessary, to get this straightened out. What we ought to do is send boats out there to give reports when we need them,” was the final declaration by the citizen who had one time been a shipmaster himself. And he did write to Congress and the White House. Others joined him. The argument over legislation began.
Long before the use of radio on shipboard, the location, intensity, and movement of hurricanes over the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf, and along the coasts and between the islands in the West Indies had been judged by careful observations of the wind, sea and sky. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the storm hunters had become quite expert at it. Among the best were the Jesuits in the West Indies and in the Far East. They watched the high clouds moving out in advance of the tropical storm, the sea swells that are stirred up by the big winds and travel rapidly ahead, and, finally, as the storm center drew near, they studied the winds in the outer edges when they began to be felt locally. One of the pioneers in this work in the West Indies was Father Benito Viñes, at Havana. He began giving out warnings as early as 1875 and by the end of the century was an authority on the precursory signs of hurricanes, both for land observers and for men on shipboard. By that time many of the Weather Bureau men along the coasts had become experts and, after the Spanish War, they began work on the islands in the West Indies.
Observations from the islands came in by cable and from the American coasts they came by telegraph. In some areas this information served very well, but far from land—in the open Atlantic, Caribbean, or Gulf—there was not much togo on. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, the last resort before putting up the red flags with black centers was the experienced observer who had an unobstructed view of the open sea. Even with the best of such reports, there was always a question as to whether it was a big storm with its center far out or a small storm with its center close by. This fact, plus the rate of forward motion of the storm, could make a vital difference. A big, slow-moving storm gave plenty of warning but a small, fast-moving one brought destructive winds and tides almost as soon as the warnings could be sent out and the flags hoisted.
Aside from these indications, the storm hunters depended heavily on the behavior of tropical storms in different parts of the season. They had average tracks by months, showing how storms had moved both in direction and speed, and much other information on their normal behavior. But all too often hurricanes took an erratic course, and now and then the center of a big one described a loop or a track shaped like a hairpin. A few of the storm hunters thought that some upper air movement—a “steering current”—controlled the hurricane’s path. The most obvious influence of this kind is the general air circulation over the Atlantic—the large anticyclone nearly always centered over the ocean near the Azores but often extending westward to Bermuda or even to the American mainland.
In the central regions of the Atlantic High, the modern sailor, unlike his predecessor in the sailing ship, is delighted by calms or gentle breezes and fair weather. On its northern edge, storms pass from America to Europe, stirring the northern regions of the ocean. On its southern edge, we find the trade winds reaching down into the tropics and turning westward across the West Indies and the Bahamas. A chart of these prevailing winds gives a fairly good indication of the ocean currents. Some of the surface waters are cold,some warm. And where they wander through the tropics as equatorial currents or counter-currents, they are hot and, other things being favorable, we find a birthplace of storms. In some other tropical regions, the waters are cold and no hurricanes form there.
Near the equator, the earth is girdled by a belt of heat, calms, oppressive humidity, and persistent showers. This belt is called the “doldrums.” The trade winds of the Northern Hemisphere reach to its northern edge, while the trades below the equator brush its southern margin. Tropical storms form now and then in and along the doldrum belt at certain seasons—just why, no one knows, for there are hundreds of days when everything seems right for a cyclone but nothing happens except showers and the miserable sultriness of the torrid atmosphere.
Stripped to his waist, the sailor sits on his bunk at night without the slightest exertion while perspiration descends in rivulets from his head and shoulders. Nothing seems capable of making any appreciable change in this monotonous regime. But eight or ten times a year on the Atlantic, in summer or autumn, a storm rears its head in this oppressive atmosphere. Its winds turn against the motions of the hands of a clock, seemingly geared to the edges of the vast, fair-weather whirlwind centered in mid-ocean. Around the southern and western margins of this great whirl the storm moves majestically, gaining in power which it takes in some manner from the heat and humidity—a power which would drain the energies of a thousand atom bombs. The crowning clouds push to enormous heights and deploy ahead of the monster—a foreboding of destruction in its path. Here is one of the great mysteries of the sea. Its heated surface lets loose great quantities of moisture which somehow feed the monster—that we know—but what sets it off is almost as much of a mystery as it was in the time of Columbus.
