Chapter IX: Part 9

When the New Mexico atom bomb was exploded, the weather was bad, with rain in torrents, strong winds, lightning and thunder. Afterward, the weather was much better and this led to a lot of speculation. The fact is, however, that the scientists waited until the weather improved before they exploded the bomb; hence neither the bad weather nor the improvement could be attributed to the explosion.

Before the tests at Bikini in 1946 and Eniwetok in 1948, the scientists received numerous letters, warning them that the explosions would start storms and might cause a typhoon. But the effects of explosions of this kind are soon over, while the forces that maintain a hurricane or typhoon must be applied continuously day and night for a week or two, to keep one of these big tropical storms going in full fury. One of the scientists who witnessed these tests estimated that it would take a thousand atomic bombs at any moment to equal the energy of motion in a hurricane. No scientist has figured what would happen if one thousand atomic bombs were exploded at one time in a storm area!

After a year or two of rainmaking with dry ice and another chemical, silver iodide, the conviction grew that it would be possible to kill a hurricane by dropping some of this material in a vital spot. Some of the bolder students of weather control actually tried it. One of them was Gordon Clouser. Just what he did when he flew into the storm and what happened to it afterward make a mystery, for he gave his life in the effort. It is a good example of the fearless activities of the hurricane hunters.

Gordon Clouser was born in 1912, in Gibraltar, Pennsylvania. He grew into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor, then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that, he had many activities--teacher, librarian, writer and director of plays. He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then was a teacher in Junior College in Yakima, Washington.

It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next year, he had moved to Plainview, Texas, and had begun to organize airplane operations to prevent hail on the high plains of the State. Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes and in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner, carrying some denim to be used in connection with an experiment, and his wife discovered that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop chemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When he asked what they were having for dinner, she replied, "I guess it will be frozen denim."

The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough money to finance the necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for twenty to forty cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But, he argued, the prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates, which are based on the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done.

To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms, to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and, if so, they dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called "seeding" by the rainmakers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his command. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, they checked 421 thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes in eighty-two of them, which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on that score.

During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoes and getting the Weather Bureau's forecasts and warnings. On May 26, he heard a prediction of tornadoes in an area which included the two counties where he was working to prevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying among thunderheads in tornado weather, his planes were in the air for a total of nearly ten hours that day, seeding clouds that looked dangerous. That night, a half hour after the last of Gordon's planes landed, the Weather Bureau issued an "all clear." There had been no tornadoes in either county. Gordon said, "We can't prove that we prevented a tornado--maybe none would have formed anyway--but we do know that conditions were right for one, and we changed those conditions."

For a man of Clouser's adventurous spirit, this was just a side issue. He occupied much of his spare time studying hurricanes and making plans for the day when he would be operating a large company to kill these storms before they reached the Coasts of the United States. He hoped to have his main office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with planes stationed also at Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of Mexico, in Cuba, and at two or three other strategic places. He would get the government reports, talk to the weather men, and at the right time drop a mixture containing his secret formula into the eye of the storm or some other vital spot that he would find by flying above the storm clouds and studying the wind circulation.

His wife, Olive, took this philosophically. With their three children, she was living at Norman, near Oklahoma City. Like the wives of most adventurous pilots, she knew that any one of these trips might be her husband's last. She encouraged him in his hail prevention but worried about tornadoes, and especially hurricanes. She knew that they form and move over vast sea surfaces on which the winds impress violent motions, a deadly place for a man to land when in trouble. After Gordon flew into the tornado clouds in May, he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called her on the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead of going home, he asked her to drive him to the Weather Bureau Office at the airport, where he checked on the reports to see if they knew what had happened to the tornadoes. Then she found out what he had been doing and heard him talking about hurricanes.

Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted to paint the kitchen-yellow, but he was against it. She tried to get a compromise. If he was going to fly into tornadoes and other storms against her advice, why not paint the kitchen yellow, even if he didn't like it very much? He offered strong objections and she put it off for a while.

In the meantime, Gordon was in trouble. September of that year--1952--was very dry in Texas. The farmers in Floyd and Hale Counties in that state got the idea that his agitations against hail had prevented rain. Anyway, he was out of work, for, as he said, "There is no point in a hail-busting business when there are no clouds." A delegation of farmers called on him to protest his activities. They said that he and his men had deprived them of rain and they were going to lose a lot of money.

Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlier in the year had nothing to do with the drought. He pointed out that only 82 out of 421 storms had been seeded; therefore, 339 of them had acted exactly as nature had intended. Besides that, he showed them news reports that nearly all of Texas was dry, some parts being much drier than the counties he was working. They went home satisfied, but Gordon had time on his hands, with no thunderheads or clouds to work on. So he gathered data on hurricanes and spent a good deal of time at home, making experiments in the freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The little ones in Floyd and Hale Counties gave him trouble. All rainmakers know that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rain on the farm or ranch of a man who refuses to pay for seeding, and have no rain on a farm next to it, owned by a man who has paid for the service.

