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Title: The Hurricane Hunters
Author: Tannehill, Ivan Ray
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Hurricane Hunters" ***
THE
_Hurricane Hunters_
BY Ivan Ray Tannehill
ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK 1956
Copyright, © 1955 by Ivan Ray Tannehill
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher
Published November, 1955
Second Printing, February, 1956
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-9480
Printed in the United States of America
by The Cornwall Press, Inc., Cornwall, N. Y.
To my daughter and son-in-law,
Doris and Bill
_Acknowledgment_
At appropriate places in the book the narrative serves as an
acknowledgment by giving the names of a large number of men who
furnished information in personal interviews, by correspondence, or in
their reports which were included in the voluminous files searched in
the last year.
In writing this book I had unstinted cooperation from the Air Weather
Service and its Commander, Brigadier General Thomas Moorman, from the
Aerological Branch of the Navy Department and its Head, Captain C. J. S.
McKillip, and from the Chief of the Weather Bureau, Dr. F. W.
Reichelderfer, and his associates in the field and the central office.
In particular, Major William C. Anderson and associates in the Office of
Information Services of the Air Weather Service and Captain Robert O.
Minter of the Fleet Weather Central at Miami and his associates there in
Airborne Early Warning Squadron Four at Jacksonville were extremely
helpful. Of the associates of these men I wish to mention especially the
assistance of Lieutenant Commander R. W. Westover and Air Force Captain
Ed Vrable, both of whom are seasoned hurricane hunters.
Others not mentioned in the book who contributed to the warning service
and indirectly to the material used here were Isaac M. Cline and Charles
L. Mitchell of the Weather Bureau. Their writings supply much of the
background for any work on tropical storms.
The Air Force, Navy and Weather Bureau kindly supplied official
photographs used here, except the wave breaking on the sea wall by the
Miami _Daily News_ and the drawings of sailing ships in hurricanes which
are credited to Colonel William Reid who published them in 1850 in his
book on the “Law of Storms.”
_The Author_
CONTENTS
1. Monsters of the World of Storms _1_
2. The Saddler’s Apprentice _19_
3. At the Bottom of the Sea _32_
4. Storm Warnings _45_
5. Radio Helps—Then Hinders _59_
6. The Eye of the Hurricane _75_
7. First Flight into the Vortex! _90_
8. The Hammer and the Highway _103_
9. Wings against the Whirling Blasts _117_
10. Kappler’s Hurricane _132_
11. Tricks of the Trade _150_
12. Trailing the Terrible Typhoon _167_
13. Guest on a Hairy Hop _185_
14. The Unexpected _202_
15. Fighting Hail and Hurricanes _224_
16. Carol, Edna, Hazel or Saxby! _237_
17. The Gears and Guts of the Giant _250_
ILLUSTRATIONS
(_Photographic supplement follows page 50_)
The English warship _Egmont_ in the “Great Hurricane” of 1780.
The _Calypso_ in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837.
A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast at
the height of a hurricane.
Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier _Bennington_ and
drapes it over the bow.
Winds of hurricane drive pine board through the tough trunk of a palm
tree in Puerto Rico, September 13, 1928.
Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with winds of 15
knots.
Sea surface with winds of 40 knots.
Sea surface with winds of 75 knots.
Sea surface with winds of 120 knots.
Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane hunting.
Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting.
Navy crew of hurricane hunters.
Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into
hurricane.
Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951.
Part of a spiral squall band, an “arm of the octopus.”
Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500
feet below.
Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane mission.
Radar operator and navigator.
Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane
mission.
City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler’s Hurricane in September,
1945.
Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission.
Part of scope showing typhoon by radar.
Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna on September 7, 1954.
Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951.
Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot and radar operator.
The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance.
The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows up.
The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for hurricane
reconnaissance.
_THE HURRICANE HUNTERS_
_1._ MONSTERS OF THE WORLD OF STORMS
_The hollow winds begin to blow,
The clouds look black, the glass is low._
—E. Darwin
A stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rain across the
Navy airfield. The place was gloomy and deserted, except for one
Privateer standing behind the air station, all other planes having been
evacuated the night before. A tall young airman came out of a building
down at the other side of the field. He looked nervously at the
blackening morning sky as another squall came by, hurried over to the
plane and stood between it and the protecting station. In a few minutes,
eight men followed him. They climbed aboard the craft. The tall airman
was last, taking a final look at the sky over his shoulder as he crawled
in. The roots of his hair felt electrified, his spine tingled and his
knees turned to rubber. In a few moments the plane took off into the
darkening sky.
In those anxious moments as he had glanced upward at the wind-torn
clouds with driving rain in his face, many thoughts passed through his
mind. In training for this job he had read about aircraft carriers
having their flight decks torn up by typhoons, about battered destroyers
sunk by hurricanes, big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper
stories of brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways through
the tough trunks of palm trees. The idea of sending a plane into one of
these monsters seemed fantastic. He could imagine the wings being torn
off and see vividly in his mind the broken craft rocketing downward into
the foam of gale-swept waters far below. He leaned over on the radio
table and muttered a prayer, hoping that God could hear him above the
tumult of winds, seas and engines. To most of the men this was “old
stuff.” Flying into hurricanes had been going on for two years. To him
it was a strange adventure.
He was the radio man and this was to be his first flight into a
hurricane. And it would be no practice ride. This was a bad storm,
getting too close to the coast to suit him. He had been told that after
nightfall its center would strike inland and there would be widespread
damage and some loss of life. He tried to remember other things they had
told him in the briefing session and some of the instructions he had
been reading for three days now. Well, such is life, he thought. His
father had been the master of an oil tanker for the last fifteen years.
He had told his growing son a lot about these big storms of the
Caribbean. What would his father say now when he learned that his son
was one of the men assigned to the job of flying into them? His thoughts
were interrupted by violent agitation of the plane and the roar of the
wind. The navigator said something about the turbulence.
He remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the
hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “Like going over Niagara
Falls in a telephone booth.” He recalled the burly fellow who pointed to
the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and
how to get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men had
told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands
until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office
and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown
on his ear. Now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain
had become torrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water was
coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It was pouring on him
from above somewhere. Rivers were running down his back.
He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied,
“Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets a good deal worse.”
Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. Maybe the pilot and
co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. He hit
his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick.
Finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose
his breakfast.
Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted. All planes but
one had been flown inland and the last one, a B-17, was poised on
Morrison Field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before
nightfall.
In Miami, one of the senior men in the Weather Bureau office was called
to the telephone. Somebody insisted on talking to him and nobody else.
It was long distance. A woman said in a frightened voice that her son
had gone out to look after a neighbor’s boat and she wanted to know
whether she should try to go out to find him and bring him in. He was
only twelve years old. “Yes, by all means,” was the answer. The
forecaster didn’t know how she was going to reach the boy or how far she
had to go, but he recalled that other men and boys had lost their lives
doing the same thing. They were having hundreds of calls and they were
unable to go into details. He paused just a moment, his mind running
regretfully over this poor woman and her problem. Then he started a
radio broadcast.
Down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down on the sidewalk,
bossing three men who were nailing frames over his plate glass windows.
He went into the store to his telephone and, after dialing for about ten
minutes, finally got the forecaster on the line. “What’s the latest on
the storm?” he asked in a strained voice. “Nothing new,” came the tired
voice of the forecaster. “A Navy plane went out half an hour ago. We’ll
have a report pretty soon now. But the hurricane’s going to hit us,
that’s sure. Be a bad night.”
Three miles south of the city, two fishermen stood looking at a pole on
the pier. Two red flags with black centers were flapping in the wind.
“Aw, nuts,” growled the big man. “Guess I’ll go home and nail up the
windows again. This is the third time this year.” The little man started
off, pulling his raincoat up around his ears as a squall came over.
“Well, we can’t complain, I guess. The other times the flags went up we
got storms, didn’t we? Looks like this will be the worst of the lot.” By
that time the big fellow was running in a dog-trot and disappearing
around a building. His father had been drowned in the big storm at Key
West in 1919.
Even on the other side of the State the people were worried, and for
good reason, for it might be over there tomorrow. The forecaster was
wanted again on the telephone. A man said in an anxious tone that he had
one thousand five hundred unfenced cattle near the shore and what should
he do? Without hesitation, the forecaster said, “Get them away from the
water and behind a fence. This storm will go south of you. There will be
strong offshore gales and the cattle will walk with the wind and go
right out into the water and drown if there is no fence.”
Out in the Atlantic, a merchant ship was wallowing in heavy seas, with
one hundred miles an hour winds raking her decks. The third mate
struggled through the wind and sea and into the radio room. He handed a
wet weather message to the radio operator. A hundred miles away, in the
Bahamas, an old Negro was reading his weather instruments and looking at
the sky. He was pushed around by furious winds but they had died down a
little since early morning. The roof was off his house. Trees were
uprooted all around him. He went into a small, low-slung radio hut and
attempted to send a weather message to Nassau. He was badly crowded in
the hut. His wife, daughter and two grandchildren were huddled in the
corners. His son-in-law had been killed in the night by a big tree that
fell on the porch. His daughter and her two children were sobbing. He
raised the Nassau radio station and sent a message for the forecast
office in Miami.
All up and down the Florida coast, many thousands had heard the radio
warnings or had seen the flags flying and wanted to know more. The
highways here and there were filling with people, leaving threatened
places on the coast. By night the roads would be jammed. Out on the
Privateer, the tall young radioman, sopping wet, raised himself in his
chair, and took a soggy message from the weather officer. After the
plane settled a little, he put on his head phones and listened to the
loud, almost deafening static. He still felt a bit sick. But he began to
pound out the weather message, with the hope that somebody would get it
and pass it on to the forecaster.
In these and other ways, it has come about that a pair of red flags with
black centers strikes fear into the hearts of seafaring men and
terrifies people in towns and cities in the line of advance of the big
winds. The warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming
gales, relatives and friends lost in other great storms that have roared
out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollers break on the
beaches with a booming sound. In the distance, a long, low, angry cloud
appears on the horizon. If the cloud grows and puts out scud and
squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the
big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. If the
distant cloud is seen to move along the horizon, the tumult of wind and
sea on the beaches will subside. The local indications in the sky and
the water tell a vital story to the initiated but the warning they give
does not come soon enough. It is necessary to know what is going to
happen while the hurricane is well out at sea. This depends on the
hurricane hunters, and so the messages they send ashore while fighting
their way by air into the vortices of these terrible whirlwinds are
awaited anxiously by countless people.
Tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job, often a dangerous
one. But it is not a one-man job; it requires the co-operation of many
people. A tropical storm of hurricane force covers such a vast area that
all of it cannot be seen by one person. Its products—gales with clouds
and rain—and its effects—destruction of life and property and big waves
on the sea—are visible to people in different parts of the disturbance.
But before we know much about it, the little that is seen by each of
many people on islands and ships at sea must be put together, like clues
in a murder case. The weather observers who get the clues and the
experts who put them together are the hurricane hunters.
For at least five hundred years it has been known that these terrible
disturbances are born in the heated parts of the oceans. Down near the
equator, where hot, moist winds are the rule, something causes vast
storms to form and grow in violence, bringing turmoil to the ordinary
daily round of gentle breezes and showers. They have come to bear the
general name of tropical storms, though known locally as hurricanes,
typhoons, or cyclones.
Most of them occur in the late summer or early fall. At that season, on
the islands in the tropics where the natives in other centuries took
life easy, depending on nature’s lavish gifts of fruit and other foods,
the tropical storm came as an occasional catastrophe. Trees went down in
howling gales, rain came in torrents, flooding the hilly sections, big
waves deluged the coasts, and frail native houses were swept away in an
uproar of the elements. The survivors thought they had done something to
displease one of the mythical beings who ruled the winds and the waters.
In the Caribbean region, it was supposed to be the god of the big winds,
Hunrakan, from which the name hurricane originated. His evil face seemed
to leer from the darkening clouds as the elements raged.
In time, Europeans settled in the islands and on the southeastern coasts
of America. They dreaded the approach of late summer, when
copper-colored clouds of a tropical storm might push slowly upward from
the southeastern horizon. What they learned about them came mostly from
the natives, who had long memories for such frightening things and
reckoned the time of other events from the years of great hurricanes.
Strangely enough, although during the more than four hundred years that
have passed since then, man has finally mastered thermo-nuclear
reactions capable of permanent destruction of whole islands, he still
probes for the secret of storm forces of far greater power.
It is hard to say who was the first hunter of storms. Columbus and his
sailors were constantly on the lookout and actually saw several West
Indian hurricanes. Luckily, they didn’t run into one on their first
voyage, or the story of the discovery of America would be quite
different, for the ships sailed by Columbus were not able to stand up
against these big winds of the tropics. They would have been sunk in
deep water or cast ashore as worthless wrecks.
If Columbus had been lost in one of these monstrous storms—and he didn’t
miss it by very much—it might have been many years before another
navigator with a stout heart could have induced men to risk their lives
in the uncharted winds of the far places in the Atlantic Ocean. Out
there toward the end of the world, where increasing gales dragged ships
relentlessly in the direction of the setting sun, sailors who ventured
too far would drop off the edge of a flat earth and plunge screaming
into eternity—so they thought. Only in Columbus’ mind was the earth a
sphere.
By the time Columbus had made his third voyage to the West Indies, he
had learned a good deal about hurricanes and how to keep out of them. He
got this information by his own wits and from talking with the natives
in the islands bordering the Caribbean. They told him of storms much
more powerful than any that were brewed in European waters. After
listening to their tales, he was afraid of them. In 1494 he hid his
fleet behind an island while a hurricane roared by. The next year, an
unexpected one sank three of his vessels and the others took such a
beating that he declared, “Nothing but the service of God and the
extension of the monarchy would induce me to expose myself to such
dangers.”
In 1499, a Spaniard named Francisco Bobadilla was appointed governor and
judge of the Colony on Hispaniola (Santo Domingo). He sent false charges
back to Spain, accusing Columbus of being unjust and often brutal in his
treatment of the natives. Columbus was ordered back to Spain in chains.
Here he remained in disgrace until December, 1500. By that time the true
nature of Bobadilla’s treachery had become known.
By the spring of 1502, Columbus had been vindicated and was on his way
back to the West Indies with four ships and 150 men. During his earlier
voyages he had become deeply respectful of these big winds of the New
World. When he arrived at San Domingo on this last voyage, his
observations made him suspect the approach of a hurricane. At the same
time, a fleet carrying rich cargoes was instructed to take Bobadilla
back to Spain. It was ready to depart. Columbus asked for permission to
shelter his squadron in the river and he sent a message, urging the
fleet to put off its departure until the storm had passed.
Bluntly, both of Columbus’ requests were denied. He found a safe place
in the lee of the island but the fleet carrying Bobadilla departed in
the face of the hurricane and all but one vessel went to the bottom.
Bobadilla went down with them, which seemed to be a fitting end for the
scoundrel who had been guilty of hatching up false charges against
Columbus.
After the time of Columbus, better ships were built and the fear of
storms diminished. Seafaring men today are likely to get the idea that
modern ships of war and trade are immune to hurricanes. They have a
brush or two with minor storms or escape the worst of a larger one and
cease to be afraid of the big winds of the West Indies. Now and then
this attitude leads to disaster.
In September, 1944, the Weather Bureau spotted a violent storm in the
Atlantic, northeast of Puerto Rico. It grew in fury and moved toward the
Atlantic Coast of the United States. The forecasters called it the
“Great Atlantic Hurricane.” Being usually conservative, Weather Bureau
forecasters seldom use the word “great” when warning of hurricanes and
when they do, it is time for everybody to be on guard. In this case, the
casualties at sea included one destroyer, two Coast Guard cutters, a
light vessel and a mine sweeper. This should have been sufficient
evidence of the power of the tropical storm to destroy modern warships,
but just three months later a big typhoon caught the Navy off guard in
the Pacific and proved the case beyond the slightest doubt.
