“Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers.”—Euripides
“Whirlwinds are most violent near their centers.”—Euripides
After war broke out in Europe in 1939, the job of finding and predicting hurricanes became steadily more difficult. Ships of countries at war ceased to report weather by radio and fewer vessels of neutral nations dared to risk submarine attack. After Pearl Harbor, the American merchant marine also stopped their weather messages and the oceans were blanked out on the weather maps. Already the British had been confronted by the lack of weather reports from the Atlantic and the seas around the British Isles, and this was extremely serious in their fight against Nazi air power.
Notwithstanding the alarming scarcity of planes for military purposes, the British were forced to send aircraft on routine weather missions. They usually flew a track in the shape of a triangle—for example, one leg of the triangle northwestward until well out at sea, a second leg southward across the ocean about an equal distance, and the last leg back tohome base. Other triangles were flown over Europe and back and over the North Sea. As time went on, the pilots of these observation planes gained much experience in flying the weather, including some fairly bad storms, but no one had occasion to fly into a hurricane. There was a good deal of talk about the situation in the United States in 1942, however, because of the danger that the West Indian region might become a theater of war, if the Nazi armies gained control of West Africa and attacked the United States by air, across Brazil and the Caribbean.
With this threat from the southeast, the United States took action, which was a repetition of the events during the Spanish War in 1898. Military weather stations were set up in the West Indies and aircraft were prepared to fly weather missions in the area. At the same time, the United States was getting ready to ferry planes across the South Atlantic via the Caribbean, the South American Coast and Ascension Island. It was very definitely evident early in 1942 that hurricanes might play a critical role if the West Indies became a theater of war. By 1943, however, there were two surprising turns of affairs. The Allies invaded Africa late in 1942 and the first flight into a hurricane center, unscheduled and unauthorized, came in 1943.
The first to fly into the vortex of a hurricane was Joseph B. Duckworth, a veteran pilot of the scheduled airlines, who was at the time a colonel in the Army Air Corps Reserve, in command of the Instrument Flying Instructors School at Bryan, Texas. It was one of those rare combinations of circumstances by which the man with the necessary skill, experience, daring, and inclination happened to be at the right place at the right time. With a full appreciation of the danger, he flew a single engine airplane deliberately into the hurricane and proceeded on a direct heading into the calm center, looked around, and flew back to Bryan. Spotting hisweather officer, he bundled him into the back seat and duplicated the feat immediately!
Joe Duckworth was born in Savannah, Georgia, on September 8, 1902, which, incidentally, was the anniversary date of the terrible Galveston disaster of 1900, and it was a hurricane at Galveston into which he flew in 1943. Joe’s mother was Mary Haines, a Savannah girl. His father, Hubert Duckworth, was a naturalized Englishman who had been sent to the States to take over the American cotton offices of Joe’s grandfather, after whom he was named. When Joe was two years of age, the family moved to Macon, Georgia, where his father was vice-president of the Bibb Manufacturing Company.
Joe’s first memory of anything connected with aviation was when his parents took him to the fair grounds at Macon to see Eugene Ely fly in an early Wright-type biplane. The wind was not right for a flight. Pilots were cautious in those days and Ely didn’t go up. Joe and his parents were looking at the plane when his father remarked, “You know, some day they will be carrying passengers in these things.” His mother answered, “Don’t be silly, Hubert, you might as well try to fly to the moon.” Joe had a vague idea at the time that he would like to fly when he grew up. Long afterward, he did. He says, “Many times in the nineteen thirties I captained an Eastern Airlines plane over Macon and looked down on the old fair grounds and recalled the thrill I had on seeing my first airplane and the remarks of my mother and father.”
After his father died in 1914, Joe attended Woodberry Forest School in Orange, Virginia, for three years and then went for two years to Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, graduating from there in 1920. In the meantime, his mother had moved to Atlanta and he continued his education for two years at Georgia Tech, and one year at Oglethorpe University. Nothing he did would take flyingout of his mind and he finally gained admission to the Flying Cadets. After going through both Brooks and Kelly Fields as Cadet Captain, he was graduated in 1928, the happiest year of his life. Later, while flying for Eastern Airlines, he got a law degree from the University of Miami.