October came and it proved to be the driest month for the country as a whole since weather records began. All the rainmakers were in trouble and the "hail-busters" were out of work. Gordon sat at home, listening to the radio and working on his formula. He and Olive talked about many things but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens. Then on Tuesday, October 21, Gordon left for Plainview. The next day he heard a news report from Lubbock that there was a hurricane in Cuba, moving toward the United States. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombe plane, saying nothing to anybody except Bill and Pauline Seirp. Bill was not a pilot but Gordon had been teaching him to fly.

Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was having the kitchen painted yellow and wondering what Gordon would say when he came home from Plainview. That was on Thursday. On Sunday, the twenty-sixth, she and the children had a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday School and remained for church service. During the hymn at the beginning of the service, there was a long-distance call for Olive from Plainview. Gordon was lost at sea. Later in the day, she heard the story in full.

Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reached Florida he tried to get one better suited for storm work. He had plans for building a special plane for the purpose but now he was anxious to get into the hurricane. It might be the last one of the season, he thought. It had done a great deal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather Bureau Office in Miami and got the latest information on the position, strength and movement of the storm. At 3:45 P.M. (October 25) the center of the hurricane was about seventy-five or eighty miles east of Miami when Gordon took off in his Luscombe plane. At 8:56 P.M., a radio station in Miami picked up a message from him, saying that he was fifty or sixty miles east-southeast of Miami, still in the edge of the storm. The radio station talked with him for twenty-six minutes as he flew toward Miami, making poor headway against the winds. The last message was, "Out of fuel--descending--give my love to my wife and family."

The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the Coast Guard searched the area for forty-eight hours without finding any trace of the missing man. Olive went to Miami and did her best to keep the planes looking for him. Whether or not he had any effect on the storm will never be known for sure. The weather forecasters in Miami did not think so. But the hurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It was destructive early on the twenty-sixth as it turned into the Bahamas, then lost force, and turned northward. The official report of the Weather Bureau said that "it moved northeastward thereafter as a disturbance of no great violence."

The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought to mind the Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may have studied. It began far to the southward, near the Isthmus of Panama, early on the ninth of October. On the eleventh, it crossed the extreme western end of Cuba, and on the twelfth passed over southern Florida. From this time on, its course was very unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed it going northeastward over the Atlantic until the night of the thirteenth, when it was east of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early on the fourteenth, a plane got into the storm area and found it moving southwestward. With considerable force it struck Savannah, Georgia, early on the fifteenth, causing about two million dollars' worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah and some of the city officials complained to the government for causing the hurricane to strike the city.

At about the time, or just before the hurricane changed its course abruptly to the southwest, military planes had carried out an experiment in dropping dry ice into its upper levels. There was a great deal of discussion in the press. At first it was said that the dry ice had caused the storm to take a new course, but after the Savannah complaints were heard, little more was said by the military about the experiment and it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believe that dry ice could have such an effect on so large a storm. Actually, there were few observations in the storm area during the night of the thirteenth to fourteenth and precise information about the time and nature of the change of course was not available for an investigation. It belongs in the same class as the Clouser storm.

_16._ CAROL, EDNA, HAZEL OR SAXBY!

"_But I know ladies by the score
Whose hair, like seaweed, scents the storm;
Long, long before it starts to pour
Their locks assume a baneful form._"
--Hebert

At the end of August, 1954, when the hurricane named "Carol" devastated Long Island and the southern coast of New England, it did a tremendous amount of property damage, principally on the shores of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. There was sharp criticism of the weathermen and the hurricane hunters. People claimed that the warning came only a few hours ahead of the big winds and the high storm tides. The weathermen answered that there really was no delay on their part in giving out the warning. They said that the hurricane hunters had been tracking Carol for several days and everybody had been warned that it was on the way. The hurricane simply started to move with great rapidity during that final night and there was no way of getting the warning to large numbers of people that early in the morning. It was after daylight when they got out of bed and turned on radio and television.

Of all the criticism, the sharpest and most prolonged was about the name of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts--the New Bedford _Times_--ran an editorial saying that it was not appropriate to give a nice name like Carol to a death-dealing and destructive monster of this kind. Other newspapers and many citizens here and there around the country joined in, partly in complaint and partly out of curiosity and the wish to get into the argument. A New Orleans woman wrote to the editor of the New Bedford _Times_ that she would rather a storm would hit her house nameless than to run a chance of having it named after one of her husband's old girl friends. Other women were incensed because storms had been called by their given names. The weathermen had a good explanation, but not many people seemed to sympathize with them. Persons who suffered losses of property were the most critical, saying that the name Carol gave the impression that the storm was not dangerous and that its winds and tides would not be much out of the ordinary.