Until lately, the investigators trying to study the hurricane in motion across the earth were as handicapped as if they had been stricken blind and dumb when its great cloud shield enveloped them. The darkening scud and rain shut off all view of the upper regions by day and left them in utter darkness by night. No word came from ships caught in its inward tentacles until long afterward, when the survivors had come into port. Balloons tracing its winds disappeared in the clouds and were carried away. A method of following them above the clouds would have helped in the understanding of the upper regions in the same way that reports from sailing ships had helped in the study of the surface winds. This was the situation at the end of the Spanish War. But a new era was opening.
As the century came to a close, Marconi was getting ready to span the far reaches of the Atlantic with his wireless apparatus. Already the miracle of the telephone carrying the human voice by wire had become a practical reality, with more than a million subscribers in the United States, but it was not destined to be used across the ocean for many years. Even that accomplishment would not have afforded much help to the storm hunters. They had tried transoceanic messages for weather reporting when submarine cables were laid across the Atlantic. Some weathermen thought at first that it would be possible to pick up reports of storms on the American Coast and, allowing a certain number of days for them to cross the Atlantic, to predict their arrival in Europe. This failed to work, for many storms die or merge with others en route, and so many new disturbances are born in mid-Atlantic that it is necessary to have reports every day from all parts of the ocean to tell when storms are likely to approach European shores.
In 1900, Marconi was building a long distance transmitting station in England, and readable signals had been sentover a span of two hundred miles. No one then could foresee the strange roles that this remarkable invention would play in storm hunting but it was obvious that messages could be sent across long distances between ships at sea and from ship to shore. Already wireless had been used successfully between British war vessels on maneuvers. Actually, it was destined to be a powerful ally of the men who searched for hurricanes and reported their progress, but eventually this trend reversed itself and radio was the cause of tropical storms being found and then lost again in critical circumstances.
The spread of wireless across the oceans began while the American people still had vividly in mind the most terrible hurricane disaster in the history of the United States. The nation had been shocked by news of a “tidal wave” which had virtually destroyed Galveston, Texas, on the night of September 8, 1900, and killed more than six thousand of its citizens. Really it was not a tidal wave but a West Indian hurricane of almost irresistible force which had raised the tide to heights never known before and then topped it with an enormous storm wave as the center struck the low-lying island.
There was good reason to expect a disaster of this kind. A number of bad hurricanes had hit Galveston in the nineteenth century. The first of which we have any reliable record struck the island in 1818, when it was nothing more than a rendezvous for pirates, principally the notorious Jean Lafitte. It is known that he was in full possession there in 1817, and it was rumored that he and his pirate crews were caught in the hurricane of 1818 and had four of their vessels sunk or driven on shore.
All along the Texas Coast, the inhabitants always have worried about hurricanes and they have plenty of reason. Whole settlements have been destroyed by wind and wave.One case deserves special mention. After the middle of the century, there had been a thriving town named Indianola in the coastal region southwest of Galveston. The town gave promise then of being the principal competitor of the island city for the commerce of the State of Texas. But in September, 1875, a West Indian hurricane took a slow westward course through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, and struck the Coast near Indianola. Vicious winds prostrated the buildings while enormous waves swept through the streets, drowning a large share of the population.
Courageous citizens rebuilt the town and for more than ten years it prospered. Then in August, 1886, a bigger hurricane ravaged the town and the countryside and literally wiped the place out of existence. The survivors deserted the site and after a few days nothing was left to mark the spot except sand, bushes and the wrecks of houses and carriages, a litter of personal property, and a great many dead animals. After the hurricane of 1875, the Signal Corps had established a weather station at Indianola, and in the storm of 1886 the building fell in, overturning a lamp in the office and setting fire to the fallen timbers. The observer tried to escape but was drowned in the street.
Both of these hurricanes caused much damage at Galveston, for the island was caught in the dangerous sector on the right of the center in both cases. And it was natural that when, on September 8, 1900, the winds began to increase and the tide rose above the ordinary marks at Galveston, the citizens became alarmed, expecting a repetition of the big blows of 1875 and 1886, which were still being mentioned in August and September every year when the Gulf became rough and gusty northeast winds tugged at the palm trees and oleanders.
But on September 8 the wind kept on rising and the tide crept above any previous records. The weather observersfeared the worst and dispatched a telegram to Washington, telling about the heavy storm swells flooding the lower parts of the city and adding, “Such high water with opposing winds never seen before.” It was not altogether unexpected. Beginning on September 4, the hurricane had been tracked across Cuba and into the Gulf toward the Texas Coast, but this rise of the sea was more than the observers had bargained for.