With basic training of the kind that young Duckworth received as a Cadet, he was not fitted to fly into a hurricane or into any sort of really bad weather. Military operations at that time were strictly visual or “contact.” The problem was not how to get through bad weather—thunderstorms, low overcast, fog, for example—but how to keep out of it. There were few flight instruments, and there was no instrument flying training. At that time, dirigibles were thought by many leaders in aeronautics to have the best passenger-carrying possibilities for the future. Steel had just replaced wood in fuselages and airplanes in general had earned the description “heavier-than air.” On the other hand, the world had been electrified by Lindbergh’s flight to Paris in 1927 and other “stunt” flights became numerous. Another thrilling piece of news was Admiral Byrd’s flight to the South Pole in 1929.
Trial freight-carrying runs were being flown by the Ford Motor Company from Detroit to Chicago and from Detroit to Buffalo, and Joe heard that a young man could get tri-motor flight time as a co-pilot two days a week, provided he worked four days in the factory. Duckworth headed for Detroit. After getting on the job with Ford, he had his first serious run-in with clear ice, or freezing rain. The plane barely made South Bend Airport, coming in at high speed with a load of ice on the wings. Fifteen years later, the pilot on instruments would have climbed quickly into the warmer air at higher levels and then worked his way down to destination, but instrument flying was unknown at the time.
In the spring of 1929, Joe went with the Curtis WrightFlying Service as their first instructor, at Grosse Ile, near Detroit. They were starting out to set up a nation-wide chain of bases with the idea of teaching everyone to fly. The plan was successful at first and in the fall Joe opened a branch at Atlanta, just as the stock market broke wide open. The slump in business that followed in 1930 caused general failure in the flying services. In December, Joe saw that the Atlanta branch was going out of business, and he went to work as a pilot for Eastern Air Transport, now Eastern Airlines, and remained with the company for ten years. At first he flew mail planes with parachutes but no passengers.
Even then there was no such thing as flying the weather. On his first mail flight, he got some pointed advice from the operations manager. He told Joe to be “sure to be on the look out for a reflection of the revolving radio beacon on the cloud ceiling and the moment you see such an apparition, you must get down immediately in an emergency field. If you let the overcast close down on you, you are strictly out of luck.” Airplanes were a long way then from being equipped to fly into hurricanes.
What little was known at that time about the temperature, pressure, and humidity in the upper air was secured by kites sent up daily at a few places. They were box kites, carrying recording instruments and flown by steel piano wire. Observers let them rise and pulled them in by reels and, after examining the records, sent the data to the weather forecasters. This was a slow process and, besides, it was becoming dangerous around airports where the data were needed most. A long piano wire in the sky was a serious hazard for aircraft. After 1931 this method was abandoned, and pilots under contract to the Weather Bureau attached weather-recording instruments to their planes and ascended to a height of three miles or a little higher, and on return gave the records to the weather observer, who worked them upand wired the results to the forecasters. Army and Navy pilots carried out similar missions at military bases. This plan worked fairly well. The flights were made early in the morning but when the weather was bad and the data would have been most useful, the planes were obliged to remain on the ground.
Gradually, beginning about 1932, airline pilots began more and more intentional flights “on instruments,” that is, operating in clouds without visual reference to ground or horizon. Reliability of schedules was an economic necessity. Navigation by radio was becoming more of a commonplace and, by experiment and self-teaching, by 1940 airlines were flying almost all kinds of en route weather, including thunderstorms.
In 1940, Joe’s thoughts turned to the Army Air Corps, in which he held a reserve commission as Major. It looked as though war might come to the United States, so in November of that year he resigned from Eastern to enter active duty—probably the first airline pilot to do so. Assigned to the Training Command, he never got overseas—but what he did in teaching instrument flying throughout the Air Corps is still acknowledged and appreciated by thousands of wartime pilots. He received literally hundreds of letters expressing their gratitude, some of them declaring that the training they had received had literally saved their lives on many occasions.
Joe found a serious lack of instrument flight training in the Air Corps, due to the frenzied expansion of training for War. And, as Joe said, “You couldn’t call off the war when the weather was bad!” He set out to make his wartime mission the remedying of this situation, and the record will show he did a monumental job. Cutting “red tape” wherever possible, experimenting, lecturing, and writing a whole new system of instrument flying training, he and his chosen assistantsculminated two years of intensive effort by establishing an instrument flying instructors school at Bryan, Texas, in February of 1943. During the next two years, the school provided over ten thousand highly qualified instructors to the Army Air Forces, and attained a solid reputation which is not forgotten today. Joe’s instructors flew all types of weather—anywhere—and at the same time piled up a safety record unheard of at the time. The manuals they developed are still, in principle, the standard of today’s Air Force.