Typhoons are big tropical storms, just like West Indian hurricanes. They
form in the vast tropical waters of the Pacific, develop tremendous
power, and head for the Philippines and China, sometimes going straight
forward and sometimes turning toward Japan before they reach the coast.
Like hurricanes, they are often preceded by beautiful weather, allaying
the suspicions of the inexperienced until it is too late to escape from
the indraft of the winds and the mountainous seas that precede their
centers.
It was hard to keep track of typhoons in World War II. In large areas of
the Pacific there are few islands to serve as observation posts for
weathermen. Before the war, merchantmen on voyages through this region
had reported by radio when they saw signs of typhoons. But many of the
weather-reporting vessels had been sent to the bottom by enemy torpedoes
and the remainder had been ordered to silence their radios. Thereafter,
the only effective means of finding and tracking tropical storms was by
aircraft, but reconnaissance by air had just begun in the Atlantic and
was not organized in the Pacific until 1945.
Late in 1944, our Third Fleet, said to be the most powerful sea force
ever assembled, had drawn back from the battle of Leyte to refuel. The
Japanese Navy had received a fatal blow from the big fleet. Nothing more
terrible was reserved for the Japanese except the atom bomb. Far out in
the Pacific, a typhoon was brewing while valiant oil tankers waited five
hundred miles east of Luzon for the refueling operation so vitally
needed by our warships after days of ranging the seas against the Japs.
It was December 17 when the refueling began. By that time, the winds and
seas in the front of the typhoon were being felt in force. Battleships,
cruisers, destroyers and a host of other vessels rode big waves as the
wind increased. The typhoon drew nearer and the smaller ships were
bounced around so violently that it became impossible to maintain hose
connections to the oilers. Before nightfall, the refueling had stopped
completely and the fleet was trying to run away from the typhoon.
It was almost a panic, if we can use the word to describe the desperate
movements of a great battle fleet. Messages flew back and forth,
changing the ships’ courses as the wind changed. They ran toward the
northwest, then toward the southwest, and finally due south, in a last
effort to escape the central fury of the great typhoon. But all this did
no good.
The lighter vessels, escort carriers, destroyers, and such, top-heavy
with armament and equipment and with little oil for ballast, began the
struggle for life. Each hour it seemed that the height of the storm had
come, but it grew steadily worse. Writhing slopes of vast waves dipped
into canyon-like depths. The crests were like mountains. The wind came
in awful gusts, estimated at more than 150 miles an hour. The tops of
the waves were torn off and hurled with the force of stone. Ships were
buried under hundreds of tons of water and emerged again, shuddering and
rolling wildly.
On the eighteenth of December, one after another of the ships of the
Third Fleet lost control and wallowed in the typhoon. Time and again
thousands of men faced death and escaped by something that seemed a
miracle. There was no longer any visible separation between the sea and
the atmosphere. Only by the force with which the elements struck could
the men aboard distinguish between wind-driven spume and hurtling water.
Steering control was lost; electric power and lights failed; lifeboats
were torn loose; stacks were ripped off; planes were hurled overboard;
three destroyers rolled too far over and went to the bottom of the
Pacific.
Altogether, nearly 150 planes were destroyed on deck or blown into the
sea and lost. Cruisers and carriers suffered badly. Battleships lost
planes and gear. The surviving destroyers had been battered into
helplessness. Almost eight hundred men were dead or missing. As the
typhoon subsided, the crippled Third Fleet canceled its plans to strike
against the enemy on Luzon and retreated to the nearest atoll harbor to
survey its losses. More men had died and more damage had been done than
in many engagements with the Japanese Navy.
A Navy Court of Inquiry was summoned. It was said that this typhoon of
1944 was the granddaddy of all tropical storms. But a study of the
records shows that it was just a full-grown typhoon. There have been
thousands of hurricanes and typhoons like this one. Down through the
centuries, these terrible storms have swept in broad arcs across
tropical waters, reaching out with great wind tentacles to grasp
thousands of ships and send them to the bottom. Pounding across populous
coasts, with mountainous seas flooding the land, they have drowned
hundreds of thousands of people, certainly more than a million in the
last three centuries, and untold thousands before that.
After the typhoon disaster, the Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet
declared that his officers would have to learn forthwith about the law
of storms. Really there was nothing new in that idea. It had been voiced
by navigators of all maritime countries of the world from the earliest
times. The so-called “law of storms” is merely the total existing
knowledge about storms at sea—how to recognize the signs of their coming
and how to avoid their destructive forces—and it has taken four and a
half centuries to develop our present understanding of hurricanes.
This experience of the Third Fleet made it plain that a sailing vessel
had very little chance of survival in the central regions of a fully
developed tropical storm. The only hope was that the master would see
the signs of its coming and manage to keep out of it. Once he became
involved, the force of the wind was likely to be so great that his
vessel soon would be reduced to an unmanageable hulk. The gales seemed
to have unlimited power. Even today, we don’t know accurately the speed
of the strongest winds. It seems likely that the highest velocities are
between two hundred and two hundred and fifty miles per hour.
Wind-measuring instruments are disabled or carried away and the towers
or buildings which support them are blown down.
Long after the time of Columbus, it was generally believed that a storm
was a large mass of air moving straight ahead at high velocities. A ship
might be caught in these terrible winds and be carried along with them,
to be dashed on shore or torn apart and sent to the bottom. Every
mariner wanted to know how to avoid these dangers but, strangely enough,
few wanted to avoid them altogether. If a sailing vessel circled around
a storm, it took longer to get to the port of destination and how could
the master explain the time lost to his bosses when he got home, if he
had no record of a storm in the log book to account for the delay?
From this point of view, some of the things that happened seemed very
strange. Two or three hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a
sailing ship to be caught in a hurricane and scud for hours or days
under bare poles in high winds and seas, and finally come to rest near
the place where it first encountered the storm. A sailor on board would
imagine he had traveled hundreds of miles and yet he might survive the
wreck of his ship and find himself tossed ashore near the place where he
started!
Up until about 1700 A.D., nobody could offer a reasonable explanation of
these curious happenings and most people believed they never would be
accounted for. For example, it was often claimed that “the storm came
back.” After blowing in one direction with awful force until great
damage had been done, it would suddenly turn around and blow in the
opposite direction, perhaps harder than before, wrecking everything that
had not been destroyed in the first blow. To add to the mystery, many
ships were never heard from again. They became involved in hurricanes
and disappeared, leaving no trace of any kind.
Men might try to explain what had happened to the ships which were
tossed on shore near the places where they had started from, but there
was a general feeling that these cases were the exceptions to the law of
storms and that the true understanding of these fearful winds would come
only with the discovery of what happened to the great numbers of ships
and men that were never seen again. And yet it is amazing to find how
near some of these men came to the right answer. There were seafaring
men in the seventeenth century who knew or suspected the truth but none
of them had both the knowledge and the ability to put it in writing in a
convincing manner. They were the buccaneers whose operations were
centered in the Caribbean Sea, mostly from about 1630 to 1690. They were
English, Dutch, Portuguese and French, all at one time or another
opposed to Spanish control in the Carribbean. On various occasions they
seized one or another of the smaller islands and used it as a base from
which to prey on Spanish shipping and settlements.
During these years, the islands were devastated by at least thirty
hurricanes of sufficient power to earn a place in history. Doubtless,
there were many more not recorded. A great number of vessels went down
in the seas and harbors around St. Kitts, Martinique and Jamaica, where
the buccaneers sought haven from the Spaniards.
One of the most intelligent but least successful as a buccaneer was
William Dampier. He was born in England in 1652, became an orphan at an
early age and was put in the hands of the master of a ship in which he
made a voyage to Newfoundland. Afterward, he sailed to the East Indies
and then fought in the Dutch War in 1673. The next year he went to
Jamaica and became a buccaneer. Soon he was familiar with the harbors,
bays, inlets and other features of the Carribbean coasts and islands. At
times, he and other buccaneers ranged as far as the South American
coast, plundering, sacking and burning as they went. Eventually, they
raided the Mexican and Californian coasts and crossed the Pacific to
Guam, and then to the East Indies.
At intervals, Dampier wrote the accounts of his voyages which ultimately
took him over most of the world. But he died poor, just three years
before he was due to share in nearly a million dollars’ worth of prize
money.
Being a genius at the observation of natural phenomena and having the
ability to put this in writing, Dampier distinguished himself from the
other buccaneers by earning a place in history as a writer of scientific
facts in a clear and easy style. In his writings, we find our earliest
good first-hand descriptions of tropical storms that are really good.
Among other things, he said of a typhoon in the China Sea that “typhoons
are a sort of violent whirlwinds.” He said they were preceded by fine,
clear and serene weather, with light winds.
“Before these whirlwinds come on,” wrote Dampier, “there appears a heavy
cloud to the northeast which is very black near the horizon, but toward
the upper part is a dull reddish color.” To him, this cloud was
frightful and alarming. He went on to say that it was sometimes seen
twelve hours before the whirlwind struck. The tempest came with great
violence but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm
succeeded. This lasted an hour, more or less, then the gales were turned
around, blowing with great fury from the southwest.
These stories by Dampier and others might have cleared up some of the
mysteries of these furious storms, especially those that “turned around
and came back.” They might have explained the fact that sailors were
carried long distances and then cast ashore near the places from which
they started—for they were huge whirlwinds, as Dampier suspected—but
nobody seemed to be able to put “two and two together” and prove it. For
one thing, no one knew then that weather moves from place to place.
Everybody seemed to have a vague belief that the weather developed right
at home and blew itself out without going anywhere. With these ideas in
vogue, the eighteenth century came to an end and there was no useful law
of storms. But we can put William Dampier down as one of the first
“hurricane hunters.”
As cities and towns on southern coasts and islands grew in population,
storm catastrophes became more numerous. Now and then, a hurricane
seemed to appear from nowhere and caused terrible destruction on land.
New Orleans was devastated in 1722 and again in 1723. Charleston and
other coastal cities were hit repeatedly. Coringa, on the Bay of Bengal,
was practically wiped out by a furious storm in December, 1789, and
there was another disaster at the same place in 1839.
Tropical storms that form in the Bay of Bengal and strike the populous
coasts of India are known as cyclones. They are the same kind of storms
as West Indian hurricanes and the typhoons of the Pacific. The worst
feature is the overwhelming flood of seawater that comes in big waves
into the harbors as the center of the storm arrives. If there is
insufficient warning, thousands of the inhabitants are drowned.
Coringa is a coastal city of India which had a population of about
20,000 in 1789. In December, there was a strong wind, “seeming like a
cyclone.” The tide rose to an unusual height and the wind increased to
great fury from the northwest. The unfortunate inhabitants saw three
huge waves coming in from the sea while the wind was blowing with its
greatest violence. The first wave brought several feet of water into the
city. All the able-bodied ran for higher ground or climbed to the
rooftops to keep from drowning. The second wave flooded all the low
parts of the city and the third overwhelmed everything and carried the
buildings away. All the inhabitants, except about twenty, disappeared.
In cases of this kind, a warning less than an hour in advance would have
saved the lives of thousands, but disasters like this were repeated here
and in other parts of the world dozens of times before the hunters,
trackers and forecasters of hurricanes learned to cheat these terrible
storms of their toll of death and injury. Progress was slow in the
nineteenth century, which saw some of the world’s worst storm disasters.
In 1881, three hundred thousand people died in one typhoon on the coast
of China.
We now come to the stories of the men who tried to do something about
it—the storm hunters. At first, early in the nineteenth century, the
hunters were men engaged in some other work for a living. They put in
their spare time gathering information, getting reports from sailors who
had survived these terrible storms at sea and from landsmen who had seen
them come roaring across harbors and beaches, to lay waste to the
countryside. We go with some of them through these awful experiences.
Then, after the middle of the century, first under Emperor Napoleon III
of France and later under President Grant in America and Queen Victoria
in England, storm hunting became a government job and spread slowly
around the world.
Here we see a bitter uphill battle. The hurricane proved to be an
enormous whirlwind, hidden behind dense curtains of low-flying clouds,
tremendous rains, and the thick spray of mountainous seas torn by
earth-shaking forces of the monster. Its mysteries were challenging. Out
of this work a warning system grew, and slowly the losses of life were
reduced from thousands to hundreds, and then to dozens. We go with the
storm hunters into Congress and the White House, to argue about it. Then
we come to World War II and the desperate need for information while
submarines attack shipping and hurricanes threaten airfields and naval
bases.
And here we find stories of big four-engined bombers flying into the
centers of these furious storms. In these stories we go along. We see
what the weather crews saw and learn what they learned. And we see how
the hurricane warning service works today—far better than a few years
ago—but with a part of the great mystery still unsolved. So we go with
the hunters in shaking, plunging planes, from the surface of the sea to
the tops of the biggest hurricanes, looking for the final answers to
this great puzzle of the centuries.
_2._ THE SADDLER’S APPRENTICE
“_All violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds._”
—Redfield
In recent years, when men were first assigned to the alarming duty of
flying into hurricanes and they began to study the old records, one
question bothered them very much. Why did it take so long to prove
without doubt that these big tropical storms are whirlwinds? The main
reason, of course, is the huge size of the wind circulation. The winds
spiral in such a broad arc around the storm center that there is no
noticeable change in the wind direction within a distance of many miles.
It was like the curvature of the earth. Any circle around the full body
of the earth is so enormous that it seems to be a straight line, and men
were deceived for centuries into believing that the earth is flat.
The crews of fast modern aircraft can fly through the main part of a
hurricane in two or three hours, at most, and they can immediately see
changes of the wind as they go along. They have no reason to question
it. In earlier times, there was no means of travel fast enough to get
the facts in this way. Then, too, there was no means of sending messages
fast enough to show what the wind was doing at the same instant in
different parts of the storm. Also, the entire wind system was in motion
and if the various reports were not sent at the same time, the results,
when they were charted, failed to make sense. This fact alone was the
cause of much confusion, even as late as the first part of the
nineteenth century.
A definite answer to the whirlwind question came suddenly and
unexpectedly in a most peculiar manner.
In the autumn of 1821, a young saddler was walking through the woods of
central Connecticut with his inquiring mind on scientific matters of the
day when he discovered a strange fact that led to the first “law of
storms” and eventually made him the most illustrious of the hurricane
hunters. His name was William Redfield. His ideas were first published
in 1831 and, together with the work of a few men who followed on his
trail, were the mainstay of sailors in stormy weather for nearly a
hundred years.
Hurricanes were not only extremely dangerous to the sailing ships of
that day but were becoming more destructive to the growing cities along
the American coast. In the first quarter of the century, the population
of the country doubled. In 1800, there were five million people. In
spite of the War of 1812, which lasted for three years, and the
temporary drop it caused in immigration, the population increased
rapidly, mostly on and near the Atlantic Coast. The United States began
to take a place in the forefront of the world’s commerce. But now and
then a great storm from the tropics swept the entire seaboard and took a
grievous toll of ships and men and harbor facilities.
Up to that time, no one had learned enough about storms to give warnings
in advance. There were no really useful rules to guide seamen around or
out of a tropical storm. Weather prediction was not accepted as
scientific work. Storm disasters were called “acts of God” and the ways
of the atmosphere were thought to be beyond human understanding.
Occasionally, a mariner with an inquiring mind like Dampier came to the
conclusion that tropical storms are huge whirlwinds which move from
place to place. But none of these inquirers came up with any real proof.
After 1800, the destruction from hurricanes grew steadily worse. The
summer of 1815 was remarkable for furious storms all along the Atlantic
Coast. Newspapers were filled with the details of storm disasters and
the destruction of life and property on shore and at sea. The crowning
catastrophe was caused by a furious West Indian hurricane which struck
New England on September 23 of that year. In the violence of its winds
and the height of its tides, this storm was about equal to the New
England hurricane of 1938. Although the country was far less populous in
1815, and the buildings, ships, and wharves subjected to its fury were
much less numerous than in 1938, the destruction was so great and the
loss of life so heavy that the newspapers did not have space enough to
give all the details of the marine disasters in this instance.