By noon, the wind and sea were much worse, the fall of the barometer was ominous, and the Signal Corps observers, two brothers named Isaac and Joe Cline, took turns going out to the beach and reporting to Washington. At 4:00 P.M., all communications failed. Isaac found the water waist deep around his home and the wreckage of beach homes battered by waves was flying through the streets. At 6:30, Joe, who had come to the south end of the city to view the Gulf, joined his brother and found the water neck deep in the streets and roofs of houses and timbers flying overhead after being tossed into the air by giant waves. As the peril grew, fifty neighbors gathered for refuge in the Cline home because it was stronger than others in that part of the city.
At 6:30, in the weather office, one of the assistant observers, Joe Blagden, looked first at the steep downward curve on the recording barometer and then noted that the wind register had failed as the gale rose to one hundred miles an hour. To repair the gauge, he climbed to the roof and crawled out, holding on tightly in the gusts and edging forward in the lulls. Reaching the instrument support, he saw that the wind gauge had been blown away, so he crawled down from the roof, after taking one brief, horrified look over the stricken city.
There was no longer any island—just buildings protruding from the Gulf, with the mainland miles away. Down thestreet filled with surging water, the spire of a church bent in the wind and then let go as the tower collapsed. The side of a brick building crumbled. As each terrible gust held sway for a few moments, the air was full of debris. The top story of a brick building was sheared off. The scene was like that caused by the destructive blasts at the center of a tornado but, instead of the minute or two of the twister, it lasted for hours. Darkness, under low racing storm clouds, swiftly closed over the city in the deafening roar of giant winds and the crash of broken buildings. The frightened observers saw that the right front sector of the hurricane was bearing down on the island.
Out at the beach, block after block of houses, high-raised to keep them above the tide marks of previous storms, had been swept into the center of the city and were being used as battering rams to destroy succeeding blocks, until a great pile of wreckage held against the mountainous waves. After an hour or two that seemed like an eternity, the hurricane center began crossing the western end of the island, and the city on the eastern end was swept by enormous seas which brought the water level to twenty feet behind the dam of wrecked houses. Everything floated, many frame buildings, or what was left of them, being carried out into the Gulf.
The Cline house disintegrated and more than thirty people in it drowned, among them Isaac’s wife. The others drifted on wreckage, rising and falling with huge waves and trying desperately to hold timbers between them and the wind, to ward off flying boards, slate, and shingles. One woman, seeing her home was giving way to the wind and going down in the water, fastened her baby to the roof by hammering a big nail through one of his wrists. He survived. How many drowned or were killed in that awful night was never known. The estimates finally rose above six thousand.Doubt about the number was due to the presence of many summer visitors at the beaches and, besides, there was no accurate check on the missing, partly because the cemetery was washed out and the recently buried dead were confused with the bodies of storm victims. The aftermath was horrible beyond description.
Galveston had been on the right edge of the hurricane center. If the city had been equally close to the center on the left side, the destruction of wind and waves would have been bad, but nothing like that actually experienced. On the left side—that is, left when looking forward along the line of progress—the tide would have fallen rapidly as the center passed and the gales would have lacked the peak velocities so damaging to brick buildings and other structures which had withstood previous hurricanes. Here was a sharp challenge to the storm hunters. To tell in advance how devastating the hurricane might be, they would have to be able to predict its path with sufficient accuracy to say with some assurance whether the center would pass to the left or right of a coastal city.
This case shows how hard it was to make predictions without radio. During the approach of the Galveston hurricane, the storm hunters knew the position of its center only when it crossed Cuba and again when it struck the Texas Coast. While it was in the Gulf, weather reports from coastal points indicated that there was a hurricane outside, moving westward, but the winds, clouds, tides, and waves at those points would have been about the same with a big storm far out over the water as with a small storm close to land. Soon after the Galveston disaster there was a growing hope that wireless messages from ships at sea would provide this vital information in time for adequate warnings.
Progress in the use of wireless at sea really was fast, althoughit seemed very slow to the storm hunters at the time. The first ocean-weather report to the Weather Bureau was received from the SteamshipNew York, in the western Atlantic, on December 3, 1905. It was not until August 26, 1909, that a vessel at sea reported from the inside of a hurricane. It was the SteamshipCartago, near the Coast of Yucatan. The master estimated the winds at one hundred miles an hour. This big storm struck the Mexican Coast on August 28, drowned fifteen hundred people and created alarming tides and very rough seas all along the Texas Coast. Thousands of people at Galveston and at many other points between there and Brownsville stood on the Gulf front and watched the tremendous waves breaking on the beaches.