The hurricane hunters were amazed by this reaction. Use of names for storms was not new. For a great many years the worst of the world's storms have been given names, some before they struck with full force, but mostly afterward. Many were named after cities, towns or islands that were devastated. Others had gotten their names from some unusual weather that came with them or from ships that were sunk or damaged. One of them, as already has been related, was named "Kappler's Hurricane" after a weather officer named Kappler who discovered it.

During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a New Englander, Sidney Perley, collected all the available records of storms and other disasters, together with strange phenomena in New England, starting with a big hurricane in 1635, when there were only a few settlers, and continuing down to 1890. His book, _Historic Storms of New England_, was published in Salem, in 1891. He listed floods, earthquakes, dark and yellow days, big meteors, eclipses, avalanches, droughts, great gales, tornadoes, hurricanes, and storms of hail and heavy snow. Prominent among them were the "Long Storm" of 1798, the "September Gale" of 1815, and the "Lighthouse Storm" of 1851.

The "Long Storm," as the name suggests, was of long duration. It began on the seventeenth of November and continued with terrific gales and heavy snow until late on the twenty-first. This violent weather was unprecedented so early in the winter. From Perley's account it seems that the center of the storm crossed Cape Cod. A great many vessels were lost and there was much suffering among the people.

The "September Gale" of 1815 became famous because of a poem written in later years by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was six years old at the time of the big gale. Holmes remembered and lamented the loss of his favorite pair of breeches, in part as follows:

"It chanced to be our washing day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the sheets and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,--
I lost my Sunday breeches."

Holmes entitled the poem _The September Gale_ and so this became the name of the storm. Actually, it was a hurricane quite like those that struck New England in 1938, 1944 and 1954. Years afterward, a New Haven man named Noyes Darling became interested in the storm of 1815 and traced its course by a collection of newspaper accounts from many places and by the logs of ships which had been in the western Atlantic when the hurricane passed. In 1842, he plotted all this information on a map and was able to figure its course. This was rather remarkable, for a study since that time shows that the tracks of hurricanes which do great damage in New England must adhere closely to one path--far enough eastward to clear the land areas as they go northward and far enough westward so that they do not go out into the ocean before they reach the latitude of Nantucket. Those which strike shore to the southward may reach New England but passage over land causes them to lose much of their fury on the way. Darling's plotted path was correct according to experiences since that time.

The "Lighthouse Storm" of 1851 commenced in the District of Columbia on Sunday, April 13, reached New York on Monday morning, and during the day struck New England. It came at the time of the full moon and so the storm-driven waters joined with the high tides, and the sea, rising over the wharves at Dorchester, Massachusetts, came into the streets to a greater height than had ever been known before. All around the coasts of Massachusetts and New Hampshire there was much property damage. The event which gave the storm its name was the destruction of the lighthouse on Minot's ledge, at Cohasset, Massachusetts. It was wrecked and swept away. At four o'clock the morning after the storm some of the wreckage was found strewn along the beach. Two young men, assistant light keepers, were killed. Since this was a very dangerous rock and many vessels had been lost there, a new lighthouse was erected at the same point soon afterward.

One of the most noted storms of the nineteenth century was "Saxby's Gale," which caused a great amount of destruction in New Brunswick on October 4, 1869. The amazing fact was that this storm was predicted nearly a year before by a Lieutenant Saxby of the British Navy. In November, 1868, he wrote to the newspapers in London, predicting that the earth would be visited by a storm of unusual violence attended by an extraordinary rise of tide at seven o'clock on the morning of October 5, 1869.

Saxby wrote the following explanation of his forecast to the newspaper:

"I now beg to state with regard to 1869 at 7 A.M. October 5th, the Moon will be at the part of her orbit which is nearest the Earth. Her attraction will be therefore at its maximum force. At noon of the same day the Moon will be on the Earth's equator, a circumstance which never occurs without marked atmospheric disturbance, and at 2 P.M. of the same day lines drawn from the Earth's centre would cut the Sun and Moon in the same arc of right ascension (the Moon's attraction and the Sun's attraction will therefore be acting in the same direction); in other words, the new moon will be on the Earth's equator when in perigee, and nothing more threatening can, I say, occur without miracle. The earth it is true will not be in perihelion by some sixteen or seventeen seconds of semidiameter.

"With your permission I will during September next (1869) for the safety of mariners briefly remind your readers of this warning. In the meantime there will be time for the repair of unsafe sea walls and for the circulation of this notice throughout the world."

It seems that Saxby had made other similar forecasts. Commenting on one of his predictions, a London newspaper, the _Standard_, said:

"Saxby claims to have been successful in some of his predictions, and he may prove either lucky or clever on the present occasion. As the astronomical effect will operate over the entire globe, it is exceedingly likely there will be a gale of wind and a flood somewhere."