At Providence, there was terrible destruction. The tide rose more than
seven feet above the highest stage previously recorded. Five hundred
buildings were destroyed; the loss of life was never fully determined,
but it was excessive. The same sort of tragic story came from New
Bedford and other towns on the coast. Many buildings and a tremendous
number of trees were blown down in the interior.
The most treacherous feature of these big storms was their resemblance
in the initial stages to the ordinary “northeasters” which came at about
the same time of year—late August or September—and blew fitfully for a
day or two. They brought rain and high tides along the coast and finally
died out without much damage. Tropical storms, like the big one in 1815,
begin much the same way in New England, but suddenly become violent.
Then, as now, they blew gustily from the northeast in the beginning but
went around the compass and ended with shattering on-shore gales which
drove engulfing floods into the harbors. Everybody was caught off guard.
This storm and another which came six years later in the same region set
men to thinking seriously about ways to avoid these disasters. The
violent hurricane of 1821 crossed Long Island and New England, leaving a
path of destruction which lay somewhat to the westward of the hurricane
path of 1815. Again enormous numbers of trees were blown down, this time
mostly in Connecticut. And here is where we come to the story of the
saddler’s apprentice.
In September, 1802, a sailor named Peleg Redfield, of Middletown,
Connecticut, died, leaving a widow and six children in very poor
circumstances. The eldest child, William, thirteen years of age, had
attended common school and learned about reading, writing and
arithmetic, but when his father died, he had to be taken out of school.
The next year William was apprenticed to a local saddle and harness
maker. Boys as well as men worked long hours in those days, and William
Redfield was no exception. After he had finished the day’s work and had
done the chores around the Redfield home, he had only a small part of
his evening to himself. Even then, he had a lot of discouragement—no
books and no light to read by. The family could not afford candles.
Nevertheless, William was so interested in science that he studied by
the light of the wood fire, reading intently anything on scientific
subjects that he could get his hands on.
A year later, William’s mother married a widower with nine children of
his own, and in 1806 the couple moved to Ohio, taking his nine children
and five of hers, but leaving William behind to look out for himself. He
continued his study of science, but with no indication that he would
eventually find some of the answers so vitally needed in the fight
against hurricanes. His father, being a sailor, had told him about
storms at sea and the boy was unable to get this out of his mind.
Fortunately, there was a well-educated physician in the village of
Middletown, William Tully, who had a good library and made it available
to young Redfield. The first book the physician handed to William was a
very difficult volume on physics. The boy brought it back so soon the
doctor thought he had been unable to understand it, but he was
pleasantly surprised, for the lad had read it very thoroughly and had
come back for more technical works of the time. Soon William gained such
an understanding of scientific matters that an intimate friendship with
the physician developed. During this time, however, young Redfield felt
an increasing urge to visit his mother. But she lived more than seven
hundred miles from Middletown and he had very little money. So in 1810
he walked all the way to Ohio.
At that time, Ohio had a very small population; it was less than 50,000
at the beginning of the century. The territory intervening between Ohio
and Connecticut was pretty wild, with settlements only here and there.
William followed primitive roads and trails and at last reached the
shores of Lake Erie, where Cleveland and other cities stand today. The
next year he walked back to Connecticut.
Redfield was now past twenty-one. He had thought deeply of many things
while he trudged those lonely trails. He had a vision of a great railway
extending from Connecticut to the Mississippi River. Also, his mind kept
running back over the stories of storms his father had told him. From
his thoughts on this lonely journey he devised and later executed a plan
for a line of barges which operated between New York and Albany.
But when he arrived in Middletown, he had no course for the time being
except to go into business in his trade of saddler and harness maker. To
supplement his poor income, he peddled merchandise in the region around
Middletown, trudging through the woods and stopping in the villages here
and there. The years went by and he kept on studying science in his
spare moments.
And then, on the third of September, 1821, the center of that vicious
hurricane which crossed the eastern part of Connecticut brought its dire
evidence to the very door of the man who was still trying to master the
sciences in his spare moments. As Redfield trudged the countryside with
his wares, he passed among hundreds of big trees felled by the furious
winds. Near Middletown, he found that the trees lay with their branches
toward the northwest and he remembered that the gale there had begun
from the southeast. Less than seventy miles away, he found the trees
lying with their heads toward the southeast and here the winds evidently
had begun from the northwest.
Making inquiries as he went along, Redfield learned the directions from
which the winds had blown at various times during the storm. It became
quite clear that the hurricane had been a huge whirlwind which had
traveled across the country from south to north. He gathered a lot of
evidence to prove it.
But Redfield was now past thirty years of age. Because he had not gone
very far in school, he did not see how he could undertake to demonstrate
these facts about hurricanes to men of scientific learning. He kept
turning the idea over in his mind at intervals as the months and years
went by. In the meantime, he had become interested in navigation on the
Hudson River and had made a reputation as a marine engineer. By 1826, he
was superintendent of a line of forty or fifty barges and canal boats.
But whenever he read of a bad storm on the coast, he thought about the
hurricane of 1821 and the trees thrown down in different directions by
the opposing winds of a great whirling storm.
In 1831, Professor Denison Olmstead of Yale College was traveling by
boat from New York to New Haven. A stranger approached him and began
talking about some papers the professor had published in the _American
Journal of Science_. The stranger said his name was William C. Redfield.
(Actually he had no middle name but used the C for “Convenience,” to
keep from being confused with two other William Redfields in the area.)
In the course of the conversation, Redfield talked reservedly about his
ideas regarding West Indian hurricanes. The professor was amazed and
urged him to publish his ideas in the _American Journal of Science_.
Redfield, who was now forty-two years old, began writing on the law of
storms. He wrote well and his ideas were clear and convincingly
expressed. A long series of articles followed his first one in the
_American Journal of Science_. During these years he became a famous
“hurricane hunter.” He collected reports of West Indian hurricanes—as
many as he could get from ships caught in storms and from other
sources—and studied them at great length. He inspected the log books of
vessels in port, interviewed many shipmasters, and corresponded with
others. His urgent purpose was to devise a law of storms and a set of
rules to promote the safety of human life and property afloat on the
oceans and to afford some measure of protection for the inhabitants of
cities and towns on the coasts subjected to destructive visits from
these monsters of the tropics.
After the death of Redfield, in 1857, Professor Olmstead summarized his
theory of storms as follows:
“That all violent gales or hurricanes are great whirlwinds, in which the
wind blows in circuits around an axis; that the winds do not move in
horizontal circles but rather in spirals.
“That the direction of revolution is always uniform being from right to
left, or against the sun, on the north side of the equator, and from
left to right, or with the sun, on the south side of the equator.
“That the velocity of rotation increases from the margin toward the
center of the storm. That the whole body of air is, at the same time,
moving forward in a path, at a variable rate, but always with a velocity
much less than its velocity of rotation.
“That in storms of a particular region, as the gales of the Atlantic or
the typhoons of the China Sea, great uniformity exists with regard to
the path pursued by these storms. Those of the Atlantic, for example,
usually come from the equatorial regions east of the West India islands,
moving at first toward the northwest as far as the latitude of 30°, and
then gradually wheeling toward the northeast and following a path nearly
parallel to the American Coast until they are lost in mid-ocean. That
their dimensions are sometimes very great, as much as 1,000 miles in
diameter, while their paths over the ocean can sometimes be traced for
3,000 miles.”
These conclusions were in the main correct, but time has proved that
there are many exceptions. At any rate, Redfield’s papers became
classics. He had demonstrated by collections of observations on
shipboard that a tropical storm is an organized rotary wind system and
not just a mass of air moving straightaway at high velocities.
It happened that in 1831, the same year in which Redfield’s first paper
appeared in the _American Journal of Science_, there was a terrible
hurricane on the island of Barbados. Devastation was so great that the
people on the island firmly believed the storm had been accompanied by
an earthquake. More than 1,500 lives were lost. Property damage,
considering values in that early day, was tremendous for a small
island—estimated at more than seven million dollars.
Barbados had suffered so much that England sent Colonel (afterward
Brigadier-General) William Reid of the Royal Engineers to superintend
the reconstruction of the government buildings. He was appalled by what
he saw.
Reid examined the ruins and made inquiries of many people about the
nature of the hurricane of 1831. He came to the conclusion that there
had not been an earthquake, but all the damage had been caused by the
wind and sea. One of the residents told Reid that when daybreak came,
amidst the roar of the storm and the noise of falling roofs and walls,
he had looked out over the harbor and saw a heaving body of lumber,
shingles, staves, barrels, wreckage of all description, and vessels
capsized or thrown on their beam ends in shallow water. The whole face
of the country was laid waste. No sign of vegetation was seen except
here and there patches of a sickly green. Trees were stripped of their
boughs and foliage. The very surface of the ground looked as if fire had
run through the land.
Reid resolved to study hurricanes and see what he could do to reduce the
consequent loss of life. He wanted to tell sailors how to keep out of
these terrible storms and he thought it might be possible to design
buildings capable of withstanding the winds. Soon afterward, he saw
Redfield’s articles in the _American Journal of Science_. He wrote to
the author and they began a friendly correspondence which continued
until the latter’s death.
Neither Redfield nor Reid was actually the first to declare that the
hurricane is a great whirlwind. Many others had suggested this before
them, and in 1828 a German named H. W. Dove had confirmed it, but none
of these had hunted up the data and talked and corresponded with
hundreds of seamen to collect facts to prove their contentions. And none
had presented the facts in a way that would serve as a law of storms for
seamen.
Following the lead of General Reid, an Englishman named Henry
Piddington, on duty at Calcutta in India, became a great hurricane
hunter in the middle of the nineteenth century. He collected information
from every source, talked to seamen of all ranks from admiral down, and
added a great deal to the law of storms. Because of the movement of
violent winds around and in toward the hurricane center, he gave it the
name _cyclone_, which means “coil of a snake.” This is the reason why
tropical storms are now called cyclones in the Bay of Bengal.
Piddington, who became President of the Marine Courts of Inquiry at
Calcutta, published numerous memoirs on the law of storms. Of all the
accounts that he collected of experiences of seamen in tropical storms,
the outstanding case, in his estimation, was that of the Brig _Charles
Heddles_, in a hurricane near Mauritius, a small island in the Indian
Ocean, east of Africa. Mauritius is south of the equator, where
hurricane winds blow around the center in a clockwise direction, the
opposite of the whirling motion of storms in the northern hemisphere.
The _Charles Heddles_ was originally in the slave trade but at the time
that she was caught in the hurricane was mostly being employed in the
cattle trade between Mauritius and Madagascar. Only the fastest vessels
were engaged in the cattle trade, and the _Charles Heddles_ was an
exceptionally good ship. Her master was a man named Finck, an able and
highly respected seaman.
On Friday, February 21, 1845, the _Charles Heddles_ left Mauritius and
in the early morning of the twenty-second ran into heavy weather, with
wind and sea gradually increasing. It became squally and the vessel was
laboring greatly by midnight. On the twenty-third it was worse, with a
frightful sea and the wind very high, accompanied by incessant rain. The
seas swept over the decks and the crew was frequently at the pumps.
By this time Captain Finck had determined to keep the brig scudding
before the wind and run his chance of what might happen. The steady
change of the wind around the compass as the day wore on made it
impossible for him to estimate his position, but he was sure he had
plenty of sea room. The crew was unable to clue up the topsail without
risk of severe damage, so round and round they went.
Wind force and weather were always about the same. There was a
terrifying sea, the vessel constantly shipping water, which poured down
the hatchways and cabin scuttle. The fore topsail blew away at 4 P.M.
and they continued scudding under bare poles, the ship’s course changing
steadily around the compass. By the twenty-fifth of February, the vessel
was taking water through every seam, the crew was constantly at the
pumps or baling water out of the cabins with buckets. All the provisions
were wet. The seas broke clear over the ship.
On the twenty-sixth, the hurricane winds continued without the least
intermission. The ship was continually suffering damages, which had to
be repaired as quickly as possible by the exhausted crew. The seas were
monstrous, water going through the decks as though they were made of
paper. Still the ship was scudding and steadily changing course around
the compass. By the twenty-seventh, the weather had improved but the
ship persisted in going round and round, veering and scudding before the
wind. After all this travel, Captain Finck succeeded in taking an
observation and found, to his surprise, that he was not far from port in
Mauritius, from which he had set sail before the storm, almost a week
earlier, and on the twenty-eighth he made for port there.
From the log kept by Captain Finck and the observations made on other
ships caught in the same hurricane, Piddington laid down the track of
the storm and the course of the _Charles Heddles_. Now it was clear that
the ship had been carried round and round the storm center, at the same
time going forward as the storm progressed. Its course at sea looked
like a watch spring drawn out—a series of loops extending in an arc from
the north to the west of Mauritius. Here was vivid and undeniable proof,
from the experience of one ship, that hurricanes over the ocean are
progressive whirlwinds, like the storm which Redfield had charted from
trees blown down in Connecticut in 1821.
Another fact was quite clear to Piddington and he published it with the
hope that all seafaring men would profit by it. He could see now why a
ship could be carried hour after hour and day by day before the wind,
apparently to great distances, and then be cast ashore near the very
place where the ship took to sea.
Inspired by this report of the _Charles Heddles_ in the hurricane,
Piddington suggested, for the first time in history (1845), that ships
be sent out to study hurricanes. He wrote:
“Every man and every set of men who are pursuing the investigation of
any great question, are apt to overrate its importance; and perhaps I
shall only excite a smile when I say, that the _day will yet come when
ships will be sent out to investigate the nature and course of storms
and hurricanes_, as they are now sent out to reach the poles or to
survey pestilential coasts, or on any other scientific service.”
The prediction which Piddington put in italics was eventually verified,
though nearly a century later.
“Nothing indeed can more clearly show,” Piddington continued, “how this
may, with a well appointed and managed vessel be done in perfect
safety—performed by mere chance by a fast-sailing colonial brig, manned
only as a bullock trader, but capitally officered, and developing for
the seaman and meteorologist a view of what we may almost call the
_internal_ phenomena of winds and waves in a hurricane.”
But this was only the beginning. Learning the secrets of the hurricane
proved to be far more difficult than Redfield, Reid and Piddington had
imagined. The world looked in amazement at the tremendous labors of a
few men who collected enormous quantities of reports, interviews, and
observations from mariners and tried to put the bits together, but there
was a prevailing suspicion that the real facts were locked in the minds
of men who had gone to their doom in ships sunk in the centers of these
awful storms and the lucky ones who came back had seen only a part of
their ultimate terrors. In these days of relatively safe navigation at
the middle of the twentieth century, our minds are scarcely able to
grasp the seriousness of this scourge of tropical and subtropical seas
which destroyed so many ships and drove busy men, working long hours for
a living, to such tremendous labors, at night and at odd times, to learn
the truth. We may get some light from the stories of desperate sailors
who, by some strange fate, were thrown exhausted on the rocks that
finally claimed the broken remains of once-proud vessels of trade and
war.
_3._ AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
“_Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon:
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea._”
—Shakespeare
Two hundred years ago, scientists were beginning to chart the winds over
the oceans and the currents that thread their way across the surface of
deep waters. Until this work was finished, the mariner was almost
completely at the mercy of the atmosphere and the sea. He would come to
uncharted places where the winds ceased to blow and sailing vessels
might be becalmed for weeks. Day after day, the burning sun climbed
slowly toward the zenith and while the unbearable heat tortured the
crew, descended with agonizing slowness toward the western horizon. At
night, relief came under unclouded skies but the stars gave no
indication of better fortunes on the morrow.