Gradually the number of weather reports by radio increased and the work of the storm hunters improved. World War I and enemy submarines stopped the messages from ships temporarily, but after 1919 weather maps were extended over the oceans. Other countries co-operated in the exchange of messages and the centers of storms were spotted, even when far out of range of the nearest coast or island. Cautionary warnings were sent to vessels in the line of advance. By this means, the service of the storm hunters was of extreme value in the safety of life and property afloat as well as on shore.
By 1930 another trouble had developed serious proportions as a consequence of this efficiency in the issuance of warnings. Vessel masters soon learned that it was dangerous to be caught in the predicted path of a hurricane, and when a warning was received by radio, they steamed out of the line of peril as quickly as possible. Thus, as the storm advanced, fewer and fewer ships were in a position to make useful reports and in a day or two the hurricane was said to be “lost,” that is, there were too few reports to spot thecenter accurately, or in some cases there were no reports at all. The storm hunters could only place it vaguely somewhere in a large ocean area. When it is impossible to track the center of a hurricane accurately, it is impossible also to issue accurate warnings.
In 1926, a hurricane crossed the Atlantic from the Cape Verde Islands to the Bahamas and threatened southern Florida. After it left the latter islands, weather reports from ships became scarce and the center was too close to the coast for safety when hurricane warnings were issued, although everybody in southern Florida knew that there was a severe storm outside. More than one hundred lives were lost in Miami and property damage reached one hundred million dollars. In 1928, another big hurricane started in the vicinity of the Cape Verdes, swept across the Atlantic, and devastated Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida. Loss of life was placed at three hundred in Puerto Rico and at two thousand in Florida, mostly in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee.
In these years and up to 1932, several hurricanes were “lost” in the Gulf of Mexico and citizens of the coastal areas began making demands for a storm patrol. They wanted the U. S. Coast Guard to send cutters out to search for disturbances or explore their interiors and send information by radio to the Weather Bureau. There was opposition from the forecasters—they didn’t know what they would do with the cutters. If they had enough ship reports to know where to send the cutters, they would not need the latters’ reports, and if they had no reports, they would not know where to send the vessels. Besides, it was the government’s business to keep ships out of storms—not to send them deliberately into danger.
The season of 1933 established an all-time record oftwenty-one tropical storms in the West Indian region. Many of them reached the Gulf States or the South Atlantic Coast and the controversy about sending ships into hurricanes was resumed, resulting in legislation containing the authority, but President Roosevelt vetoed it. By 1937 the criticism of the warnings and the arguments about Coast Guard cutters began again. This time it involved Senators and Congressmen from Gulf States and finally the White House was embroiled.
In August, 1937, a delegation of citizens came to Washington and brought their complaints direct to the White House. The President arranged a conference so that the storm hunters, Coast Guard officials and others could explain again why vessels should not go out into the Gulf of Mexico to get data when the presence of a hurricane was suspected. Actually, ships were being saved by the warnings which kept them out of danger, and the criticism was based on fear of hurricanes rather than any deficiency of the warnings with respect to the coastal areas.
When the conference was held at the White House, the President was busy with other matters and James Roosevelt presided. The President had given him a note to the effect that he should receive the delegation in a most pleasant manner but that it would be dangerous and fruitless to try to send Coast Guard vessels into hurricanes.
The President’s note to his son said in part:
“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again and that instead of a hurricane patrol the safest and cheapest thing would be a study of hurricanes from all of the given points on land and around the Gulf of Mexico. This might involve sending special study groups to points in Mexico, such as Tampico, Valparaiso, Tehuantepec, Yucatan, Campeche, also to the west end of Cuba and possibly to some of thesmaller islands in the region. What the Congressmen and others in Texas want is study and information and it is my thought that this can be done more cheaply and much more safely on land instead of sending a ship into the middle of a hurricane.”
The delegation gathered in an outer office at the White House. It happened that the Coast Guard had a new Commandant, Admiral Waesche, who had not been advised of the views of the White House, the Coast Guard, and the Weather Bureau. In the few minutes before the conference started, there was no opportunity to inform the Admiral, for he was engaged in conversation with a group of Senators and Congressmen. As soon as the conferees were assembled, James Roosevelt called on the Admiral to speak first. To the amazement of all present, he indorsed the idea in full and promised to send cutters out in the Gulf whenever a request was received from the Weather Bureau. Nobody knew what to do next, so James adjourned the conference, and after everybody had shaken hands and departed, he went back to his father to explain what had happened.