The extraordinary fact is that a citizen of Halifax, Nova Scotia, disturbed by Saxby's prediction for October 5, 1869, wrote to the local newspaper the week before:

"I believe that a heavy gale will be encountered here on Tuesday next 5th October beginning perhaps on Monday night or possibly deferred as late as Tuesday night, but between these two periods it seems inevitable. At its greatest force the direction of the wind should be southwest, having commenced at or near south.

"Should Monday the 4th be a warm day for the season an additional guarantee of the coming storm will be given. Roughly speaking the warmer it may be on the 4th, the more violent will be the succeeding storm. Apart from the theory of the Moon's attraction, as applied to Meteorology--which is disbelieved by many, the experience of any careful observer teaches him to look for a storm at next new moon, and the state of the atmosphere, and consequent weather lately appears to be leading directly not only to this blow next week, but to a succession of gales during next month."

Actually the fourth began as a warm day in New Brunswick and later in the day the storm became violent, as predicted by the Halifax citizen, named Frederick Allison.

There were high tide and heavy rain at Halifax but the weather in general was a disappointment, for the citizens, after seeing the warning in the newspaper, had made many preparations about the wharves, moving goods to higher floors in warehouses, and anchoring boats out in the stream or securing them with lines in all directions.

Near by in New Brunswick, however, the storm on October 4 was severe. The gale rose to hurricane strength between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M. The tide at St. John was above any preceding mark. Vessels broke away from their moorings and some were badly damaged. Buildings were flooded and in St. John and other cities and towns in the area, buildings were demolished or unroofed, tracts of forest trees were uprooted, and cattle were drowned in great numbers.

All of this was rather remarkable as the storm reached its height at about 9:00 P.M. on October 4th, which was actually after midnight by London time and therefore on October 5th. Regardless of these circumstances, this is an instance of a storm that had a name--"Saxby's Gale"--long before it occurred and for years afterward. Some weathermen thought that it was of tropical origin and had been a hurricane in lower latitudes, but if so, it came overland in its final days, for it was felt at Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and in parts of New England on the third and early on the fourth, with heavy rains and gales in many localities.

A few hurricanes have been named for the peculiar paths they followed. One that was very unusual was the "Loop Hurricane" of October, 1910. It was an intense storm that passed over western Cuba, after which its center described a small loop over the waters between Cuba and Southern Florida. When it finally crossed the coast of western Florida, it caused tides so high that many people had to climb trees to keep from drowning. The "Yankee Hurricane" was so named by the Mayor of Miami. It was first observed to the east of Bermuda in late October, 1935, moving westward. On approaching the coast of the Carolinas, it took an extraordinary course, almost opposite to the normal track at that season, and went southwestward to southern Florida, with its calm center over Miami on the fourth of November. In the same year, another unusual storm known as the "Hairpin Hurricane" started in the western Caribbean, moved northeastward to Cuba, and then turned sharply southwestward to Honduras, describing a track shaped like a hairpin. It caused one of the worst disasters of that region. Loss of life exceeded two thousand.

Examples of storms named after ships are "Racer's Storm" in 1837, named after a British sloop of war which was caught in its hurricane winds in the Yucatan Channel. Another one of great violence was called "Antje's Hurricane," because it dismasted a schooner of that name in the Atlantic in 1842.

In Puerto Rico, a hurricane may be given the name of the saint whose feast is celebrated on the day on which it strikes the island. The most famous are: Santa Ana, July 26, 1825; Los Angeles, August 2, 1837; Santa Elena, August 18, 1851; San Narcisco, October 29, 1867; San Felipe, September 13, 1876; San Ciriaco, August 8, 1899; and the second San Felipe, September 13, 1928.

Doubtless the worst hurricane during the twentieth century was the one in 1928, "San Felipe." It caused damage estimated at fifty million dollars in Puerto Rico, and later struck Florida, causing losses estimated at twenty-five million dollars. Puerto Rico lost three hundred lives, Florida nearly two thousand.

One of the well-known storms of the West Indies was the "Padre Ruiz Hurricane," which was named after a priest whose funeral services were being held in the church at Santa Barbara, Santo Domingo, on September 23, 1837, when the hurricane struck the island, causing an appalling loss of life and property destruction.

Before the end of the nineteenth century, a weatherman in Australia named Clement Wragge had begun giving girls' names to tropical storms. Down in that part of the Southern Hemisphere, hurricanes are called willy-willies. They come from the tropics on a southwest course and turn to the south and southeast on approaching or passing Australia. Their winds spiral inward around the center in a clockwise direction--the opposite of the turning motion of our hurricanes.