In these places it seldom rained. Drinking water, as long as it lasted,
became putrid, but the crew preserved it as their most precious
treasure, drinking a little when they could go no longer without
it—holding their noses. The food became so bad that every man who had
the courage to eat it wondered if it wouldn’t be better to starve. This
happened often in the North Atlantic in the days when sailing vessels
were carrying horses to the West Indies. If they were becalmed and fresh
water ran short, the crews had to throw some or all of the horses
overboard. In time this region became known as the “horse latitudes.”
Because it lay north and northeast of the hurricane belt, a long spell
of rainless weather for a sailing ship here could be succeeded suddenly
and overwhelmingly by the torrential rains of a tropical storm.
At long intervals, a slight breeze came along, barely enough to extend a
small flag, but it gave the ship a little motion and brought hope to the
men who were worn out with tugging at the oars. In this circumstance, it
might happen that a long, low groundswell would appear. Coming from a
great distance, it would raise and then lower the vessel a little in
passing. Others would surely follow—low undulations at intervals of four
or five to the minute—bringing a warning of a storm beyond the horizon.
Here was one of the ironic twists of a sailor’s existence. Even while he
prayed for water, the atmosphere was about to give it to him in
tremendous quantities, both from above and below. At this juncture the
master was in a quandary. For the safety of ship and crew, it was vital
that he know exactly what to do at the very instant when the first gusty
breezes of the coming storm filled the sails.
From the law of storms, the mariner eventually learned—and it was
suicide to forget it at a time like this—that if he could look forward
from the center of the hurricane, along the line of progress, the most
terrible winds and waves would be on his right. Here the raging demons
of the tropical blast outdo themselves. The whirling velocity is added
to the forward motion, for both in these few harrowing hours have the
same direction. All the power of the atmosphere is delivered in this
space, where unbelievable gales try to blast their way into the partial
vacuum at the center. But the atmosphere is held back from the center by
a still greater power, the rotation of the earth on its axis. No
shipmaster should ever be caught between these awful forces with the
huge bulk of the storm drawing toward him.
Here we find horrors that were never disclosed to the early storm
hunters. It is doubtful if any sailing ship or any man aboard survived
in this sector of a really great hurricane. But even more dangerous are
the deceitful motions of the sea surface, which can trap the mariner and
drag his vessel toward the dangerous sector, even while he thinks he is
fighting his way out of it.
In those uneasy hours when the groundswell preceded the winds, the
master had to watch his barometer and the clouds on the horizon, to get
the best estimate of the storm’s future course. If it gave signs of
coming toward him or passing a little to the west of him, he had to run
with the wind as soon as it began, every inch of canvas straining at the
creaking masts to get all the headway possible. He would do better than
he thought, for the surface of the sea was moving with the winds and his
vessel was plowing through the waves while the sea was swirling in the
same direction. It was a race for life, and if he was not unlucky, he
would find himself behind the storm, sailing rapidly toward better
weather.
If he made the wrong choice and tried to go around the center on the
east side while the storm moved northward, he might have thought that he
was making headway. But the sea surface was carrying him backward while
the horrible right sector rushed forward to encompass the ship. Now we
see why Redfield, Reid and Piddington, when they came to a realization
of some of these facts in the logs of sailing vessels, were so eager to
give the world a law of storms. Their work was only a beginning, for the
so-called law is not as simple as they imagined. But some shipmasters
took their advice and survived, whereas any other course would have
taken them to the bottom of the sea. And untold numbers had gone down in
big hurricanes.
Among the logs and letters collected by Redfield and Reid in their work
on the law of storms were many which referred to a fierce hurricane in
1780. For more than fifty years it had been talked about as “The Great
Hurricane.” But the stories didn’t all seem to fit together. The storm
was said to have been in too many places at too many different times to
suit Redfield. When he had finished putting the data from ships’ logs on
a map in accordance with his law of storms, he saw that there had been
three hurricanes at about the same time and that they had been confused
and reported as one.
In the year of these big hurricanes there were many warships in the
Caribbean region. The American War of Independence had started with
bloodshed at Lexington and Bunker Hill in 1775, and by 1780 England was
in a state of war with half the world. Her battle fleets controlled most
of the seas along the American Coast and roamed the waters in and around
the West Indies.
The first of the three hurricanes struck Jamaica on the third of
October. Nine English warships, under the command of Sir Peter Parker,
went to the bottom. Seven of his vessels were dismasted or severely
damaged. From the tenth to the fifteenth of October a second—and even
more powerful hurricane—ravaged Barbados and progressively devastated
other islands in the Eastern Caribbean. This one has been rated the most
terrible hurricane in history by many students of storms. It wreaked
awful destruction on the island of St. Lucia, where six thousand persons
were crushed in the ruins of demolished buildings. The English fleet in
that vicinity disappeared. Neither trees nor houses were left standing
on Barbados. Off Martinique, forty ships of a French convoy were sunk
and nearly all on board were lost, including four thousand soldiers. On
the island itself, nine thousand persons were killed. Most of the
vessels in the broad path of the storm as it progressed farther into the
Caribbean, including several warships, foundered with all their crews.
It drove fifty vessels ashore at Bermuda, on the eighteenth.
Before this terrible storm reached Bermuda another one roared out of the
Western Caribbean, crossed western Cuba and passed into the Gulf of
Mexico, on October 18. Unaware of the approach of this hurricane, a
Spanish fleet of seventy-four warships, under Admiral Solano, sailed
from Havana into the Gulf, to attack Pensacola. They were trapped in the
eastern section of the Gulf and nineteen ships were lost. The remainder
were dispersed, several having thrown their guns overboard to avoid
capsizing. Nearly all the others were damaged, many dismasted. The
Spanish fleet was no longer a fighting force.
Within three weeks most of the battle fleets in and around the Caribbean
had been put out of commission. Both Redfield and Reid were impressed by
the power displayed by these hurricanes. In his search of the records,
the former succeeded in getting a copy of a letter written by a
Lieutenant Archer to his mother in England, giving an account of the
first of these terrible storms. The following story is condensed from
Archer’s letter.
Archer was second in command of an English warship named the _Phoenix_.
It was commanded by Sir Hyde Parker. Before the first of these three
hurricanes developed, the _Phoenix_ had been sent to Pensacola, where
the English were in control. Late in September, she sailed to rejoin the
remainder of the fleet at Jamaica. On passing Havana harbor, Sir Hyde
looked in and was astounded to see Solano’s Spanish fleet at anchor. He
hurried around Cuba into the Caribbean, to take the news to the British
fleet.
At Kingston, Jamaica, the crew of the _Phoenix_ found three other
men-of-war lying in the harbor and they had a strong party for “kicking
up a dust on shore,” with dancing until two o’clock every morning.
Little did they think of what might be in store for them. Out of the
four men-of-war not one was in existence four days later and not a man
aboard any of them survived, except a few of the crew of the _Phoenix_.
And what is more, the houses where the crews had been so merry were so
completely destroyed that scarcely a vestige remained to show where they
had stood.
On September 30, the four warships set sail for Port Royal, around the
eastern end of Jamaica. At eleven o’clock on the night of October 2, it
began to “snuffle,” with a “monstrous heavy appearance to the eastward.”
Sir Hyde sent for Lieutenant Archer.
“What sort of weather have we, Archer?”
“It blows a little and has a very ugly look; if in any other quarter, I
should say we were going to have a gale of wind.”
They had a very dirty night. At eight in the morning, with close-reefed
topsails, the _Phoenix_ was fighting a hard blow from the
east-northeast, and heavy squalls at times. Archer said he was once in a
hurricane in the East Indies and the beginning of it had much the same
appearance as this. The crew took in the topsails and were glad they had
plenty of sea-room. On Sir Hyde’s orders, they secured all the sails
with spare gaskets, put good rolling tackles on the yards, squared the
booms, saw that the boats were all fast, lashed the guns,
double-breeched the lower deckers, got the top-gallant mast down on the
deck and, in fact, did everything to make a snug ship.
“And now,” Archer wrote, “the poor birds began to suffer from the uproar
of the elements and came on board. They turned to the windward like a
ship, tack and tack, and dashed themselves down on the deck without
attempting to stir till picked up. They would not leave the ship.”
The carpenters were placed by the mainmast with broad axes, ready to cut
it away to save the ship. Archer found the purser “frightened out of his
wits” and two marine officers “white as sheets” from listening to the
vibration of the lower deck guns, which were pulling loose and thrashing
around. At every roll it seemed that the whole ship’s side was going.
At twelve it was blowing a full hurricane. Archer came on deck and found
Sir Hyde there. “It blows terribly hard, Archer.”
“It does indeed, Sir.”
“I don’t remember its blowing so hard before,” shouted Sir Hyde,
striving to get his voice above the roar of the wind. “The ship makes
good weather of it on this tack but we must wear her (to turn about by
putting the helm up and the stern of the boat to the wind), as the wind
has shifted to the southeast and we are fast drawing up on the Coast of
Cuba.”
“Sir, there is no canvas can stand against it a moment. We may lose
three or four of our people in the effort. She’ll wear by manning the
fire shrouds.”
“Well, try it,” said Sir Hyde, which was a great condescension for a man
of his temperament to accept the advice of a subordinate. It took two
hundred men to wear the ship, but when she was turned about, the sea
began to run clear across the decks and she had no time to rise from one
sea until another lashed into her. Some of the sails had been torn from
the masts and the rest began to fly from the yards “through the gaskets
like coachwhips.”
“To think that the wind could have such force!” Archer shouted into the
gale.
“Go down and see what is the matter between decks,” ordered Sir Hyde in
a lull.
Archer crept below and a marine officer screamed, “We are sinking. The
water is up to the bottom of my cot!”
Archer yelled back, “As long as it is not over your mouth, you are well
off.” He put all spare men to work at the pumps. The _Phoenix_ labored
heavily, with scarcely any of her above water except the quarter-deck
and that seldom.
On returning, Archer found Sir Hyde lashed to a mast. He lashed himself
alongside his commander and tried to hear what he was shouting.
Afterward, Archer tried to describe this situation in his letter. “If I
was to write forever, I could not give you an idea of it. A total
darkness above and the sea running in Alps or Peaks of Teneriffe
(Mountains is too common an idea); the wind roaring louder than thunder,
the ship shaking her sides and groaning.”
“Hold fast,” shouted Sir Hyde as a big wave crashed into the ship. “That
was an ugly sea! We must lower the yards, Archer.”
“If we attempt it, Sir, we shall lose them. I wish the mainmast was
overboard without carrying anything else along with it.”
Another mountainous wave swept the trembling ship. A crewman brought
news from the pump room. Water was gaining on the weary pumpers. The
ship was almost on her beam-ends. Archer called to Sir Hyde, “Shall we
cut the mainmast away?”
“Ay, as fast as you can,” said Sir Hyde. But just then a tremendous wave
broke right on board, carried everything on deck away and filled the
ship with water. The main and mizen masts went, the _Phoenix_ righted a
little but was in the last struggle of sinking.
As soon as they could shake their heads free of the water, Sir Hyde
yelled, “We are gone at last, Archer. Foundered at sea! Farewell, and
the Lord have mercy on us!”
Archer felt sorry that he could swim, for he would struggle
instinctively and it would take him a quarter hour longer to die than a
man who could not. The quarter-deck was full of men praying for mercy.
At that moment there was a great thump and a grinding under them.
Archer screamed, “Sir, the ship is ashore. We may save ourselves yet!”
Every stroke of the sea threatened dissolution of the ship’s frame.
Every wave swept over her as she lay stern ashore.
Sir Hyde cried out, “Keep to the quarter-deck, my lads. When she goes to
pieces that is your best chance.”
Five men were lost cutting the foremast. The sea seemed to reach for
them as it took the mast overboard and they went with it. Everyone
expected it would be his turn next. It was awful—the ship grinding and
being torn away piece by piece. Mercifully, as if to give the crew
another desperate chance, a tremendous wave carried the _Phoenix_ among
the rocks and she stuck there, though her decks tumbled in.
Archer took off his coat and shoes and prepared to swim, but on second
thought he knew it wouldn’t do. As second officer, he would have to stay
with his commander and see that every man, including the sick and
injured, was safely off the ship before he left it. He wrote later that
he looked around with a philosophic eye in that moment and was amazed to
find that those who had been the most swaggering, swearing bullies in
fine weather were now the most pitiful wretches on earth, with death
before them.
Finally, Archer helped two sailors off with a line which was made fast
to the rocks, and most of those who had survived the storm got ashore
alive, including the sick and injured, who were moved from a cabin
window by means of a spare topsail-yard.
On shore, Sir Hyde came to Archer so affected that he was scarcely able
to make himself understood. “I am happy to see you ashore—but look at
our poor _Phoenix_.” Weak and worn, the two sat huddled on the shore,
silent for a quarter hour, blasted by gale and sea. Archer actually
wept. After that, the two officers gathered the men together and rescued
some fresh water and provisions from the wreck. They also secured
material to make tents. The storm had thrown great quantities of fish
into the holes in the rocks and these provided a good meal.
One of the ship’s boats was left in fair condition. In two days the
carpenters repaired it, and Archer, with four volunteers, set off for
Jamaica. They had squally weather and a leaky boat, but by constant
baling with two buckets, they arrived at their destination next evening.
Eventually, all the remainder of the crew they had left in Cuba were
saved except some who died of injuries after getting ashore from the
_Phoenix_ and a few who got hold of some of the ship’s rum and drank
themselves to death.
How many times this drama of death and narrow escape may have been
repeated in the three great hurricanes of 1780 is not disclosed in the
records. But hundreds of ships and many thousands of men were lost. And
at that time no one knew the true nature of these great winds. It was
not until more than fifty years had passed and Redfield and Reid
examined all the reports that these tremendous gales were found to be
parts of three separate hurricanes. This ignorance seems strange, for
nearly three hundred years had passed since Columbus ran into his first
hurricane.
As Reid worked at great length on these old records in logs and letters,
he became confident that Redfield was right about the whirling nature of
tropical storms. There were ten hurricanes in the West Indies in 1837
and these supplied Reid with a great deal of added information. One of
the most exciting was the big hurricane in the middle of August of that
year.
This was a vicious storm which was first observed by the Barque
_Felicity_ in the Atlantic, far east of the Antilles, on August 12,
1837. The chances are that it came from the African Coast, near the Cape
Verde Islands, as many of the worst of them do. By the time these
faraway disturbances have crossed the Atlantic and approached the West
Indies, they are usually major hurricanes, capable of wreaking great
destruction. This one was no exception, but its path lay a little
farther to the northward than usual and its most furious winds were not
felt on land, even on the more northerly islands in the group.
Ships in its path reported winds which appeared to be of a “rotatory”
nature when Reid plotted them on maps. On the fifteenth, the storm
passed near Turk’s Island and on the sixteenth, was being felt on the
easternmost Bahamas.
At this stage, the ship _Calypso_ became involved in the storm and was
unable to escape. The master, a man named Wilkinson, wrote an account to
the owners, from which the following is taken:
“During the night the Winds increased, and day-light found the vessel
under a close-reefed main-topsail, with royal and top-gallant-yards on
deck, and prepared for a gale of wind. At 10 A.M. the wind about
north-east, the lee-rail under water, and the masts bending like canes.
Got a tarpaulin on the main rigging and took the main topsail in. The
ship laboring much obliged main and bilge-pumps to be kept constantly
going. At 6 P.M. the wind north-west, I should think the latitude would
be about 27°, and longitude 77°W. At midnight the wind was west, when a
sea took the quarter-boat away.
“At day-dawn, or rather I should have said the time when the day would
have dawned, the wind was southwest, and a sea stove the fore-scuttle.
All attempts to stop this leak were useless, for when the ship pitched
the scuttle was considerably under water. I then had the gaskets and
lines cut from the reefed foresail, which blew away; a new
fore-topmast-studding-sail was got up and down the fore-rigging, but in
a few seconds the bolt-rope only remained; the masts had then to be cut
away.”