Thus began a brief period of hunting hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico with Coast Guard cutters. During the next two seasons, the Weather Bureau forecasters notified the Coast Guard when observations were needed. In each instance a cutter left port in accordance with the agreement, but as soon as the vessel was in the open Gulf the master was in supreme command and he would not deliberately put his ship and crew in jeopardy. Cutters went out in a few cases, but most of the disturbances to be reconnoitered were crossing the southern Gulf, out of range of merchantmen on routes to Gulf ports. In sailing directly toward the center under these conditions, the Coast Guard commander wouldhave been traveling into the most dangerous sector, and the distance he could make good in a day in rough water could not have been much larger than the normal travel of a tropical storm, certainly not a safe margin.
Irate citizens complained to Washington, first, that the Weather Bureau refused to call on the Coast Guard for observations; and, second, that the Coast Guard refused to carry out the Weather Bureau’s instructions. After two or three years, no special information of any particular value was obtained and the scheme was forgotten.
In accordance with the ideas expressed by President Roosevelt, but without any support from Congress, some study groups and other special arrangements secured useful results on coasts and islands, but it was obvious after 1940 that automatic instruments for exploration of the upper atmosphere and reconnaissance by aircraft offered the best prospects for improvement in the service.
The most destructive hurricane during this period devastated large areas of Long Island and New England in September, 1938, taking six hundred lives and destroying property valued at about a third of a billion dollars. This event aroused general criticism of the storm hunters for two reasons. First, this disturbance, while it was in the West Indies and during its course as far as Hatteras, behaved like others of great intensity, but from that point northward its forward motion was without precedent. During the day when it passed into New England, its progressive motion exceeded fifty miles an hour, hence little time remained for the issue of warnings after its increased rapidity of motion was detected. Second, the people were absorbed in news of negotiations in Europe to prevent the outbreak of a world war, and storm news on the radio was largely suppressed to make way for reports of the European crisis.
Here it might be said that the storm hunters lost another battle, but it is probable that the loss of life in this hurricane would have exceeded that at Galveston in 1900 if there had been no real improvement in the warning service in the meantime.
“—the whirlwind’s heart of peace.”—Tennyson
“—the whirlwind’s heart of peace.”—Tennyson
After the White House conference in 1937 about sending ships into hurricanes, some of the Weather Bureau forecasters expressed the idea that the best method of tracking hurricanes would be by airplane. What they had in mind was flying around the edge of the storm and getting three or more bearings from which the location of the center could be accurately estimated. Nothing came of the idea at the time but after World War II broke out in Europe, the talk about use of planes increased. It was the Weather Bureau’s plan to contract with commercial flyers to go out and get the observations on request from the forecasters. But no one seriously considered sending planes into the centers of hurricanes. No one knew what would happen to the plane. There was no very definite information as to what the flyer would encounter in the upper layers in the region around the center.
Of course, it was known that at the surface of the earth or the sea there was a small calm region in the center—anoddity in the weather, for no other kind of large storm has such a center. The tornado may have, but it is a very small storm in comparison with a hurricane. Its writhing, twisting funnel at the vortex is hollow, according to the testimony of a few men who have looked up into it and lived to tell about it. In the tropical storm, however, nothing was known about the central winds in the upper levels. There was no proof that strong winds did not blow outward from the center up there and a plane would be thrown into the ring of powerful winds around the eye. The only way to find out was to fly into it and have a look, but there was no one at the moment who wanted to venture into it.
On the outer fringes of the hurricane, where light, gusty winds blew across deep ocean waters, stirred at the surface by giant sea swells, the hurricane hunters were fairly well satisfied with their findings. In the middle regions, where deluges of rain slanted through raging winds and low-flying clouds, the grim fact was that they knew amazingly little about what was going on in the upper layers. Their balloons sent up to explore the racing winds above were lost in thick clouds before they had risen more than a few hundred feet.
On beyond, somewhere in that last inner third of the whirlwind, the increasing gales rose to a deadly peak and torrents of rain merged with the spindrift of mountainous wave crests to blot out the view of the observer. Within this whirling ring of air and water lay the vortex. When the mariner entered, sometimes slowly, but more often suddenly, the wind and rain ceased and usually there would be no violence except the rise and fall of the sea surface, like a boiling pot on a scale which was huge in fact but small in proportion to the extent of the storm itself. The entire whirling body of air would likely be bigger than the state of Ohio; the calm central region might be the size of the city of Columbus.