Wragge was the government meteorologist in Queensland, and later ran a weather bureau of his own in Brisbane. A tall, thin, bewhiskered man who stammered, he was known all over Australia as a lecturer on weather and similar subjects. Australians of that time said that, as likely as not, when due to talk about big winds, he would arrive at the lecture hall with "too many sheets out" and fail to keep on his feet during the lecture. Though his name was Clement, he was better known in Australia as "Inclement."

Storms which did not come from the tropics were called by men's names. Generally, Wragge called them after politicians who had earned his disfavor, but for some reason he used girls' names for the willy-willies. As an illustration for his weather journal called "WRAGGE," he had a weather map for February 2, 1898, with a willy-willy named "Eline." He predicted nasty weather from a disturbance named "Hackenbush."

E. B. Buxton, a meteorologist for Pan American Airways, went to the South Pacific in the late thirties and, after hearing about Wragge and his names for willy-willies, adopted the idea for his charts. He recalled particularly using the name "Chloe" for hurricanes.

With few exceptions, the hurricanes of the twentieth century went unnamed in the United States until 1951, although some were referred to in terms of place and date; for instance, the "New England Hurricane of 1938." Unofficially, a few had names of people. In 1949, while President Truman was in Miami addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the first hurricane of the season was called "Harry," and a little later a bigger one which the newsmen said had greater authority struck southern Florida and it was called "Hurricane Bess."

In sending out advices and warnings of West Indian storms, it was not considered necessary to have names, as it was seldom that more than one was in existence at the same time. In 1944, when aircraft reconnaissance began, it became customary to get reports by radio-telephone and voice was used increasingly in other ways by the hurricane hunters. But this gave no particular trouble until September, 1950, when there were three hurricanes in progress at the same time.

Two were in the Atlantic, one north of Bermuda and the other north of Puerto Rico. The third appeared in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. When aircraft were dispatched into these storms and began reporting, there was increasing confusion. Other communications and public advices became mixed and there was much uncertainty as to which storm was meant. Use of letters of the alphabet to identify them was no help, for letters B, C, D, E, and G sound much alike by radio-telephone; also A, J, and H. Numbers were no better because weather reports are sent by numbers and the advisories issued on each storm are numbered, so that the number 3 could be the number of the storm, the number of the advice, an element of the weather, the hour, etc.

The agencies involved in weather and communications in connection with hurricanes met early in 1951 and decided to identify storms by the phonetic alphabet, which gave Able for A, Baker for B, Charlie for C, etc., in accordance with the following table:

Able
Baker
Charlie
Dog
Easy
Fox
George
How
Item
Jig
King
Love
Mike
Nan
Oboe
Peter
Queen
Roger
Sugar
Tare
Uncle
Victor
William
Xray
Yoke
Zebra

In the 1951 season, this worked very well in the communications and the public began to speak of hurricanes by these names. At the start of the 1952 season, the agencies began to use the same list of names, starting with Able for the first storm, but soon ran into difficulty. A new international alphabet had been introduced as follows:

Alfa
Bravo
Coca
Delta
Echo
Foxtrot
Golf
Hotel
India
Joliet
Kilo
Lima
Metro
Nectar
Oscar
Papa
Quebec
Romeo
Sierra
Tango
Union
Victor
Whiskey
Extra
Yankee
Zulu

Some of the agencies had begun using the new alphabet in their communications, while others stuck to the old one. So the third storm of the season was "Charlie" part of the time and the rest of the time some wanted to call it "Coca." At the end of the season there was no agreement as to which phonetic alphabet should be used and there was criticism for having continued an alphabet which was obsolete internationally.

After a long discussion, military members of the conference suggested adoption of girls' names, which had been used successfully for typhoons in the Pacific for several years. Just how this practice originated is not known, but it was thought by some persons to have come from the book _Storm_, by George R. Stewart, which was published in 1941. In this book a fictitious Pacific storm is traced to the United States and its effects on the people are narrated in the style of a novel. A young weatherman at San Francisco, according to the story, called the storm Maria. Also there was Wragge's use of girls' names for willy-willies in Australia and Pan American Airway's practice in connection with hurricanes as early as 1938. At any rate, with these Pacific precedents, the weathermen and hurricane hunters adopted the following list for 1953 for hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico:

Alice
Barbara
Carol
Dolly
Edna
Florence
Gilda
Hazel
Irene
Jill
Katherine
Lucy
Mabel
Norma
Orpha
Patsy
Queen
Rachel
Susie
Tina
Una
Vicky
Wallis

This list worked perfectly in 1953; the public was pleased; the communicators were happy about it; the newspapers thought it was colorful; and use of the same names began to spread in Canada and some of the countries to the southward. The same list was adopted with enthusiasm for the 1954 season.