By this time the wind was even more furious and the seas so high none
expected the _Calypso_ to survive. The master continued his story:
“My chief mate had a small axe in his berth, which he had made very
sharp a few days previous. That was immediately procured; and while the
men were employed cutting away the mizenmast, the lower yard-arms went
in the water. It is human nature to struggle hard for life; so fourteen
men and myself got over the rail between the main and mizen rigging as
the mast-heads went into the water. The ship was sinking fast. While
some men were employed cutting the weather-lanyards of the rigging, some
were calling to God for mercy; some were stupified with despair; and two
poor fellows, who had gone from the afterhold, over the cargo, to get to
the forecastle, to try to stop the leak, were swimming in the ship’s
hold. In about three minutes after getting on the bends, the
weather-lanyards were cut fore and aft, and the mizen, main, and
foremasts went one after the other, just as the vessel was going down
head foremost.
“The ship hung in this miserable position, as if about to disappear (as
shown in the accompanying reconstruction of the scene by an artist who
worked under the direction of the master of the _Calypso_) and then by
some miracle slowly righted herself.
“On getting on board again, I found the three masts had gone close off
by the deck. The boats were gone, the main hatches stove in, the planks
of the deck had started in many places, the water was up to the beams,
and the puncheons of rum sending about the hold with great violence. The
starboard gunwale was about a foot from the level of the sea, and the
larboard about five feet. The sea was breaking over the ship as it would
have done over a log. You will, perhaps, say it could not have been
worse, and any lives spared to tell the tale. I assure you, Sir, it was
worse; and by Divine Providence, every man was suffered to walk from
that ship to the quay at Wilmington.”
From such accounts the hurricane hunters gathered the facts which led to
a better “law of storms” and made life at sea safer for the officers and
men who struggled with sails and masts in tropical gales. But it is most
likely that the experiences of the crews of those sailing ships that
were caught in the worst sectors of fully developed hurricanes in the
open sea were never told. It is not probable that any survived the
calamitous weather on the right front of the storm center, where the
sea, the atmosphere, the rotation of the earth, and the forward motion
of the hurricane are combined in a frenzy of destructive power.
In one sense, all of the men who survived these terrors at sea were
hurricane hunters. They had to be. Those who lived were the men who were
always alert to the first signs in sea and sky, who knew when one of the
big storms of the tropics was just beyond the horizon. They were
learning and passing the knowledge along to others. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, the mariner had a “law of storms” that kept
countless ships out of the most dangerous parts of tropical
disturbances.
_4._ STORM WARNINGS
“_I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than of the entire
Spanish Navy._”
—McKinley
Strangely enough, government weather bureaus were not set up for the
purpose of giving warnings of tropical storms. Maybe there was a feeling
in the years before radio that nothing could be done for the sailor on
the open sea except to teach him the law of storms. And for the landsman
the case looked hopeless until the telegraph came in sight. At any rate,
most of the men who began to fly into hurricanes during World War II
were astonished to find that, up to that time, the prediction of
tropical storms had been a kind of side issue.
Although hurricanes are nearly always destructive and other kinds of
storms—the “lows” on the weather map—are generally mild, once in a long
time one of these others results in a catastrophe. Starting as a low
which is spread weakly over a wide area, with cloudy weather, rain or
snow, and gentle winds, now and then the exceptional storm suddenly
fills newspaper headlines. Gales and winds of hurricane force bring a
blizzard, tornado, bad hailstorm, or torrential rain and a damaging
flood. If it really is a bad one, it finds its way into the pages of
history. In times past, these storms often struck populous districts,
while hurricanes, in early centuries, hit on thinly settled islands or
coasts.
So far as we know, the worst storm to devastate the British Isles was
one of this kind. It was not a tropical cyclone. It was entirely
unexpected, as were most of the big gales in England in the old days.
Surprise was one of the elements of danger. The weather is seldom fine
in the British Isles, over the English Channel or in the North Sea.
Gloom, with fog or low-flying clouds, is the rule. Even on the best
days, a damp haze hangs everywhere. It is like looking through a dirty
window pane. Into this background of gloom many a big storm stole its
way eastward from the Atlantic. The record-breaker tore up the docks,
wrecked shipping and crumbled buildings in the year 1703.
Houses were ruined and big trees were blown down. Whole fleets were lost
and more than nine thousand seamen were drowned. The most violent winds
came at night. Startled by the roar of the storm, Queen Anne got out of
bed and found a part of the palace roof had been torn away. One prelate,
Bishop Kidder, was buried beneath the ruins of his mansion. Awakened by
the giant gusts, he put on his dressing gown and made for the door, but
a chimney stack crashed through the ceiling and dashed out his brains.
His wife was crushed in her bed. After the gales subsided, London and
other cities looked like they had been sacked by an enemy. All over the
south of England, the lead roofs of churches were rolled up by the wind
or blown away in large sheets.
Though other gales almost as bad as this one came in later years, it was
more than a century before the storm hunters made much progress. Not
long after 1800, several men with an inquiring mind began to get
results. Redfield was one, but he studied hurricanes and not the storms
of higher latitudes, such as the one which devastated the British Isles.
Shortly after 1800, there were signs of the coming of faster means of
travel and communications and they were destined to be a vital factor in
weather forecasting. In 1816 a “hobby-horse” with wheels was displayed
in Paris by an inventor named Niepice. It was propelled by a man or two
sitting on it and pushing on the ground. Even with two men pushing, it
went no faster than a man could walk. But strong claims were made about
its possibilities. At about the same time, several men were working on
devices like the telegraph.
Whether it was this trend or not, something aroused the intense
curiosity of a young professor, William Heinrich Brandes, of the
University of Breslau, in Germany. He began a study in 1816, to see if
the weather moved from place to place and if it would be possible to
send predictions ahead by means then available. Everybody at that time
knew that storms moved but it was the general belief that ordinary
changes in the weather didn’t go anywhere. Brandes collected newspapers
from many places and searched them for remarks about the weather, which
he put on maps. Here he was amazed to see that all kinds of weather
seemed to be constantly in motion, quite generally from west to east.
But the newspaper reports were rather poor for his purposes and he
couldn’t be too sure about the rate of travel.
Brandes knew that the French had set up weather stations and collected
observations for maps as early as 1780, but the terrible French
Revolution had brought an end to this work and the data were lying in
disuse. After some delay, he obtained copies of the observations for
1783 and put them on maps. Sure enough, after he had drawn many daily
maps, he saw clearly how the weather moved just as he had suspected it
did from the newspaper reports. But at the same time he saw that it was
hopeless. The weather moved so rapidly that there was no way of sending
the reports ahead fast enough for making predictions of what was coming.
The quickest way of sending the reports ahead was by horse or a good man
on foot, and the weather would easily outrun them. In 1820, Brandes
wrote an article about weather maps for publication and then put his
maps and newspapers in the trash. But in time his idea got around the
world and as the years passed more and more scientists began drawing
maps and trying to predict the weather. And so it came about that the
government weather services in different parts of the world were set up
to predict storms of higher latitudes rather than hurricanes.
Redfield was mapping storms after 1830, but he was not trying to make
weather forecasts. He wanted only to learn about hurricanes in order to
give the mariner a law of storms by which he could judge the weather for
himself. Nobody worried about the landlubber. It was the idea in those
days that a man on land could get his weather out of an almanac or by
watching the signs of the winds, clouds, birds, stars, or the rise and
fall of the barometer. Scientists who believed that it would be possible
to predict the ordinary changes in the weather were decidedly in the
minority. One of these was James Pollard Espy, who became known as the
“Old Storm King” of America.
James Espy was born in Pennsylvania, in the vicinity of Harrisburg, but
his father moved the family to Kentucky while James was an infant. It
has been said in biographies of Espy that the boy had no education and
was seventeen years old before he learned to read, but this was denied
by relatives who survived him. It seems that the elder Espy soon went to
the Miami Valley in Ohio, to get established in business, and left James
with an older sister in Kentucky. At eighteen James registered at
Transylvania University, in Lexington, where he was much interested in
science. In any event, at various times he was a schoolteacher in Ohio,
Maryland, and Pennsylvania, until he became fully occupied in the study
of weather.
In 1820, Espy joined the Franklin Institute, in Philadelphia, to teach
languages and work on the weather. In an amazingly short time, he became
an authority on meteorology. He was a pleasant, easygoing man, but very
persistent in two matters. First, he was determined to have a government
bureau established to predict storms; and, second, he disagreed with
Redfield in the latter’s whirlwind theory of hurricanes. At times the
two carried on a violent controversy in the press. Espy argued that the
winds blow directly toward the center of a storm or toward a line
through the center. He was right with respect to storms of middle and
higher latitudes, as everybody knows today. He anticipated the modern
idea of fronts, and he and other scientists of his day sometimes
referred to these lines as “like a line of battle.” In a way, Redfield
also was right, for the typical hurricane in the tropics has no fronts.
In his efforts to set up a government weather bureau, Espy was
successful in a small way. In 1842, he was appointed by Congress for
five years as “Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” and assigned to
the Surgeon General, where he worked for five years. This rather strange
appointment was due to the fact that the Surgeon General had been taking
weather observations at Army posts since 1819 and had much data for
study.
In the meantime, Espy had visited England and France, where he was
received with honor by renowned scientific associations. On returning to
the United States, he published a book, _The Philosophy of Storms_, in
1841. His weather maps and storm reports were now famous and by this
time he was widely known as the “Old Storm King.” When his term as
“Meteorologist to the U. S. Government” expired, he secured an
appointment as meteorologist under the Secretary of the Navy, to work
with the Smithsonian Institution, where he made an annual report to the
Navy until 1852.
During these years, Espy was continually after Congress to do more about
storm hunting. In Washington, he earned the title of the “Half Baked
Storm Hunter” and in Congress he was known as the “Old Storm Breeder.”
In 1842 he was granted hearings and members of an appropriation
committee said that he was a “monomaniac” and his “organ of self-esteem
was swollen to the size of a goiter.” They told him that they were not
impressed just because “the French had indorsed all his crack-brained
schemes.” Espy kept insisting for several years and was looked upon as a
nuisance in Congress until he died in 1860, having had very little
success in getting the government to do anything about it, except to
give him an appointment to study the weather himself.
As it finally worked out, Congress in 1870 established a weather
service, to study storms on the Great Lakes and the seacoasts of the
United States. This proved to be such a tough job that, for the time
being, the hurricane work, which had been neglected during and after the
War between the States, was dropped into second place.
The disturbances that kept the government service busy after 1870 are
those that begin in higher latitudes and move generally from west to
east—the lows of the weather map—called extratropical to distinguish
them from hurricanes and other tropical storms. If they were as regular
in their shapes and movements as the tropical variety, the forecasting
job would be much easier. But the extratropical kind takes odd forms,
elongated or in the shape of a trough, sometimes with two or more
centers. Their movements are irregular. Rarely does one of them become
extremely violent, but there is always danger of it and so the
forecasters must always be on the alert.
[Illustration: _The English warship _Egmont_ in the “Great Hurricane”
of 1780._]
[Illustration: _The _Calypso_ in the big Atlantic hurricane of 1837,
showing the crew climbing over the rail as the mastheads go into the
water._]
[Illustration: _USWB—Miami Herald Staff Photo_
_A tremendous wave breaks against the distant seawall on Florida coast
at the height of a hurricane._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Typhoon buckles the flight deck of the aircraft carrier _Bennington_
and drapes it over the bow._]
[Illustration: _Wind of hurricane drive pine board (10 feet by 1 inch by
3 inches) through the tough trunk of a palm tree in Puerto Rico,
September 13, 1928._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Looking down from plane at the surface of the sea with wind of 15
knots (17 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 40 knots (46 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 75 knots (86 miles an hour)._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Sea surface with winds of 120 knots (138 miles an hour). Tops of big
waves are torn off and carried away in a white boiling sheet._]
[Illustration: _Superfortress B-29 used by Air Force for hurricane
hunting._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Neptune P2V-3W used by Navy for hurricane hunting._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Navy crew of hurricane hunters._]
[Illustration: _Air Force Photo_
_Air Force crew being briefed by weather officer before flight into
hurricane._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Conditions at birth of Caribbean Charlie in 1951._]
[Illustration: _In the foreground, part of a spiral squall band, an “arm
of the octopus.”_]
[Illustration: _Photographed by McClellan Air Force Base_
_Through Plexiglas nose, weather officer sees white caps on sea 1,500
feet below._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Navy aerologist at his station in nose of aircraft on hurricane
mission._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photograph_
_Radar operator in foreground; navigator in background._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photograph_
_Maintenance crew goes to work on B-29 after return from hurricane
mission._]
[Illustration: _USWB—Miami Daily News_
_City docks at Miami after passage of Kappler’s Hurricane in September,
1945._]
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photocopy_
_Positions of crew members in B-29 on hurricane mission._]
AFT ENTRANCE HATCH
RADIO OPERATOR
RIGHT SCANNER (CREW CHIEF)
RADIOSONDE OPERATOR
LEFT SCANNER (DROPSONDE OPERATOR)
ENGINEER
COPILOT
WEATHER OBSERVER
NAVIGATOR
RADAR OPERATOR
FORWARD ENTRANCE HATCH
PILOT
[Illustration: _Part of scope showing typhoon by radar. Eye is above
center at right with spiral bands showing. Radar is located at center
of picture with surrounding clouds showing as dense white mass due to
heavy nearby echo return. Echo from opposite side of typhoon is faint._]
[Illustration: _Official U. S. Navy Photograph_
_Looking down into the eye of Hurricane Edna (foreground) on September
7, 1954._]
[Illustration: _U. S. Air Force Photo_
_Looking down at the central region of Typhoon Marge in 1951._]
[Illustration: _Weather officer in nose of aircraft talking to pilot
(left) and radar operator._]
[Illustration: _Official Photo U. S. A. F._
_The engineer in a B-29 on hurricane reconnaissance._]
_The two scanners ready to signal engine trouble the instant it shows
up._
[Illustration: _Official Defense Department Photograph_]
[Illustration: _Official Photo U. S. A. F._]
[Illustration: _The new plane (B-50) to be used by the Air Force for
hurricane reconnaissance._]
Some of the most dangerous of the extratropical storms begin as small
companions or secondary centers of huge disturbances, generally on the
south side, where they grow rapidly in fury and merge with the original
cyclones to produce winds of tremendous destructive power. This often
happens in the so-called “windy corners” of the world. One of these, and
a good example, is Cape Hatteras, on the eastern coast of North
Carolina. It is a sort of way station for both the tropical and
extratropical varieties. Hurricanes heading northwestward from the
Caribbean and curving to follow the coastline, sweep over the Cape,
which juts into the ocean at the point where the northward-moving storms
still retain great force. In winter, big extratropical cyclones passing
eastward across the region of the Great Lakes tend to produce small
companions or secondaries in the southeastern states and some of them
develop gales of hurricane force by the time they reach Hatteras. Here
the cold air masses of the continent, guided by storm winds, are thrown
against the warm, moist air from the Gulf Stream. In the reaction, there
are towering seas and hazardous gales that are well known to seamen.
As these big storms roar past Cape Hatteras, the winds shift to
northwest and the sky clears, unless you happen to be on shipboard and
the tops of big waves are being torn off by the wind and thrown into the
air, to pass overhead in streaks or splatter on the decks. In the days
of the sailing ship, the master was not surprised when he got into
trouble in the area between Bermuda and Hatteras. Here many merchantmen
from far places passed, en route to or from New York or other Atlantic
ports. Slowed by cross seas and dirty weather hatched over the Gulf
Stream, they were soon reduced to storm stay-sails. As the gales
mounted, the crews could see other ships rising on the billows in one
instant before slithering into a great trough where, in the next
instant, they could see nothing but jagged peaks of water and a welter
of foam. On the Hatteras side, especially, the master could get into a
rendezvous with death, for he often had only two choices. He could run
full tilt toward the west and try to get around the front of a hurricane
moving northward, but this maneuver would take him toward Hatteras,
where he might find company in the wrecks of countless other ships that
had failed in the effort and had been thrown against the coast. The
other choice was no better. He could make such progress as was possible
toward the east and hope that he would not be caught in the dangerous
sector of the oncoming hurricane, a course which more likely than not
would lead to disaster.