Here in this inner third were the mysteries. Where could all this air go—streaming so violently around and in toward that mysterious center but never getting there? It must go up, the storm hunters argued, for what else could produce all this tremendous rainfall if not the upward rush of moist air to be cooled in the upper levels? And then, why no rain or wind in the central region? Some argued that the air must descend in the vortex, growing warmer and dry in descent, but why the descent? And finally, if the air was moving upward in all this vast area outside the calm center, what finally became of it?
Even if the storm hunters were unable to answer these questions, they could render a service of enormous value if they could track the storm and predict its movements. But they knew that the only sure way to track a hurricane over the ocean was to find its center and follow it persistently and accurately from day to day. Tests had shown that it was not practical to send ships into the storm to find its center and report by radio. Ships couldn’t move fast enough. If the storm hunters had known enough about it, they might have concluded that a plane could enter the storm in the least dangerous sector and find its way swiftly to the calm center through some upper level without being hurled into the angry sea. If it reached the center of the vortex—usually called the “eye of the hurricane”—the navigator might be able to see the sky and the sun by day, the stars by night. Here the pilot might be able to figure out his position, as an ocean-going vessel does on some occasions, and that would be the location of the storm to be placed on the charts of the storm hunters in the weather office. But nobody took it seriously until after the United States got into the Second World War.
When the request for funds to hire commercial flyers in hurricane emergencies was presented to the Bureau of theBudget, the examiners asked why the Weather Bureau didn’t try to get the co-operation of the Army and Navy. Why couldn’t they have their pilots carry out the flights as needed? There was some talk about it in 1942, but at that time there were no experienced Army or Navy pilots to spare.
Naturally, the military pilots who thought about flying into the eyes of hurricanes wanted to know what it was like in the upper levels and in the center. Air Force pilots who expected to go on bombing missions to Germany thought it might be more dangerous flying into the vortex of a hurricane than over an enemy stronghold with the air full of flak and Nazi fighters rising on all sides. Nobody looked upon the assignment with any enthusiasm. One discouraging fact was that the reports of shipmasters who had been in the eyes of hurricanes didn’t agree very well. Few of them had the ability to describe what they saw. And those who had the ability told a story that was not reassuring. For example, one of the first was the master of the shipIdaho, caught in the China Sea in September, 1869, as a typhoon struck. With little of the precious sea room needed to maneuver, the ship soon was obliged to lie to and take it. Afterward, when by some miracle the ship had made its way to shore, the master calmly described his experiences while they were fresh:
“With one wild, unearthly, soul-chilling shriek the wind suddenly dropped to a calm, and those who had been in these seas before knew that we were in the terriblevortexof the typhoon, the dreaded center of the whirlwind. Till then the sea had been beaten down by the wind, and only boarded the vessel when she became completely unmanageable; but now the waters, relieved from all restraint, rose in their own might. Ghastly gleams of lightning revealed them piled up on every side in rough, pyramidal masses, mountain high—the revolving circle of wind, which everywhere inclosedthem, causing them to boil and tumble as though they were being stirred in some mighty cauldron. The ship, no longer blown over on her side, rolled and pitched, and was tossed about like a cork. The sea rose, toppled over, and fell with crushing force upon her decks. Once she shipped immense bodies of water over both bows, both quarters, and the starboard gangway at the same moment. Her seams opened fore and aft. Both above and below, men were pitched about the decks and many of them injured. At twenty minutes before eight o’clock the vessel entered the vortex; at twenty minutes past nine o’clock it had passed and the hurricane returned blowing with renewed violence from the north, veering to the west. The ship was now only an unmanageable wreck.”
For many years, the classic case was the obliging typhoon that moved across the Philippines with its center passing directly over the fully-equipped weather observatory in Manila. It happened on October 20, 1882. The wind which came ahead of the center was of destructive violence, reaching above 120 miles an hour in a final mad rush from the west-northwest before the calm set in. It was not an absolute calm. There were alternate gusts and lulls. The way the winds acted led the observer to think that the center was about sixteen miles in diameter. He said:
“The most striking thing about it was the sudden change in temperature and humidity. The temperature jumped from 75° to 88°. The air was saturated at 75° but the humidity dropped from 100% to 53% in the center and then rose to 100% again as the center passed. When the wind suddenly ceased at the beginning of the calm and the sun came out, many people opened their windows but they slammed them shut right away, because the hot, dry air seemed to burn the skin.”