Joe’s school taught, through novel and thorough techniques, two things. First, that there is no weather, except practically zero-zero landing conditions, that cannot be flown by the competent instrument pilot, with proper equipment. Second, that the safetyandutility of both military and commercial flight depend almost wholly on the competence of the pilot in instrument flying.
Thus it came about that the first flight into a hurricane center was not the result of a sudden notion but of years of intensive training in flying the weather, including storms, and the flyer who did it was probably the most expert in the world at getting safely through all kinds of weather. Looking at it from this point of view, it is not strange that there was a rather amusing sequel to this story, involving the other instructors at Bryan, Texas. But first we come to the story of the history-making flight by Colonel Duckworth.
Early on the morning of July 27, 1943, Joe came out to have breakfast at the field. The sky at Bryan was absolutely clear and it did not seem to promise any kind of weather that would try the mettle of men whose business it was to fly in stormy conditions. Someone at the table said he had seen a report that a hurricane was approaching Galveston. Joe was immediately attentive. Sitting opposite him was a young and enthusiastic navigator, the only one at the field, Lieutenant Ralph O’Hair.
Thinking again about the fact that no one had flown a hurricane and that it ought to be easy because of the circular flow, Joe suggested to Ralph: “Let’s go down and get an AT-6 and penetrate the center, just for fun.” He said it would be “for fun” because he felt sure that higher headquarters probably would not approve the risk of the aircraft and highly trained personnel for an official flight. There were three or four newly arrived B-25’s at the field but Duckworth had not had the time to check out in one of them and therefore could not fly a B-25 (a twin-engine airplane) without going through some formalities. Use of the AT-6, of course, involved the danger that its one engine might quit inside the hurricane and they would be in trouble.
Lieutenant O’Hair was quite willing—enthusiastic in fact—and the pair gathered such information as was available about the hurricane and made ready for the flight. They took off in the AT-6 shortly after noon. The data on the storm had been rather meagre. Two days before, Forecaster W. R. Stevens at New Orleans had deduced from the charts that a tropical storm was forming in the Gulf to the southward. He drew his conclusion almost solely from upper air data at coastal stations, for no ships were reporting from the Gulf. On the twenty-sixth, Stevens had correctly tracked it westward toward Galveston (quite a feat in view of the lack of observations) and warnings had been issued in advance.
On the morning of the twenty-seventh, this small but intense hurricane was moving inland on the Texas Coast, a short distance north of Galveston, and by early afternoon the winds were blowing eighty to one hundred miles an hour on Galveston Bay and in Chambers County, to the eastward of the Bay. Houston and Galveston were in the western or less dangerous semicircle, a favorable condition for the flight from Bryan to Houston. Soon after leaving Bryan, the venturesome airmen were in the clouds on the outer rim of thestorm—with scud and choppy air—and shortly after they ran into rain. Precipitation static began to give them trouble in communications but there was no other serious difficulty.
As they approached Houston, the air smoothed out, the static leaked off the plane, the radio was quiet, and the overcast grew darker. They called Houston. The airways radio operator was surprised when they said their destination was Galveston.
“Do you know there is a hurricane at Galveston?” the operator asked.
“Yes, we do,” said O’Hair. “We intend to fly into the thing.”
“Well, please report back every little while,” the operator requested. “Let me know what happens.” Evidently, he wanted to be able to say what became of the plane if they went down in the storm.
At this point Joe’s mind began to run back over some of the lectures the flight instructor had given and recall how they had stressed the fact that a pilot should always have an “out,” even if it meant taking to a parachute. He wondered what it would be like to use a parachute in a hurricane. They were flying at a height of four thousand to nine thousand feet.
As they approached the center, the air became choppier again and he said afterward that they were “being tossed about like a stick in a dog’s mouth,” without much chance of getting away from the grip of the storm. Checking on the radio ranges at Houston and Galveston, they flew over the latter and then turned northward. Suddenly, they broke out of the dark overcast and rain and entered brighter clouds. Almost immediately, they could see high walls of white cumulus all around the circular area in the center and, below them, the ground and above the sky quite clearly. Theplane was in the calm center. The ground below was not surely identified but it seemed to be open country, somewhere between Galveston and Houston. They descended in an effort to get their position more clearly but the air became rougher as their altitude decreased. This led Duckworth to the conclusion that the eye of the hurricane was like a “leaning cone,” the lower part probably being restricted and retarded by the frictional drag of the land over which the storm was passing. They flew around in the center a while and then took a compass course for Bryan.