As has been noted, however, it was the tragic losses caused by
extratropical cyclones that induced governments to take over the job of
hunting storms and issuing warnings. In France, the first country to
take positive action, the immediate cause was the catastrophe which
struck the allied fleets in the harbor at Balaclava in 1854, during the
Crimean War. Ships of England and France were caught in this desperate
position because of jealousies and hatreds which have abounded in Europe
for centuries. In this case, the Tsar of Russia seized a pretext to try
to gain control of a part of Turkey. This was not unexpected. Russia
always has looked with covetous eyes at the Bosporus and the
Dardanelles, which lead through the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. On
this score Europe is perpetually uneasy. France and England, who had
been enemies, now joined forces and planned a campaign against Russia.
It was July, 1853, when the Tsar, Nicholas I, mobilized his armies. As
his first overt act, he occupied the part of Turkey which lay north of
the Danube River. Soon afterward, the Russian fleet destroyed a Turkish
squadron in the Black Sea. Now the Tsar became more cautious because of
the threat of action by England and France, and especially because of
indications that Russia’s ally, Austria, would desert her. The Tsar took
no further action. Now it required a long time in those days to get a
campaign under way, and it was a whole year later, July, 1854, when the
allies were ready to start the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, Russia had withdrawn her troops from Turkey and there was no
real cause for conflict. But tempers had flared, the vast machinery of
war had been put in motion, and the allies drew stubbornly nearer to
disaster. They knew quite well that the time might be too short to
finish the campaign before the bitterly cold weather of the Russian
winter would creep out over the Peninsula. In fact, the Tsar had said
that his best generals were January and February, and that remark should
have carried ample warning.
Actually, the allied attack began in September, 1854. The British had
taken possession of the harbor at Balaclava and, in the beginning, the
invasion seemed to promise success. But in October the heroic but
ill-fated “Charge of the Light Brigade,” made immortal by Tennyson,
marked the turning point. It was clear then that the campaign would have
to be resumed in the spring of 1855. By November, cold weather had
arrived, land action had ceased, and the allies were faced with the
problem they had hoped so earnestly to avoid—that of keeping their
fighting forces intact during winter in a hostile climate.
To understand the dire predicament of the allies when the big storm
struck, it is important to note that the harbor at Balaclava had proved
to be too small for a supply base. Many ships had to be anchored outside
and there was delay and confusion in moving in and out of the harbor.
Not only was there a difficult supply problem but the sick and wounded
were being transported across the Black Sea to Scutari, near
Constantinople, where hospital conditions were abominable. By October,
the plight of the army had become a scandal in England. Florence
Nightingale was sent to Scutari with authority over all the nurses and a
guarantee of co-operation from the medical staff. She arrived on
November 4. The remainder of her story is well known as one of the
bright pages of history.
Now the stage was set for catastrophe. An obscure winter storm blew its
way across Europe without anything happening until its southern center
crossed the Black Sea, on November 14. Suddenly, as secondaries often
do, it came to life. There was rain turning to snow as the disturbance
burst forth in gales of hurricane force. The congestion grew while the
signs of the storm intensified. The ghostly mountains around Balaclava
disappeared in the gloom, the near-by shore lines next were blotted out,
and impenetrable darkness settled down on the shuddering and grinding of
the battered remnants of the helpless fleet. Wreckage was strewn along
the coast and around the harbor. All the men-of-war survived, although
damaged, but nearly all of the vessels with essential stores were lost.
Misery, disease, and horror followed during the bitter winter. The death
rate in the hospitals reached forty-two per cent in February. Meanwhile,
in France, Napoleon III received news of the terrible gales at Balaclava
and brooded over the catastrophe. He determined to learn where this
deadly storm had originated, the path it followed, and to set up a plan
for tracking and predicting others of its kind in the future. And so he
called in the famous astronomer Leverrier and asked him to carry out the
investigation.
Urbain Leverrier, then forty-three years old, was known throughout the
world as the discoverer of the planet Neptune, in 1846. He knew of the
works of Redfield and Reid on hurricanes and by 1854 had noted the
efforts of other Americans and Britishers to track extratropical storms.
With their ideas in mind, he called on scientists in all European
countries to send him observations of the weather on the days from
November 12 to 16, preceding and following the day of the disaster at
Balaclava. Information moved slowly between countries in those days and,
though many scientists co-operated, it was February, 1855, before
Leverrier had gathered the data he needed. In developing his plan, he
was encouraged by the invention and spread of the electric telegraph in
the United States, and he hoped that the extension of lines in Europe
would provide fast-moving messages for his purpose.
Before the end of February, Leverrier handed his report to Napoleon III
and recommended that a system of weather messages and of issuing
warnings be established at once. The Emperor approved this within
twenty-four hours. Soon the French government was mapping the weather
and looking for storms. The British followed suit. Already Joseph Henry,
in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, was trying a similar plan,
but it was not until February, 1870, that the Congress of the United
States appropriated funds and established a government weather service
in the Signal Corps of the Army.
The immediate reason for this legislation in the United States was
similar to that in France. At that time there was a rapidly growing
commerce on the Great Lakes, but storm disasters were all too frequent.
In 1869, nearly two thousand vessels were beached or sunk by gales on
the Lakes. On the seacoasts, the situation was almost equally bad. The
new service was soon in operation. The first storm warning by the United
States government was sent out in November, 1870.
During the next twenty years, blizzards, hail storms, tornadoes and
sudden wind storms of other kinds gave the new weather service a great
deal of trouble. They brought a vivid realization of the great variety
of surprises that lay in wait for the storm hunters. No sooner had they
found rules for the issuance of warnings than a new kind of peril came
along. The service had been in the Signal Corps of the Army, but in 1891
it was turned over to the Department of Agriculture because of its value
to the farmers. The desperate struggle against storms continued, with
many experienced weathermen feeling very discouraged about the whole
business. And then on February 15, 1898, the Battleship Maine was sunk
in Havana Harbor and war with Spain loomed on the horizon.
On April 25, the United States declared war. The Spanish fleet left the
Cape Verde Islands for Cuba and American warships departed for the West
Indies, to prepare the way for the movement of troops for the coming
campaign in Cuba. It was June 29, however, before the transports arrived
at Santiago, carrying seventeen thousand officers and men to support the
United States fleet. By that time, the commanders on both sides had
begun to worry about storms, for the first hurricanes had appeared as
early as June in some years, bringing destructive winds and torrential
rains to some parts of Cuba and the surrounding area.
Willis Moore was Chief of the Weather Bureau. He had been a sergeant in
the Signal Corps, transferred when the service was put in the Department
of Agriculture. He knew very well the difficulties of tracking storms
and especially in the West Indies, where only scattered weather reports
could be obtained by cable from some of the islands. A bad hurricane
could easily sneak up on the American forces through the broad waters of
the Caribbean, a predicament likely to arise if the Weather Bureau
depended on cable messages from native observers.
Moore carried his worries to James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture, who
decided that they should go to the President. At the White House, they
soon had an audience with McKinley, and Wilson presented the case. Moore
had maps, charts and data on hurricanes and the disasters they had
caused in the West Indies. Also, he had sketched a plan for a cordon of
storm hunters on islands around the Caribbean, to protect the American
fleet. He said that armadas had been defeated, not by the enemy, but by
the weather. He thought it probable that as many warships had been sent
to the bottom by storms as by the fire of the enemy. The President
listened respectfully at first, then with impatience at the lengthy
discussion. He had made up his mind. Interrupting Moore, he got up, sat
on the corner of his desk and declared:
“Wilson, I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the
entire Spanish Navy. Get this service started at the earliest possible
moment.”
Moore ventured to say, “Yes, indeed, Mr. President, but the Weather
Bureau will need the authority of Congress to organize a weather service
on foreign soil.”
The President told Wilson: “Report to Chairman Cannon of the
Appropriations Committee at once. They are preparing a bill to give me
all necessary powers to conduct the war and this authority can be
included.”
It was soon done. As a part of the plan, a fast cruiser was stationed at
Key West, to carry the news to the fleet immediately, in case the
Weather Bureau predicted a hurricane. In that event, the fleet might
have abandoned the blockade, to get sea room and avoid the center of the
storm.
With this authority, the Weather Bureau moved swiftly to station men and
equipment on the islands. Letters had to be written to European
countries for permission to send observers into their possessions. But
although the bill containing the authority only passed Congress on July
7, observers arrived as follows: July 21—Kingston, Santiago, Trinidad,
San Domingo, St. Thomas; August 11—Barranquilla; August 12—Barbados;
August 18—St. Kitts; August 29—Panama.
Land fighting continued in the West Indies until August 12, but the
Spanish fleet was destroyed on the morning of July 3. They made a
desperate effort to escape from the harbor at Santiago, were shelled by
American warships, and all were disabled or beached. Up to that time
there had been no tropical disturbances in the region. A small one hit
near Tampa on August 3. Another small but vicious hurricane swept the
coast of Georgia on August 31. The first big one of the 1898 season
raked Barbados, St. Vincent and St. Lucia on September 10 to 11, and
disappeared east of the Bahamas.
The stations set up by the storm hunters in 1898 formed the backbone of
the hurricane warning service which exists today as a greatly improved
system, including squadrons of aircraft that fly into tropical storms to
obtain essential data for the forecasters. Before storm hunting could be
operated on a practical basis, however, it was necessary to find new
means of communication. Dependence on messages by cable from scattered
islands was not good enough.
_5._ RADIO HELPS—THEN HINDERS
“_Make it clear that I would veto the bill again._”
—F. D. R.
In the 1930’s there was a strange turn of affairs in hurricane hunting.
It had long been the purpose to keep ships out of trouble, first by
giving the mariner a law of storms and then by sending warnings by
radio. One morning in August, 1932, an indignant citizen came into a
Weather Bureau office on the Gulf Coast and wanted to know where the
hurricane was. The weatherman told him that there were no ship reports
in the area but the center seemed to be somewhere in the central Gulf.
“What’s the matter with the radio reports from boats?” he asked.
“Because of the warnings we issued yesterday, all the ships got out of
the area and apparently there are no ships close enough this morning to
do any good,” the weatherman explained.
“Say, what kind of a deal is this?” demanded the citizen. “The only way
we can tell where the center is located is to get radio reports from
boats out there and you fellows chase all the boats away from the
storm.”
“Well, that’s our business,” replied the Weather Bureau man in
astonishment. “We are required by law to give warnings to shipping.”
“I don’t see it. I’m going to write to my Congressman and to the White
House, if necessary, to get this straightened out. What we ought to do
is send boats out there to give reports when we need them,” was the
final declaration by the citizen who had one time been a shipmaster
himself. And he did write to Congress and the White House. Others joined
him. The argument over legislation began.
Long before the use of radio on shipboard, the location, intensity, and
movement of hurricanes over the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf, and along
the coasts and between the islands in the West Indies had been judged by
careful observations of the wind, sea and sky. In the latter part of the
nineteenth century, the storm hunters had become quite expert at it.
Among the best were the Jesuits in the West Indies and in the Far East.
They watched the high clouds moving out in advance of the tropical
storm, the sea swells that are stirred up by the big winds and travel
rapidly ahead, and, finally, as the storm center drew near, they studied
the winds in the outer edges when they began to be felt locally. One of
the pioneers in this work in the West Indies was Father Benito Viñes, at
Havana. He began giving out warnings as early as 1875 and by the end of
the century was an authority on the precursory signs of hurricanes, both
for land observers and for men on shipboard. By that time many of the
Weather Bureau men along the coasts had become experts and, after the
Spanish War, they began work on the islands in the West Indies.
Observations from the islands came in by cable and from the American
coasts they came by telegraph. In some areas this information served
very well, but far from land—in the open Atlantic, Caribbean, or
Gulf—there was not much to go on. Along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts,
the last resort before putting up the red flags with black centers was
the experienced observer who had an unobstructed view of the open sea.
Even with the best of such reports, there was always a question as to
whether it was a big storm with its center far out or a small storm with
its center close by. This fact, plus the rate of forward motion of the
storm, could make a vital difference. A big, slow-moving storm gave
plenty of warning but a small, fast-moving one brought destructive winds
and tides almost as soon as the warnings could be sent out and the flags
hoisted.
Aside from these indications, the storm hunters depended heavily on the
behavior of tropical storms in different parts of the season. They had
average tracks by months, showing how storms had moved both in direction
and speed, and much other information on their normal behavior. But all
too often hurricanes took an erratic course, and now and then the center
of a big one described a loop or a track shaped like a hairpin. A few of
the storm hunters thought that some upper air movement—a “steering
current”—controlled the hurricane’s path. The most obvious influence of
this kind is the general air circulation over the Atlantic—the large
anticyclone nearly always centered over the ocean near the Azores but
often extending westward to Bermuda or even to the American mainland.
In the central regions of the Atlantic High, the modern sailor, unlike
his predecessor in the sailing ship, is delighted by calms or gentle
breezes and fair weather. On its northern edge, storms pass from America
to Europe, stirring the northern regions of the ocean. On its southern
edge, we find the trade winds reaching down into the tropics and turning
westward across the West Indies and the Bahamas. A chart of these
prevailing winds gives a fairly good indication of the ocean currents.
Some of the surface waters are cold, some warm. And where they wander
through the tropics as equatorial currents or counter-currents, they are
hot and, other things being favorable, we find a birthplace of storms.
In some other tropical regions, the waters are cold and no hurricanes
form there.
Near the equator, the earth is girdled by a belt of heat, calms,
oppressive humidity, and persistent showers. This belt is called the
“doldrums.” The trade winds of the Northern Hemisphere reach to its
northern edge, while the trades below the equator brush its southern
margin. Tropical storms form now and then in and along the doldrum belt
at certain seasons—just why, no one knows, for there are hundreds of
days when everything seems right for a cyclone but nothing happens
except showers and the miserable sultriness of the torrid atmosphere.
Stripped to his waist, the sailor sits on his bunk at night without the
slightest exertion while perspiration descends in rivulets from his head
and shoulders. Nothing seems capable of making any appreciable change in
this monotonous regime. But eight or ten times a year on the Atlantic,
in summer or autumn, a storm rears its head in this oppressive
atmosphere. Its winds turn against the motions of the hands of a clock,
seemingly geared to the edges of the vast, fair-weather whirlwind
centered in mid-ocean. Around the southern and western margins of this
great whirl the storm moves majestically, gaining in power which it
takes in some manner from the heat and humidity—a power which would
drain the energies of a thousand atom bombs. The crowning clouds push to
enormous heights and deploy ahead of the monster—a foreboding of
destruction in its path. Here is one of the great mysteries of the sea.
Its heated surface lets loose great quantities of moisture which somehow
feed the monster—that we know—but what sets it off is almost as much of
a mystery as it was in the time of Columbus.
Until lately, the investigators trying to study the hurricane in motion
across the earth were as handicapped as if they had been stricken blind
and dumb when its great cloud shield enveloped them. The darkening scud
and rain shut off all view of the upper regions by day and left them in
utter darkness by night. No word came from ships caught in its inward
tentacles until long afterward, when the survivors had come into port.
Balloons tracing its winds disappeared in the clouds and were carried
away. A method of following them above the clouds would have helped in
the understanding of the upper regions in the same way that reports from
sailing ships had helped in the study of the surface winds. This was the
situation at the end of the Spanish War. But a new era was opening.