In 1954, Alice and Barbara were minor hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, although Alice broke up in tremendous rains in the upper watershed of the Rio Grande, after moving inland over Mexico. There were floods which broke records for all time as the water moved down the river. The third storm, Carol, started a controversy in the press and many letters were written to the editors and to the Weather Bureau, some favoring the scheme or trying to get a little fun out of it, but most of them finding objections of one kind or another. It was almost impossible to change in the middle of the season, even if the hurricane hunters had wanted to, so it was continued during 1954 and each new hurricane aroused further comment. Later Hazel came along about the middle of October, a very severe hurricane from the Caribbean Sea. It turned northward between Cuba and Haiti and caused terrible damage and much loss of life. Later it struck the coast of the Carolinas and crossed the eastern states northward to New York. Loss of life in the eastern states was variously estimated from fifty to eighty, and the damage to property, especially from falling trees, was enormous. There was another flood of complaints, this time about the name Hazel.

Before the argument was ended it threatened to be almost as stormy as some of the smaller hurricanes so named. Early in 1955 the Weather Bureau had a meeting with the Air Force, Navy and others interested in deciding the question. By that time the opinions received by mail were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing girls' names. In the meantime, there had been a surprise. A storm having some of the characteristics of a hurricane was sighted in the Caribbean Sea in January and, in the absence of a decision on names to be used in 1955, it was called Alice from the 1954 list. Later, the names for others in 1955 were decided as follows:

Brenda
Connie
Diane
Edith
Flora
Gladys
Hilda
Ione
Janet
Katie
Linda
Martha
Nellie
Orva
Peggy
Queena
Rosa
Stella
Trudy
Ursa
Verna
Wilma
Xenia
Yvonne
Zelda

_17._ THE GEARS AND GUTS OF THE GIANT

"_he that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our
skill_"
--Burke

All through this book we have talked about hurricane hunters. By now it is clear that the crew on the plane that goes into the storm at the risk of destruction of the craft and death to the men is not really "hunting" a hurricane. It is the exception rather than the rule when they discover a tropical storm. The first hint comes from some distant island or a ship in the gusty wind circle where the sea and the sky reveal ominous signs of trouble. Somewhere in a busy weather office a large outline map is being covered with figures and symbols. Long, curving lines across a panorama of weather take shape as the radios vibrate and the teletypewriters rattle with the international language of weathermen--the most co-operative people in the world's family of nations.

Hurricane hunting is done on these maps. Day after day, without any fanfare, the weathermen search the reports spread across this almost boundless region where hundreds of tropical storms could be in progress if nature chose to operate in such an eerie fashion. Even the experienced observers on islands and the alert officers on shipboard might not see the real implications in the weather messages they prepare. In the enormous reaches of the belt of trade winds, where the tremendous energy of the sun's heat and the irresistible force of earth rotation dictate that the winds shall blow as steady breezes from the northeast, somebody might put in his report, for example, that there was a light wind coming from the southwest. That fact alone would be enough. In season, the weathermen would know, almost with certainty, that there was a tropical storm in the area.

There are many things to watch for, in the array of elements at the surface, in the upper air, the clouds, sea swells, change of the barometer, faint earth tremors. A hint from this scattering of messages in the vast hurricane region starts the action. And the planes go out to investigate.

This is an extraordinary procedure. Looking at it as an outgrowth of the insistent demands of citizens along the coasts in the hurricane region for warnings of these storms, as the population increased and property losses mounted, it seems that the flight of planes into these monstrous winds is justified only until a safer method can be found. All other aircraft are flown out of the threatened areas, obviously because the winds are destructive to planes on the ground. The lives of men and the safety of the plane in the air should not run a risk of being sacrificed if it can be avoided. Of course, it is argued by some men that there is a possibility that a method may be discovered to control hurricanes by the use of chemicals or some other plan requiring planes to fly into the centers. And it is true, also, that for the time being at least there is certain information that can be obtained in no other way.

At the end of World War II, there was a grave requirement for more information about hurricanes. Little was known except in theory about their causes, maintenance, or the forces which determine their rate and direction of travel. Since that time, literally thousands of flights have been made into hurricanes and typhoons. Scientists have studied the detailed records of these many penetrations.

We have learned a great deal in these years but by no means enough. Herbert Riehl, a professor of meteorology at Chicago University, has examined as large quantities of the data as any man. Recently he said, "Our knowledge regarding the wind distribution within tropical storms and the dynamical laws that guide the air from the outskirts to the center of the cyclone is so deficient as to be deplorable."