Once out of the center, the plane went through, in reverse, the conditions the fliers had experienced on the way in, arriving at the air field at Bryan in clear weather. When they got out of the plane, the weather officer, Lieutenant William Jones-Burdick, came up and said he was very disappointed that he had not made this important flight.
Duckworth said, “OK, hop in and we’ll go back through and have another look.” So he and the weather officer flew into the calm center again and looked around a while. The weather officer kept a log from which the following excerpts are taken, beginning with their entry into dense clouds on the way into the hurricane. The time given here is twenty-four-hour clock. Subtract 1200 to get time (P.M.) by Central Standard.
One sequel to this story was Duckworth’s discovery, a year later, that after these flights into the center, some of his instructors and supervisors who were checked out in B-25’s had sneaked out and flown the same hurricane! They were afraid to tell him about it at the time, for they did not havepermission to do it, but he accidentally learned about it the next year, when he overheard some of them talking about their trips into the storm.
Altogether, Joe did not consider his flights into the hurricane to be as dangerous as some of his other weather flights. Only two things worried him at the time, the heavy precipitation static and the possibility that heavy rain might cause the engine to quit. Afterward, when pilots began to fly hurricanes as regular missions, the effect of torrential rain in lowering engine temperatures proved to be a real hazard and they had to take special precautions on this account.
Considering his hurricane penetration a routine weather flight at the time, Joe thought nothing more about it until he read a story in a Sunday paper, several weeks later. Then he had a telephone call from Brigadier General Luke Smith, at Randolph Field, who asked him to come down, and surprised him by saying that he knew of the incident. At Randolph, the General said that Joe was being recommended for the Distinguished Flying Cross. This never went through but later Joe did receive the Air Medal.
There were several amazing features about these flights into the vortex. First, they justified Duckworth’s unswerving confidence in his ability to fly safely through a hurricane; second, at the level of high flights there was a remarkable absence of violent up drafts or turbulence; third, they showed that quiet air in the center extended at least to heights of a mile to a mile and a half, and that at those levels the air in the center was much warmer than the air in the surrounding region of cloud, rain, and high winds. Joe is sorry now he did not organize his flight to get better scientific data. He believes his air temperature gauge probably was inaccurate. But, as he says, “It was just a lark—I didn’t think anybody would ever care or know about it!”
This demonstration was followed by an increasing numberof penetrations by aircraft into the eyes of tropical storms, not all of which, by any means, were as uneventful as the flights by Duckworth and his fellow officers. After years of experience, the military services involved in flying hurricanes developed a technique which was essentially the same as that used by Duckworth in this first flight; that is, penetrate into the western semicircle and then into the center or eye from the southwest quadrant.
Bellowing, there groan’d a noiseAs of a sea in tempest tornBy warring winds. The stormy blast of HadesWith restless fury drives the spirits on.—Dante
Bellowing, there groan’d a noise
As of a sea in tempest torn
By warring winds. The stormy blast of Hades
With restless fury drives the spirits on.
—Dante
During the first half of the present century there was a tremendous growth in population, industry, truck-farming, citrus-growing, boating, and aviation on the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts of the United States. This brought new worries to the hurricane hunters and forecasters.
By the beginning of the century, most of the older cities and port towns in this region had been hit repeatedly by tropical blasts. Insecure buildings had been eliminated. From bitter experience, the natives knew what to do when a storm threatened. They had built houses and other structures to withstand hurricane winds, placing nearly all of them above the highest storm tides within their memories. Down in the hurricane belt of Texas and Louisiana, a sixty-pennynail was known as a “Burrwood finishing nail.” The town of Burrwood, at the water’s edge on the southern tip of Louisiana, had no frame buildings that had survived its ravaging winds and overwhelming tides except those which were put together with spikes driven through heavy timbers.
Learning to deal with hurricanes takes a lot of time. Most places on these coasts have a really bad tropical storm about once in ten or twenty years. And so it happened that while the population was increasing rapidly in the years from 1920 to 1940, many thousands of flimsy buildings were constructed in the intervals between hurricanes. Too many were built near the sea, where they would be wrecked by the first big storm wave. To build near the water is tempting in a hot climate. And so it happened that after 1920, widespread destruction of property and great loss of life attended the first violent blow in many of these rapidly growing communities.