As the century came to a close, Marconi was getting ready to span the
far reaches of the Atlantic with his wireless apparatus. Already the
miracle of the telephone carrying the human voice by wire had become a
practical reality, with more than a million subscribers in the United
States, but it was not destined to be used across the ocean for many
years. Even that accomplishment would not have afforded much help to the
storm hunters. They had tried transoceanic messages for weather
reporting when submarine cables were laid across the Atlantic. Some
weathermen thought at first that it would be possible to pick up reports
of storms on the American Coast and, allowing a certain number of days
for them to cross the Atlantic, to predict their arrival in Europe. This
failed to work, for many storms die or merge with others en route, and
so many new disturbances are born in mid-Atlantic that it is necessary
to have reports every day from all parts of the ocean to tell when
storms are likely to approach European shores.
In 1900, Marconi was building a long distance transmitting station in
England, and readable signals had been sent over a span of two hundred
miles. No one then could foresee the strange roles that this remarkable
invention would play in storm hunting but it was obvious that messages
could be sent across long distances between ships at sea and from ship
to shore. Already wireless had been used successfully between British
war vessels on maneuvers. Actually, it was destined to be a powerful
ally of the men who searched for hurricanes and reported their progress,
but eventually this trend reversed itself and radio was the cause of
tropical storms being found and then lost again in critical
circumstances.
The spread of wireless across the oceans began while the American people
still had vividly in mind the most terrible hurricane disaster in the
history of the United States. The nation had been shocked by news of a
“tidal wave” which had virtually destroyed Galveston, Texas, on the
night of September 8, 1900, and killed more than six thousand of its
citizens. Really it was not a tidal wave but a West Indian hurricane of
almost irresistible force which had raised the tide to heights never
known before and then topped it with an enormous storm wave as the
center struck the low-lying island.
There was good reason to expect a disaster of this kind. A number of bad
hurricanes had hit Galveston in the nineteenth century. The first of
which we have any reliable record struck the island in 1818, when it was
nothing more than a rendezvous for pirates, principally the notorious
Jean Lafitte. It is known that he was in full possession there in 1817,
and it was rumored that he and his pirate crews were caught in the
hurricane of 1818 and had four of their vessels sunk or driven on shore.
All along the Texas Coast, the inhabitants always have worried about
hurricanes and they have plenty of reason. Whole settlements have been
destroyed by wind and wave. One case deserves special mention. After the
middle of the century, there had been a thriving town named Indianola in
the coastal region southwest of Galveston. The town gave promise then of
being the principal competitor of the island city for the commerce of
the State of Texas. But in September, 1875, a West Indian hurricane took
a slow westward course through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico,
and struck the Coast near Indianola. Vicious winds prostrated the
buildings while enormous waves swept through the streets, drowning a
large share of the population.
Courageous citizens rebuilt the town and for more than ten years it
prospered. Then in August, 1886, a bigger hurricane ravaged the town and
the countryside and literally wiped the place out of existence. The
survivors deserted the site and after a few days nothing was left to
mark the spot except sand, bushes and the wrecks of houses and
carriages, a litter of personal property, and a great many dead animals.
After the hurricane of 1875, the Signal Corps had established a weather
station at Indianola, and in the storm of 1886 the building fell in,
overturning a lamp in the office and setting fire to the fallen timbers.
The observer tried to escape but was drowned in the street.
Both of these hurricanes caused much damage at Galveston, for the island
was caught in the dangerous sector on the right of the center in both
cases. And it was natural that when, on September 8, 1900, the winds
began to increase and the tide rose above the ordinary marks at
Galveston, the citizens became alarmed, expecting a repetition of the
big blows of 1875 and 1886, which were still being mentioned in August
and September every year when the Gulf became rough and gusty northeast
winds tugged at the palm trees and oleanders.
But on September 8 the wind kept on rising and the tide crept above any
previous records. The weather observers feared the worst and dispatched
a telegram to Washington, telling about the heavy storm swells flooding
the lower parts of the city and adding, “Such high water with opposing
winds never seen before.” It was not altogether unexpected. Beginning on
September 4, the hurricane had been tracked across Cuba and into the
Gulf toward the Texas Coast, but this rise of the sea was more than the
observers had bargained for.
By noon, the wind and sea were much worse, the fall of the barometer was
ominous, and the Signal Corps observers, two brothers named Isaac and
Joe Cline, took turns going out to the beach and reporting to
Washington. At 4:00 P.M., all communications failed. Isaac found the
water waist deep around his home and the wreckage of beach homes
battered by waves was flying through the streets. At 6:30, Joe, who had
come to the south end of the city to view the Gulf, joined his brother
and found the water neck deep in the streets and roofs of houses and
timbers flying overhead after being tossed into the air by giant waves.
As the peril grew, fifty neighbors gathered for refuge in the Cline home
because it was stronger than others in that part of the city.
At 6:30, in the weather office, one of the assistant observers, Joe
Blagden, looked first at the steep downward curve on the recording
barometer and then noted that the wind register had failed as the gale
rose to one hundred miles an hour. To repair the gauge, he climbed to
the roof and crawled out, holding on tightly in the gusts and edging
forward in the lulls. Reaching the instrument support, he saw that the
wind gauge had been blown away, so he crawled down from the roof, after
taking one brief, horrified look over the stricken city.
There was no longer any island—just buildings protruding from the Gulf,
with the mainland miles away. Down the street filled with surging water,
the spire of a church bent in the wind and then let go as the tower
collapsed. The side of a brick building crumbled. As each terrible gust
held sway for a few moments, the air was full of debris. The top story
of a brick building was sheared off. The scene was like that caused by
the destructive blasts at the center of a tornado but, instead of the
minute or two of the twister, it lasted for hours. Darkness, under low
racing storm clouds, swiftly closed over the city in the deafening roar
of giant winds and the crash of broken buildings. The frightened
observers saw that the right front sector of the hurricane was bearing
down on the island.
Out at the beach, block after block of houses, high-raised to keep them
above the tide marks of previous storms, had been swept into the center
of the city and were being used as battering rams to destroy succeeding
blocks, until a great pile of wreckage held against the mountainous
waves. After an hour or two that seemed like an eternity, the hurricane
center began crossing the western end of the island, and the city on the
eastern end was swept by enormous seas which brought the water level to
twenty feet behind the dam of wrecked houses. Everything floated, many
frame buildings, or what was left of them, being carried out into the
Gulf.
The Cline house disintegrated and more than thirty people in it drowned,
among them Isaac’s wife. The others drifted on wreckage, rising and
falling with huge waves and trying desperately to hold timbers between
them and the wind, to ward off flying boards, slate, and shingles. One
woman, seeing her home was giving way to the wind and going down in the
water, fastened her baby to the roof by hammering a big nail through one
of his wrists. He survived. How many drowned or were killed in that
awful night was never known. The estimates finally rose above six
thousand. Doubt about the number was due to the presence of many summer
visitors at the beaches and, besides, there was no accurate check on the
missing, partly because the cemetery was washed out and the recently
buried dead were confused with the bodies of storm victims. The
aftermath was horrible beyond description.
Galveston had been on the right edge of the hurricane center. If the
city had been equally close to the center on the left side, the
destruction of wind and waves would have been bad, but nothing like that
actually experienced. On the left side—that is, left when looking
forward along the line of progress—the tide would have fallen rapidly as
the center passed and the gales would have lacked the peak velocities so
damaging to brick buildings and other structures which had withstood
previous hurricanes. Here was a sharp challenge to the storm hunters. To
tell in advance how devastating the hurricane might be, they would have
to be able to predict its path with sufficient accuracy to say with some
assurance whether the center would pass to the left or right of a
coastal city.
This case shows how hard it was to make predictions without radio.
During the approach of the Galveston hurricane, the storm hunters knew
the position of its center only when it crossed Cuba and again when it
struck the Texas Coast. While it was in the Gulf, weather reports from
coastal points indicated that there was a hurricane outside, moving
westward, but the winds, clouds, tides, and waves at those points would
have been about the same with a big storm far out over the water as with
a small storm close to land. Soon after the Galveston disaster there was
a growing hope that wireless messages from ships at sea would provide
this vital information in time for adequate warnings.
Progress in the use of wireless at sea really was fast, although it
seemed very slow to the storm hunters at the time. The first
ocean-weather report to the Weather Bureau was received from the
Steamship _New York_, in the western Atlantic, on December 3, 1905. It
was not until August 26, 1909, that a vessel at sea reported from the
inside of a hurricane. It was the Steamship _Cartago_, near the Coast of
Yucatan. The master estimated the winds at one hundred miles an hour.
This big storm struck the Mexican Coast on August 28, drowned fifteen
hundred people and created alarming tides and very rough seas all along
the Texas Coast. Thousands of people at Galveston and at many other
points between there and Brownsville stood on the Gulf front and watched
the tremendous waves breaking on the beaches.
Gradually the number of weather reports by radio increased and the work
of the storm hunters improved. World War I and enemy submarines stopped
the messages from ships temporarily, but after 1919 weather maps were
extended over the oceans. Other countries co-operated in the exchange of
messages and the centers of storms were spotted, even when far out of
range of the nearest coast or island. Cautionary warnings were sent to
vessels in the line of advance. By this means, the service of the storm
hunters was of extreme value in the safety of life and property afloat
as well as on shore.
By 1930 another trouble had developed serious proportions as a
consequence of this efficiency in the issuance of warnings. Vessel
masters soon learned that it was dangerous to be caught in the predicted
path of a hurricane, and when a warning was received by radio, they
steamed out of the line of peril as quickly as possible. Thus, as the
storm advanced, fewer and fewer ships were in a position to make useful
reports and in a day or two the hurricane was said to be “lost,” that
is, there were too few reports to spot the center accurately, or in some
cases there were no reports at all. The storm hunters could only place
it vaguely somewhere in a large ocean area. When it is impossible to
track the center of a hurricane accurately, it is impossible also to
issue accurate warnings.
In 1926, a hurricane crossed the Atlantic from the Cape Verde Islands to
the Bahamas and threatened southern Florida. After it left the latter
islands, weather reports from ships became scarce and the center was too
close to the coast for safety when hurricane warnings were issued,
although everybody in southern Florida knew that there was a severe
storm outside. More than one hundred lives were lost in Miami and
property damage reached one hundred million dollars. In 1928, another
big hurricane started in the vicinity of the Cape Verdes, swept across
the Atlantic, and devastated Puerto Rico and parts of southern Florida.
Loss of life was placed at three hundred in Puerto Rico and at two
thousand in Florida, mostly in the vicinity of Lake Okeechobee.
In these years and up to 1932, several hurricanes were “lost” in the
Gulf of Mexico and citizens of the coastal areas began making demands
for a storm patrol. They wanted the U. S. Coast Guard to send cutters
out to search for disturbances or explore their interiors and send
information by radio to the Weather Bureau. There was opposition from
the forecasters—they didn’t know what they would do with the cutters. If
they had enough ship reports to know where to send the cutters, they
would not need the latters’ reports, and if they had no reports, they
would not know where to send the vessels. Besides, it was the
government’s business to keep ships out of storms—not to send them
deliberately into danger.
The season of 1933 established an all-time record of twenty-one tropical
storms in the West Indian region. Many of them reached the Gulf States
or the South Atlantic Coast and the controversy about sending ships into
hurricanes was resumed, resulting in legislation containing the
authority, but President Roosevelt vetoed it. By 1937 the criticism of
the warnings and the arguments about Coast Guard cutters began again.
This time it involved Senators and Congressmen from Gulf States and
finally the White House was embroiled.
In August, 1937, a delegation of citizens came to Washington and brought
their complaints direct to the White House. The President arranged a
conference so that the storm hunters, Coast Guard officials and others
could explain again why vessels should not go out into the Gulf of
Mexico to get data when the presence of a hurricane was suspected.
Actually, ships were being saved by the warnings which kept them out of
danger, and the criticism was based on fear of hurricanes rather than
any deficiency of the warnings with respect to the coastal areas.
When the conference was held at the White House, the President was busy
with other matters and James Roosevelt presided. The President had given
him a note to the effect that he should receive the delegation in a most
pleasant manner but that it would be dangerous and fruitless to try to
send Coast Guard vessels into hurricanes.
The President’s note to his son said in part:
“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again and that instead of a
hurricane patrol the safest and cheapest thing would be a study of
hurricanes from all of the given points on land and around the Gulf of
Mexico. This might involve sending special study groups to points in
Mexico, such as Tampico, Valparaiso, Tehuantepec, Yucatan, Campeche,
also to the west end of Cuba and possibly to some of the smaller islands
in the region. What the Congressmen and others in Texas want is study
and information and it is my thought that this can be done more cheaply
and much more safely on land instead of sending a ship into the middle
of a hurricane.”
The delegation gathered in an outer office at the White House. It
happened that the Coast Guard had a new Commandant, Admiral Waesche, who
had not been advised of the views of the White House, the Coast Guard,
and the Weather Bureau. In the few minutes before the conference
started, there was no opportunity to inform the Admiral, for he was
engaged in conversation with a group of Senators and Congressmen. As
soon as the conferees were assembled, James Roosevelt called on the
Admiral to speak first. To the amazement of all present, he indorsed the
idea in full and promised to send cutters out in the Gulf whenever a
request was received from the Weather Bureau. Nobody knew what to do
next, so James adjourned the conference, and after everybody had shaken
hands and departed, he went back to his father to explain what had
happened.
Thus began a brief period of hunting hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico
with Coast Guard cutters. During the next two seasons, the Weather
Bureau forecasters notified the Coast Guard when observations were
needed. In each instance a cutter left port in accordance with the
agreement, but as soon as the vessel was in the open Gulf the master was
in supreme command and he would not deliberately put his ship and crew
in jeopardy. Cutters went out in a few cases, but most of the
disturbances to be reconnoitered were crossing the southern Gulf, out of
range of merchantmen on routes to Gulf ports. In sailing directly toward
the center under these conditions, the Coast Guard commander would have
been traveling into the most dangerous sector, and the distance he could
make good in a day in rough water could not have been much larger than
the normal travel of a tropical storm, certainly not a safe margin.
Irate citizens complained to Washington, first, that the Weather Bureau
refused to call on the Coast Guard for observations; and, second, that
the Coast Guard refused to carry out the Weather Bureau’s instructions.
After two or three years, no special information of any particular value
was obtained and the scheme was forgotten.
In accordance with the ideas expressed by President Roosevelt, but
without any support from Congress, some study groups and other special
arrangements secured useful results on coasts and islands, but it was
obvious after 1940 that automatic instruments for exploration of the
upper atmosphere and reconnaissance by aircraft offered the best
prospects for improvement in the service.
The most destructive hurricane during this period devastated large areas
of Long Island and New England in September, 1938, taking six hundred
lives and destroying property valued at about a third of a billion
dollars. This event aroused general criticism of the storm hunters for
two reasons. First, this disturbance, while it was in the West Indies
and during its course as far as Hatteras, behaved like others of great
intensity, but from that point northward its forward motion was without
precedent. During the day when it passed into New England, its
progressive motion exceeded fifty miles an hour, hence little time
remained for the issue of warnings after its increased rapidity of
motion was detected. Second, the people were absorbed in news of
negotiations in Europe to prevent the outbreak of a world war, and storm
news on the radio was largely suppressed to make way for reports of the
European crisis.
Here it might be said that the storm hunters lost another battle, but it
is probable that the loss of life in this hurricane would have exceeded
that at Galveston in 1900 if there had been no real improvement in the
warning service in the meantime.