From the scientific point of view, remarks of this kind are fully justified, but progress in the issuance of warnings is quite another matter. Hurricane prediction for the present and the near future is an art and not a science. Very great progress has been made in recent years in sending out timely warnings. There are figures to show the facts. At the beginning of this century, a hurricane causing ten million dollars in property damage was likely to take several hundred lives. Twenty-five years later, the average was about 160 lives. Ten years later (1936 to 1940 average) the figure had been reduced to about twenty-five and was steadily going down. After men began flying into hurricanes, the figure was reduced to four (1946 to 1950). This is astonishing, not only in showing how the warnings were improving after hunting by air got started, but also the big gains shortly before that time, especially after the hurricane teletypewriter circuit was installed around the coast in 1935. Experience in prediction, on-the-spot operation, and fast communications are vital.

In fact, the record was so good at the beginning of World War II that most forecasters despaired of their ability to keep it up. It had consistently been below ten lives for ten million dollars' damage and one serious mistake could have raised this rate considerably for several years. For this reason, as well as many others, the forecasters were extremely grateful for the information from aircraft.

The main hope for greater savings in the future is that the solution of some of the mysteries of the hurricane will enable the forecasters to send out accurate warnings much farther in advance. In such an event, it will be possible to protect certain kinds of property and crops which are being destroyed at present. Heavy equipment can be moved and certain crops can be harvested in season, if plenty of time is available. These precautions are time-consuming and costly, and the advance warnings must be accurate in detail. And it will help to make sure that no hurricane different from its predecessors will come suddenly and catch us off guard and cause excessive loss of life. Now and then we have one which is called a "freak."

One thing we have become increasingly sure of and it will stand repetition. No two hurricanes or typhoons are alike. Scientists may find some weather element that seems to be necessary to keep the monster going, and then are frustrated to find that not all tropical storms have it. If some can do without it, maybe it is not necessary, after all. And yet all of them fit a certain direful pattern; there is nothing else that resembles these big storms of the tropics. Like the explosion of an atom bomb, with its enormous cloud recognized by everyone who sees a picture of it, the hurricane has well-known features--unlike anything else--but of such enormous extent that no one can get a bird's-eye view of the whole. Putting together what we know by radar, upper air soundings, aircraft penetrations and millions of weather observations in the low levels, we can draw a sketchy word picture. Looking down from space, we could see it as a giant octopus with a clear eye in the center of its body, arms spiraling around and into this body of violent winds around the eye--all of the monster outlined by the clouds which thrive as it feeds on heat and moisture. We feel sure of that much.

The birth of the THING has not been explained. There are plenty of times when all the ingredients are there. Nothing happens. Observation and theory flourish and swell into confusion. No scientist can say, "Everything is just right; tomorrow there will be a hurricane."

Why it moves as it does is another grim puzzle. Ordinarily, the great storm marches along with the air stream in which it is embedded, changing its path with the contours of the vast pressure areas which outline the circulation of the atmosphere, but too often it suddenly changes its mind, or whatever controls it, or shifts gears, and comes to a halt, or describes a loop or a hairpin turn. Nobody can see these queer movements ahead of time. Going out there in an airplane to look the situation over does not help in this respect. It is a vital aid in keeping track of the THING and protecting life and property, but it ends there.

Where does all the air go? When the big storm begins out there over the ocean, air starts spiraling inward and the pressure falls, showing that the total amount of air above the sea to the top of the atmosphere is lessening, even as it pours inward at the bottom. For a hundred years scientists argued that it must flow outward at the top, that at some upper level the inflow of air ceases and above that there must be a powerful reversal of the circulation. Here again we have frustration. Going up with one of the investigators, we get the facts. Strangely enough, this is one of the men who want to get into hurricanes, who come down to the coast to look, and who finally "thumb a ride" with the airmen into the big winds. A brief of his story will illustrate.

This story begins with the big Gulf hurricane of 1919. It came from the Atlantic east of the Windward Islands, moved slowly to the northward of Puerto Rico and Haiti and thence to the central Bahamas, a fairly large storm threatening the Atlantic seaboard. Then it took an unusual path, generally westward, with increasing fury. It was a powerful storm as its central winds ravaged the Florida Keys and took a westward course across the Gulf. It happened shortly after World War I and there was little shipping in the Gulf. The slow-moving hurricane, now a full-fledged tropical giant, dawdled in the Gulf and was lost; that is, lost as much as a monster of its dimensions can be, but its winds were felt all around the Gulf Coast and its waves pounded the beaches as it spent four days out there without disclosing the location or motion of its calm center.

Warnings flew all around the coast and the week dragged to an end with the people extremely tired of worrying about it and the weathermen worn out with continuous duty. Saturday night came and the center seemed to be no nearer one part of the coast than another. Late at night, an annoying thing happened. It was customary in those days for the forecaster, in sending a series of messages from Washington, to stop them at midnight and begin again early the next morning. It was the rule that no reports came in between midnight and dawn. The clerk sending the last message added "Good Night," to let the coastal offices know that there would be no more until morning.