Newcomers—and there were many—didn’t know what to do to protect life and property. After the first calamity, they were alarmed by the winds which came with every local thundershower and they were likely to flee inland in great numbers whenever there was a rumor of a hurricane. Here they became refugees, to be fed and sheltered by the Red Cross and local welfare organizations. By the middle thirties, this had become a heavy burden on all concerned. To get things under control, local chapters of the Red Cross were formed and other civic leaders joined in seeing that precautions were taken when required, and panics were averted at times when no storm was known to exist. But when warnings were issued by the Weather Bureau, coastal towns were almost deserted. The greatest organized mass exodus from shore areas in advance of a tropical storm occurred in Texas, in 1942. On August 30, a big hurricane with a tremendous storm wave struck the coast between Corpus Christi andGalveston. It had been tracked across the Caribbean and Gulf, and ample warnings had been issued. More than fifty thousand persons were systematically evacuated from the threatened region and though every house was damaged in many towns, only eight lives were lost.
All of this brought heavy pressure on the hurricane hunters and forecasters to be more accurate in the warnings, to “pinpoint” the area to be seriously affected, and to defer the hoist of the black-centered red hurricane flags until those responsible were reasonably sure of the path the storm would take across the coast line. Thus, the warnings actually became more precise, but in some instances the time available for protective action was correspondingly reduced.
Precautionary measures must be carefully planned. The force of the wind on a surface placed squarely across the flow of air increases roughly with the square of the wind speed. For this reason, it is a good approximation to say that an eighty-mile wind is four times as destructive as a forty-mile wind. A 120-mile wind is nine times as destructive. In order to lessen property damage, residents of Florida and other states in the hurricane belt prepared wooden frames which could be quickly nailed over windows and other glassed openings. These devices proved to be very effective. In some cases it was a dramatic fact that, if two houses were located side by side, the one with protective covers on windows and other openings escaped serious damage while the other house soon lost a window pane and then the roof went off as powerful gusts built up strong pressures within the building. At the same time that this protection was applied on the windward side, openings on the leeward side (away from the wind) helped to reduce any pressures that built up in the interior.
As these experiences became common after 1930, wood and metal awnings were manufactured so that they could belowered quickly into position to protect windows of residences. Business houses stocked wooden frames that could be fastened in place quickly to prevent wholesale damage to plate glass windows.
Many other measures were taken hastily when the emergency warnings were sent out. One, for example, was a check by home owners to make sure that they had tools and timbers ready to brace doors and windows from the inside if they began to give way under the terrific force of hurricane gusts. They had learned that with a wind averaging eighty miles an hour, say, the gusts are likely to go as high as 120 miles an hour and it is in these brief violent blasts, so characteristic of the hurricane, that the major part of the wind damage occurs.
In addition, the experienced citizen prepares for hours when water, lights, and electric refrigeration will fail. He knows, too, that these storms have a central region, or eye, where it is calm or nearly so, and he does not make the often-fatal mistake of assuming that the storm is over when the calm suddenly succeeds the roaring gales. He wisely remains indoors and closes the openings on the other side of the house, for the first great gusts will come from a direction nearly opposite that of the most violent winds which preceded the center.
In the early thirties, the hurricane forecasts for the entire susceptible region were still being made in Washington, having been begun there in 1878. Weather reports were coming in season from observers at land stations in the West Indies, mostly by cable. From many places the cable messages went to Washington via Halifax. Ship’s weather messages came by radio to coastal stations on the Atlantic and Gulf, and from there to Washington by telegraph. Twice a day these reports were put on maps and isobars, and pressure centers (highs and lows) were drawn.
In general, the same system is used today. Arrows show the direction and force of the wind at each of many points; also the barometer reading, temperature, cloud data, and other facts are entered. Conditions in the upper air are shown at a few places where balloon soundings are made. As the map takes shape, it begins to show the vast sweep of the elements across the southern United States, Mexico, Central America, and all the region in and around the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic. In these southern regions, the trade winds, coming from the northeast and turning westward across the islands and the Caribbean, bring good weather to the edge of the belt of doldrums.
This is the lazy climate of the tropics, in the vast spaces where the bulge of the earth near the Equator seems to give things the appearance of a view through a magnifying glass. In the distant scene, islands are set off by glistening clouds hanging from mountain tops. White towers of thundery clouds push upward here and there over the sea, in startling contrast to the blue of the sky and water. Nature seems to be at peace but the trained weather observer may see and measure things that are disturbing to the weather forecasters when put together on a weather map of regions extending far beyond any single observer’s horizon.