For more than fifty years after this, there were argumentsabout the reasons for these changes in temperature and humidity. Some scientists claimed that they were caused merely by the heating of the sun in a clear sky and that the air which preceded and followed the center was cooled and saturated by the rain. Some of the Jesuit scientists at Manila did not agree. One weatherman showed, for example, that if they took air at 75° and 100% humidity and heated it to 88°, the humidity would fall only to about 61% and that the air at Manila at that time of year had never had such a low humidity (53%), even when the sun was shining.
The general conclusion was that the air descends in the eye of the tropical storm. At least, they were convinced that it descended in the Manila typhoon. When air descends, it is compressed, coming into lower levels where the pressure is higher. This compression causes its temperature to rise and the air then has a bigger capacity for moisture. In other words, the air becomes warmer and drier. There never has been full agreement on this question. Certainly, in some cases, the air is not warmer and drier in the center.
In later years, typhoon centers passed over other observatories and had various effects. However, one struck Formosa on September 16, 1912, and the calm center passed over the observatory long after the sun had gone down. In this case, the temperature jumped from 75° to 94° and this could not be explained by the direct heat of the sun. But there were different results in other cases and in one instance the temperature fell a little.
All of these observations were confined to ground level and what the observer could see from there or from shipboard, where he was being bounced around by violent seas and sometimes was thoroughly drenched by the mountainous waves breaking over the decks. One example was theIdahoin the typhoon in 1869.
A half-century later, two British destroyers were trappedin the same region by an unheralded typhoon. Setting out for Shanghai in the early morning, they rounded the Shantung Promontory and headed across the Yellow Sea at fifteen knots, with sunlight gleaming on the water ahead. The weather looked favorable, barometer high, wind light, but it failed to stay that way very long. By ten o’clock there was a strong wind on the port beam, blowing gustily from the east, and an ominous rising sea. Reducing speed to eleven knots, the commander of the destroyer in the lead—called theExe—found by dead reckoning that he was only about eight miles from land and, although he was running almost parallel to the coast, their situation was beginning to look dangerous. He had to make a decision as to his future course.
Among other disturbing factors was the design of the ships. These destroyers were of a new type, with a large forecastle which made it likely that they would drag their anchors if they tried to lie-to in a sheltered place on that exposed coast. The two ships held their course. By noon the visibility had dropped to less than a mile. The commander feared that he would be unable to identify any land he might see through the increasing gloom and concluded that his chances of finding a safe shelter among the rock-bound islands along the coast was fast becoming nil. So he signaled to the other destroyer to head fast for the open sea. In the next hour, the wind and sea mounted rapidly and he was certain that they were being overtaken by the dangerous sector of the typhoon. Now they were in real trouble!
His first lieutenant was the last of his officers out of school, so the commander asked him about the law of storms and the proper course under the circumstances. According to the latest books which the lieutenant had studied, they should have steamed toward the northwest but this would have thrown them onto a lee shore. The commander decided that there was no choice except to hold their course and run thechance of going into the dreaded center of the typhoon. So they got busy, doubly securing all movable gear and seeing that all was snug for a frightening trip into the unknown. The commander was annoyed, not so much by the battering the ship was taking as by the cheerful attitude of the lieutenant, who seemed to be looking forward to this new experience.
In this miserable situation they fought heavy gales and towering seas for hours. The other destroyer had been lost from view but now appeared close on their beam. She assumed strange attitudes in the growing darkness. “At times,” the commander said, “she would be poised on the crest of a great wave, her fore part high above the sea and her keel visible up to the conning tower; the after part, also high in the roaring wind, leaving her propellers racing far out of the water. Then she would take a dive and an intervening wave would blot out this ‘merry picture,’ and then, to our relief as the wave passed, a mast would appear waving on the other side and then we would catch sight of her funnels and finally her hull, still above water.” As darkness closed in, the crew of theExewere glad they could no longer see the other destroyer for it made them vividly conscious that their own little ship was going through equally dangerous contortions.
During this time the destroyerExehad suffered much damage. The upper deck had been swept clear. Much water was getting below and the pumps were choked. The commander was weary from holding on to the bridge and trying to keep his balance. The crew was frightened more than ever by the increasing power of the storm and the inexorable approach of the unknown horrors in the center.
The awful night passed in this terrifying manner, with the barometer steadily going lower, and the quartermaster straining to keep the craft on course. With powerful winds full in his face and drenched by spray, he managed to holdthe ship most of the time and made the best use of her high bows. When he failed and allowed the ship to get a few points off course, the steep waves threw her on her beam ends and came crashing along the upper decks, making it a tough job to get her back with her nose against the elements, and the high bows as a sort of shield against the brutal sea. Besides, the compass light had been beaten out and in the blackness of the storm he had no way of judging the direction except by the crash of the wind and water in his face.