In this case, the forecaster ended his advisory with a notice putting all Gulf offices on the alert and the clerk added "Good Night." And so the offices received a message ending with these words: "All observers will remain on the alert during the night. In case the barometer begins to fall and the wind rises, Good Night." This created a furor in coastal cities on the West Gulf and it was several weeks before the criticism subsided. By Sunday morning, however, the gusty wind had not risen much and there was no great fall in the barometer, so the weathermen had no answer at daybreak. Soon afterward, however, the weather deteriorated rapidly at Corpus Christi, and hurricane warnings went up as big Gulf waves pounded over the outlying islands into Corpus Christi Bay and the wind began screaming in the palms.

Around noon the worst of it struck the city. The tide mounted higher than in any previous storm of record, except in the terrible Galveston hurricane of 1900. Much of Corpus Christi was on a high bluff above the main business section, but the latter and the shore section to the north were low. It was after church and time to sit down to Sunday dinner when the final rise of the water began to overwhelm everything. The police, sent out by the Weather Bureau, were knocking on people's doors and telling them to get out and run for high ground. But these low sections had survived a big, fast-moving hurricane three years before, without nearly so high a tide, and most people thanked the police but determined to stay and eat. This decision was fatal in the North Beach section. The road was cut off and nearly two hundred were drowned.

Down on Chaparral Street lived a man named Clyde Simpson, with his wife and seven-year-old son Robert. The boy's uncle and grandmother were there also. They were about to sit down to a big platter of chicken, and the boy had his eye on a pile of freshly fried doughnuts. They had been out standing with other nervous people to look at the great waves roaring across the beach, but after a little the storm waters had forced them back and covered the streets. Now the water was rising fast. Several houses had come up off their foundations. A large frame residence on the opposite side of the street floated across, and, while they held their breath, missed them by a few feet, struck the house next door, and both collapsed. The elder Simpson said it was time to get out, dinner or no dinner.

The family went through the back yard, the nearest route to higher ground. The boy's mother put the dinner in a large paper sack and held it above her head as she struggled through the water. The father carried the seven-year-old on his back and brought up the rear, swimming a little as the water continued to rise. The grandmother, an invalid strapped in a wheel-chair, was pushed and floated ahead by the uncle. The boy worried as his mother got tired and let the paper sack hang lower and lower. Finally it hit the water and the chicken and doughnuts sank or floated away. That scene was etched in Robert's memory, along with the battering of the winds and the tremendous rise of the waters over the stricken city. The family survived.

Looking out of the windows of the courthouse on the edge of the bluff above the business section, the boy watched others struggling toward higher ground. Afterward the family returned to their house, smeared with oil and tar and by dirty water, floors covered with sand, mud, and debris. Robert saw death on every hand--dead dogs, birds, cats, rodents, and one neighbor who failed to get out.

In 1933, when one of the hurricanes of that year crossed the Gulf and threatened the lower Texas Coast, much like the big one in 1919, a young fellow drove all the way from Dallas to have a look at it. He was Robert Simpson. He never got it out of his mind. Finally, he joined the Weather Bureau, worked at hurricane forecasting offices and in 1945 "thumbed" his first ride into a hurricane. After that his enthusiasm and persistence annoyed some of the older weathermen and bothered members of the air crews who flew the big storms both in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Simpson made up his mind that he would use every opportunity to find out how the big storms were organized and what they were geared to in their movements, regular and irregular--the gears and guts of the THING. When Milt Sosin lurched into the center of the big storm in 1947 in a B-17 and looked up to see a B-29 high in the eye of the same hurricane, Simpson was up there with the men from Bermuda, trying to find out what steered the monster. And on this flight, with a B-29, they expected to come out on top at twenty-eight to thirty thousand feet, according to the theorists and the textbooks, but they broke out just below forty thousand, still one hundred miles from the center. From there the high cloud sheet should have sloped downward to the center, if they were to believe the accepted doctrine of circulation in the top of the hurricane. But they were shocked and chagrined to find that the high cloud sheet--the cirrostratus--sloped sharply upward in front of them, rising far above the extreme upper operational ceiling of the B-29.

And so the superfortress turned toward the center and rocketed into the high cloud deck with misgivings on the part of Pilot Eastburn and Simpson. The latter reported:

"Through this fog in which we were traveling at 250 miles an hour there loomed from time to time ghost-like structures rising like huge white marble monuments through the cirrostratus fog. Actually these were shafts of supercooled water which rose vertically and passed out of sight overhead as we viewed them from close at hand. Each time we passed through one of these shafts the leading edge of the wing accumulated an amazing extra coating of rime ice. This kind of icing would have been easy to shake off if the plane had been fitted with standard de-icing equipment. But it was not. We were so close to the center of the storm by the time the icing was discovered that the shafts were too numerous to avoid.