Here and there in this atmosphere that seems so peaceful an eddy forms and drifts westward in the grand sweep of the upper air across these southern latitudes. These temporary swirls in the atmosphere, some of which are called “easterly waves,” are marked by a wave-like form, drifting from the east. The wind turns a little, the barometer falls slightly, the clouds increase temporarily, but nothing serious happens and the eddy passes as better weather resumes. This goes on day after day and week after week, but during the hurricane season the storm hunters are always on the alert.
All this work of charting the weather day by day and week by week is not wasted if no hurricane develops. Planes take off every day from southern and eastern airports, carrying passengers to Bermuda, Nassau, Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Central and South America. The crews stop at the weather office to pick up reports of wind and weather for their routes and at destination. The weather over these vast expanses of water surface is reported and predicted also for ships at sea. And when a storm begins to develop, ships and planes are among the first to be notified.
Sooner or later, one of these swirling waves shows a definite center of low pressure, with winds blowing counterclockwise around it. Now the modern drama of the hurricane begins. In the region where these ominous winds are charted, radio messages from headquarters ask for reports from ships—every hour, if possible—and weather offices on islands are asked to make special balloon soundings of the upper air and send reports at frequent intervals. Warnings go out to vessels in the path of the storm as it picks up force. Alert storm hunters in Cuba and other countries are contacted to discuss the prospects, to furnish more frequent reports, and to assist in warning the populations on the islands.
On the coast of the United States, excitement is in the air. Conversations in the street, offices, stores, homes, everywhere, turn to the incipient hurricane, and become more insistent as the big winds draw nearer. And finally the hour comes when precautions are necessary. By this time, business in the threatened area is at a standstill. The situation is like that during world-series baseball games and almost as dramatic as that which follows a declaration of war. Few people have their minds on business. At this point, the reports of storm hunters and the decisions of forecasters involve the immediate plans of hundreds of thousands ofpeople, large costs for protection of property, and the safety of human life along shore and in small craft on the water.
Some of the men and women who came down to the weather and radio offices this morning know now that they will not go home tonight. There will be an increasing volume of weather reports, the rattle of teletypewriters will become more insistent, the radio receivers will be guarded by alert men growing weary toward morning, planes will be evacuated from airports in the threatened region and flown back into the interior, and the businessman will go home early and get out the frames he uses to board up the windows when a hurricane is predicted. The Navy may take battleships and cruisers out of a threatened harbor, so that their officers will have room to maneuver.
Under these dramatic conditions the hurricane comes toward land with good weather in advance—sunny by day and clear at night. The native fears the telltale booming of the surf and feels concerned about the fitful northeast breezes. In time there are lofty, thin clouds, spreading across the sky in wisps or “mares’ tails” of cirrus—composed of ice crystals in the high cold atmosphere far above the heated surface of the subtropics. A thin veil forms over the sky. At the end of the day, red rays of the lowering sun cast a weird crimson color into the cloud veil, reflecting a scarlet hue over the landscape and the sea. For a few minutes the earth seems to be on fire. To the visitor, it is a beautiful sunset. To the native, it is alarming, and in some parts of the Caribbean it is terrifying as an omen of the displeasure of the storm gods. In these dramatic situations the head forecaster makes his decision.
Also, during these nervous hours, representatives of the Red Cross begin arriving on the scene. At the same time, crews assigned to duties of repairing telephone, telegraph, and power lines are sent to the threatened area by theirrespective companies. As soon as the storm has passed, these men will be ready to go to work.
At this juncture it is probable that strange things will happen. Against the stream of refugees moving away from the coast, there are always a few adventurers who come from more distant places to see the full fury of a great hurricane roaring inland from the sea. At first they thrill to the crash of tremendous waves breaking on the coast and hurling spray high into the screaming winds. But when the rain comes in torrents, striking with the force of pebbles, and beach structures begin to collapse and give up their components to wind and sea, the curious spectator has had enough. Hurriedly he seeks refuge and begins to wonder fearfully if it will get worse. It does. He soon realizes that what he has seen is only the beginning.
As the full force of the blast strikes a coastal city, the scene goes beyond the power of words to describe. Darkness envelops everything, with thick, low-flying clouds and heavy rain acting like a dense fog to cut down on visibility. The air fills with debris, and with the roar of the winds and the crash of falling buildings. Power lines go down, and until the current can be cut off, electric flashes throw a weird, diffuse light on the growing chaos. In the lulls, the shrieks of fire apparatus and ambulances are heard until the streets become impassable.
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 combinationof 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, andby 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 reliefcamps 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 issuesthe 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 steadilyand 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 forthe 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.