In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probably on their last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses of water strike with immense force and, after the shock, the vessel shivering as though the hull had given way, leaving them on the verge of diving toward the bottom of the sea. Sometimes theExewas mostly out of water—they could sense it in the darkness—and then she took what they called a “belly-flopper” and every man felt sick, fearing the end had come and, after a moment, fearing just the opposite—that it would not be the end, after all, and they would have to take more of the same.
Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by a series of lurches between gusts, pulled himself to the side of his commander. “Things look better,” he shouted. “The barometer is up a little.” But soon after that he found he had made an error. He had read it an inch too high. Actually, it had dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that the center must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceased and the wind dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing into the vortex.
The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They could see for several miles—a cauldron of steep towering cones of water with spray at the crests—a brightening sky over a chaotic sea. Some of these columns of water would clash together on different courses and produce a weird effect.The wind became light and a few tired birds sought haven on deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes and then the dreaded squalls ahead of the opposite semicircle of the typhoon began to hit the vessel. By 7:20 A.M. the full force of the most vicious gales was bringing new miseries to the exhausted crew.
After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. “So the destroyer went her way,” the commander reported, “with her nose down and her tail in the air.” She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.
Examination of theExeshowed that a part of the bottom had been battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander wrote in his report: “When I recall (which I can without any trouble) those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this world.” Actually, the commander of theExehad escaped the worst of it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge, where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many others have failed under similar circumstances.
Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood inthe river and on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.
All these accounts agreed on one thing—the ring of gales around the center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A strange case was the experience on the American steamshipWind Rush, in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said: “From 9 A.M. to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with no wind and smooth sea, and the sun was shining.”
There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of them have reported confused cross seas, described as “pyramidal” or “tumultuous.” In November, 1932, the master of the British steamshipPhemius, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned sharply northward and thePhemiuswas trapped by the ring of fierce gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.
Twice thePhemiusdrifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town of SantaCruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons out of a population of four thousand. ThePhemiuswas left behind in a helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.
The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat, theSea Gull, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master, Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he became involved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” Captain Davis said, “the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and the roar of the wind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944. It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast, near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end of Cuba.
All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports—of weather and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the central region of a big typhoon—was not available until long after it happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.
The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact thatwhile on grand maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in America until 1952.
Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan. On the twenty-fifth it crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of Japan, headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet. Soon after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however, another typhoon had formed near Saipan and started toward Japan. It turned more to the northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific—squarely in front of the typhoon center.
The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is that the commanders wanted more sea room than was at hand in the northeast Sea of Japan to maneuver in the first typhoon and hoped to get well out in the open Pacific before they could be cornered by the second one. But it turned northeastward and went faster and farther out in the Pacific than they had expected. In fact, its forward motion was more than forty miles an hour in these last hours before its furious winds surrounded the fleet.
It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders and perhaps for the weather forecasters. Among the latter, H. Arakawa, one of the foremost typhoon students in Japan, was then on the staff of forecasters in the Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible for the predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was publishedby the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Taking the view of the weatherman, Arakawa said that although the damage to the fleet was unfortunate, there wasfortunatelya magnificent collection of reports from the central region of the typhoon for scientific study.
The fleet was caught in the central part of the big storm on the twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved, many of them damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, a seaplane carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines, torpedo boats, and a submarine depot ship. The fleet suffered damage mostly from the tremendous waves in the right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the rapid forward motion of the storm was added to the wind circulation and the seas were driven to excessive heights. In his report, Arakawa had a footnote: “The bows of two destroyers,HatsuyukiandYugiri, were broken off as a result of excessive storm waves, and many officers and sailors were lost.”
In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlight came through. The diameter of the eye was nine or ten miles. To the right of the eye, some of the waves measured more than sixty feet in height. The maximum roll of the ships in this area—the total angle from port to starboard—reached 75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily above eighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probably went as high as 125 miles an hour.
Many of the ships took frequent observations while in the typhoon and the data would have been extremely valuable if released to the storm hunters at that time, but when the report was published in 1953 a great deal of new data had been obtained by airplane, both at the surface—where Arakawa’s observations were confined—and at higher levels. It was a little more than nine years after this Japanese incident when the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east ofthe Philippines and suffered at least as much damage as the Japanese in 1935.
One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the upper air. World War II brought a new era.