_6._ THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE
“_—the whirlwind’s heart of peace._”
—Tennyson
After the White House conference in 1937 about sending ships into
hurricanes, some of the Weather Bureau forecasters expressed the idea
that the best method of tracking hurricanes would be by airplane. What
they had in mind was flying around the edge of the storm and getting
three or more bearings from which the location of the center could be
accurately estimated. Nothing came of the idea at the time but after
World War II broke out in Europe, the talk about use of planes
increased. It was the Weather Bureau’s plan to contract with commercial
flyers to go out and get the observations on request from the
forecasters. But no one seriously considered sending planes into the
centers of hurricanes. No one knew what would happen to the plane. There
was no very definite information as to what the flyer would encounter in
the upper layers in the region around the center.
Of course, it was known that at the surface of the earth or the sea
there was a small calm region in the center—an oddity in the weather,
for no other kind of large storm has such a center. The tornado may
have, but it is a very small storm in comparison with a hurricane. Its
writhing, twisting funnel at the vortex is hollow, according to the
testimony of a few men who have looked up into it and lived to tell
about it. In the tropical storm, however, nothing was known about the
central winds in the upper levels. There was no proof that strong winds
did not blow outward from the center up there and a plane would be
thrown into the ring of powerful winds around the eye. The only way to
find out was to fly into it and have a look, but there was no one at the
moment who wanted to venture into it.
On the outer fringes of the hurricane, where light, gusty winds blew
across deep ocean waters, stirred at the surface by giant sea swells,
the hurricane hunters were fairly well satisfied with their findings. In
the middle regions, where deluges of rain slanted through raging winds
and low-flying clouds, the grim fact was that they knew amazingly little
about what was going on in the upper layers. Their balloons sent up to
explore the racing winds above were lost in thick clouds before they had
risen more than a few hundred feet.
On beyond, somewhere in that last inner third of the whirlwind, the
increasing gales rose to a deadly peak and torrents of rain merged with
the spindrift of mountainous wave crests to blot out the view of the
observer. Within this whirling ring of air and water lay the vortex.
When the mariner entered, sometimes slowly, but more often suddenly, the
wind and rain ceased and usually there would be no violence except the
rise and fall of the sea surface, like a boiling pot on a scale which
was huge in fact but small in proportion to the extent of the storm
itself. The entire whirling body of air would likely be bigger than the
state of Ohio; the calm central region might be the size of the city of
Columbus.
Here in this inner third were the mysteries. Where could all this air
go—streaming so violently around and in toward that mysterious center
but never getting there? It must go up, the storm hunters argued, for
what else could produce all this tremendous rainfall if not the upward
rush of moist air to be cooled in the upper levels? And then, why no
rain or wind in the central region? Some argued that the air must
descend in the vortex, growing warmer and dry in descent, but why the
descent? And finally, if the air was moving upward in all this vast area
outside the calm center, what finally became of it?
Even if the storm hunters were unable to answer these questions, they
could render a service of enormous value if they could track the storm
and predict its movements. But they knew that the only sure way to track
a hurricane over the ocean was to find its center and follow it
persistently and accurately from day to day. Tests had shown that it was
not practical to send ships into the storm to find its center and report
by radio. Ships couldn’t move fast enough. If the storm hunters had
known enough about it, they might have concluded that a plane could
enter the storm in the least dangerous sector and find its way swiftly
to the calm center through some upper level without being hurled into
the angry sea. If it reached the center of the vortex—usually called the
“eye of the hurricane”—the navigator might be able to see the sky and
the sun by day, the stars by night. Here the pilot might be able to
figure out his position, as an ocean-going vessel does on some
occasions, and that would be the location of the storm to be placed on
the charts of the storm hunters in the weather office. But nobody took
it seriously until after the United States got into the Second World
War.
When the request for funds to hire commercial flyers in hurricane
emergencies was presented to the Bureau of the Budget, the examiners
asked why the Weather Bureau didn’t try to get the co-operation of the
Army and Navy. Why couldn’t they have their pilots carry out the flights
as needed? There was some talk about it in 1942, but at that time there
were no experienced Army or Navy pilots to spare.
Naturally, the military pilots who thought about flying into the eyes of
hurricanes wanted to know what it was like in the upper levels and in
the center. Air Force pilots who expected to go on bombing missions to
Germany thought it might be more dangerous flying into the vortex of a
hurricane than over an enemy stronghold with the air full of flak and
Nazi fighters rising on all sides. Nobody looked upon the assignment
with any enthusiasm. One discouraging fact was that the reports of
shipmasters who had been in the eyes of hurricanes didn’t agree very
well. Few of them had the ability to describe what they saw. And those
who had the ability told a story that was not reassuring. For example,
one of the first was the master of the ship _Idaho_, caught in the China
Sea in September, 1869, as a typhoon struck. With little of the precious
sea room needed to maneuver, the ship soon was obliged to lie to and
take it. Afterward, when by some miracle the ship had made its way to
shore, the master calmly described his experiences while they were
fresh:
“With one wild, unearthly, soul-chilling shriek the wind suddenly
dropped to a calm, and those who had been in these seas before knew that
we were in the terrible _vortex_ of the typhoon, the dreaded center of
the whirlwind. Till then the sea had been beaten down by the wind, and
only boarded the vessel when she became completely unmanageable; but now
the waters, relieved from all restraint, rose in their own might.
Ghastly gleams of lightning revealed them piled up on every side in
rough, pyramidal masses, mountain high—the revolving circle of wind,
which everywhere inclosed them, causing them to boil and tumble as
though they were being stirred in some mighty cauldron. The ship, no
longer blown over on her side, rolled and pitched, and was tossed about
like a cork. The sea rose, toppled over, and fell with crushing force
upon her decks. Once she shipped immense bodies of water over both bows,
both quarters, and the starboard gangway at the same moment. Her seams
opened fore and aft. Both above and below, men were pitched about the
decks and many of them injured. At twenty minutes before eight o’clock
the vessel entered the vortex; at twenty minutes past nine o’clock it
had passed and the hurricane returned blowing with renewed violence from
the north, veering to the west. The ship was now only an unmanageable
wreck.”
For many years, the classic case was the obliging typhoon that moved
across the Philippines with its center passing directly over the
fully-equipped weather observatory in Manila. It happened on October 20,
1882. The wind which came ahead of the center was of destructive
violence, reaching above 120 miles an hour in a final mad rush from the
west-northwest before the calm set in. It was not an absolute calm.
There were alternate gusts and lulls. The way the winds acted led the
observer to think that the center was about sixteen miles in diameter.
He said:
“The most striking thing about it was the sudden change in temperature
and humidity. The temperature jumped from 75° to 88°. The air was
saturated at 75° but the humidity dropped from 100% to 53% in the center
and then rose to 100% again as the center passed. When the wind suddenly
ceased at the beginning of the calm and the sun came out, many people
opened their windows but they slammed them shut right away, because the
hot, dry air seemed to burn the skin.”
For more than fifty years after this, there were arguments about the
reasons for these changes in temperature and humidity. Some scientists
claimed that they were caused merely by the heating of the sun in a
clear sky and that the air which preceded and followed the center was
cooled and saturated by the rain. Some of the Jesuit scientists at
Manila did not agree. One weatherman showed, for example, that if they
took air at 75° and 100% humidity and heated it to 88°, the humidity
would fall only to about 61% and that the air at Manila at that time of
year had never had such a low humidity (53%), even when the sun was
shining.
The general conclusion was that the air descends in the eye of the
tropical storm. At least, they were convinced that it descended in the
Manila typhoon. When air descends, it is compressed, coming into lower
levels where the pressure is higher. This compression causes its
temperature to rise and the air then has a bigger capacity for moisture.
In other words, the air becomes warmer and drier. There never has been
full agreement on this question. Certainly, in some cases, the air is
not warmer and drier in the center.
In later years, typhoon centers passed over other observatories and had
various effects. However, one struck Formosa on September 16, 1912, and
the calm center passed over the observatory long after the sun had gone
down. In this case, the temperature jumped from 75° to 94° and this
could not be explained by the direct heat of the sun. But there were
different results in other cases and in one instance the temperature
fell a little.
All of these observations were confined to ground level and what the
observer could see from there or from shipboard, where he was being
bounced around by violent seas and sometimes was thoroughly drenched by
the mountainous waves breaking over the decks. One example was the
_Idaho_ in the typhoon in 1869.
A half-century later, two British destroyers were trapped in the same
region by an unheralded typhoon. Setting out for Shanghai in the early
morning, they rounded the Shantung Promontory and headed across the
Yellow Sea at fifteen knots, with sunlight gleaming on the water ahead.
The weather looked favorable, barometer high, wind light, but it failed
to stay that way very long. By ten o’clock there was a strong wind on
the port beam, blowing gustily from the east, and an ominous rising sea.
Reducing speed to eleven knots, the commander of the destroyer in the
lead—called the _Exe_—found by dead reckoning that he was only about
eight miles from land and, although he was running almost parallel to
the coast, their situation was beginning to look dangerous. He had to
make a decision as to his future course.
Among other disturbing factors was the design of the ships. These
destroyers were of a new type, with a large forecastle which made it
likely that they would drag their anchors if they tried to lie-to in a
sheltered place on that exposed coast. The two ships held their course.
By noon the visibility had dropped to less than a mile. The commander
feared that he would be unable to identify any land he might see through
the increasing gloom and concluded that his chances of finding a safe
shelter among the rock-bound islands along the coast was fast becoming
nil. So he signaled to the other destroyer to head fast for the open
sea. In the next hour, the wind and sea mounted rapidly and he was
certain that they were being overtaken by the dangerous sector of the
typhoon. Now they were in real trouble!
His first lieutenant was the last of his officers out of school, so the
commander asked him about the law of storms and the proper course under
the circumstances. According to the latest books which the lieutenant
had studied, they should have steamed toward the northwest but this
would have thrown them onto a lee shore. The commander decided that
there was no choice except to hold their course and run the chance of
going into the dreaded center of the typhoon. So they got busy, doubly
securing all movable gear and seeing that all was snug for a frightening
trip into the unknown. The commander was annoyed, not so much by the
battering the ship was taking as by the cheerful attitude of the
lieutenant, who seemed to be looking forward to this new experience.
In this miserable situation they fought heavy gales and towering seas
for hours. The other destroyer had been lost from view but now appeared
close on their beam. She assumed strange attitudes in the growing
darkness. “At times,” the commander said, “she would be poised on the
crest of a great wave, her fore part high above the sea and her keel
visible up to the conning tower; the after part, also high in the
roaring wind, leaving her propellers racing far out of the water. Then
she would take a dive and an intervening wave would blot out this ‘merry
picture,’ and then, to our relief as the wave passed, a mast would
appear waving on the other side and then we would catch sight of her
funnels and finally her hull, still above water.” As darkness closed in,
the crew of the _Exe_ were glad they could no longer see the other
destroyer for it made them vividly conscious that their own little ship
was going through equally dangerous contortions.
During this time the destroyer _Exe_ had suffered much damage. The upper
deck had been swept clear. Much water was getting below and the pumps
were choked. The commander was weary from holding on to the bridge and
trying to keep his balance. The crew was frightened more than ever by
the increasing power of the storm and the inexorable approach of the
unknown horrors in the center.
The awful night passed in this terrifying manner, with the barometer
steadily going lower, and the quartermaster straining to keep the craft
on course. With powerful winds full in his face and drenched by spray,
he managed to hold the ship most of the time and made the best use of
her high bows. When he failed and allowed the ship to get a few points
off course, the steep waves threw her on her beam ends and came crashing
along the upper decks, making it a tough job to get her back with her
nose against the elements, and the high bows as a sort of shield against
the brutal sea. Besides, the compass light had been beaten out and in
the blackness of the storm he had no way of judging the direction except
by the crash of the wind and water in his face.
In a storm like this, the crew think that they are probably on their
last voyage. They can feel tremendous masses of water strike with
immense force and, after the shock, the vessel shivering as though the
hull had given way, leaving them on the verge of diving toward the
bottom of the sea. Sometimes the _Exe_ was mostly out of water—they
could sense it in the darkness—and then she took what they called a
“belly-flopper” and every man felt sick, fearing the end had come and,
after a moment, fearing just the opposite—that it would not be the end,
after all, and they would have to take more of the same.
Now the lieutenant crawled out from below and, by a series of lurches
between gusts, pulled himself to the side of his commander. “Things look
better,” he shouted. “The barometer is up a little.” But soon after that
he found he had made an error. He had read it an inch too high.
Actually, it had dropped almost an inch in three hours, showing that the
center must now be drawing near. Shortly the rain ceased and the wind
dropped. At 7:00 A.M. they were passing into the vortex.
The ocean now presented a fantastic spectacle. They could see for
several miles—a cauldron of steep towering cones of water with spray at
the crests—a brightening sky over a chaotic sea. Some of these columns
of water would clash together on different courses and produce a weird
effect. The wind became light and a few tired birds sought haven on
deck. This scene lasted only ten to twenty minutes and then the dreaded
squalls ahead of the opposite semicircle of the typhoon began to hit the
vessel. By 7:20 A.M. the full force of the most vicious gales was
bringing new miseries to the exhausted crew.
After three hours, the typhoon began to abate and the commander was
feeling a little easier about his damaged ship until one of the officers
reported that they had sprung a leak. The compartment containing the
fore magazines was flooded and soon filled up. “So the destroyer went
her way,” the commander reported, “with her nose down and her tail in
the air.” She made it to the mouth of the Yang-tse at 11:00 A.M. Up the
river a distance they found their companion destroyer. Its commander had
been much impressed by the blue sky and calm in the vortex, also by the
large number of birds, mostly kingfishers, that came on board.
Examination of the _Exe_ showed that a part of the bottom had been
battered in, shearing the rivets and opening the seams. After thinking
about his good fortune in coming through the typhoon, the commander
wrote in his report: “When I recall (which I can without any trouble)
those awful belly-floppers the craft took, and realized by inspection in
dock what amount of holding power a countersunk rivet can possibly have
in a three-sixteenth of an inch plate, I wonder that I am now in this
world.” Actually, the commander of the _Exe_ had escaped the worst of
it. If he had missed the vortex and had passed through the right edge,
where the forward drive of the typhoon was added to the force of the
violent inner whirl, he might not have lived to tell the story. Many
others have failed under similar circumstances.
Shanghai suffered severely from this typhoon. A flood in the river and
on a low-lying island drowned five thousand Chinese.
All these accounts agreed on one thing—the ring of gales around the
center. Some were more violent than others but the ring was always
there. On the eye of the hurricane, however, there was less agreement. A
strange case was the experience on the American steamship _Wind Rush_,
in October, 1930, off the west coast of Mexico. She was caught in a
violent hurricane and the master suddenly saw that the ship had passed
into the vortex. The second officer, in his report, said: “From 9 A.M.
to 10 A.M. we were in a calm spot with no wind and smooth sea, and the
sun was shining.”
There have been similar instances of vessels in the vortex of hurricanes
without much disturbance of the sea, but these are exceptions. Most of
them have reported confused cross seas, described as “pyramidal” or
“tumultuous.” In November, 1932, the master of the British steamship
_Phemius_, on a voyage from Savannah to the Panama Canal, was so
unfortunate as to become entangled in the outer circulation of a
late-season hurricane moving westward in the Caribbean Sea. It turned
sharply northward and the _Phemius_ was trapped by the ring of fierce
gales in the central region. She rolled through an arc of 70° while the
gusts came with such force that the funnel was blown away. The master
put the wind at two hundred miles an hour. Hatches were blown overboard
like matchwood, derricks and lifeboats were wrecked, and the upper and
lower bridges were blown in. The ship was rendered helpless and was
carried with the hurricane in an unmanageable condition.
Twice the _Phemius_ drifted into the vortex, with high, confused seas
and light winds. The second time the vessel was besieged by hundreds of
birds. They took refuge in every part of the ship but lived only a few
hours. Driving toward the coast of Cuba, the hurricane ravaged the town
of Santa Cruz del Sur, hurling a tremendous storm wave across all the
low ground, engulfing the town, and drowning twenty-five hundred persons
out of a population of four thousand. The _Phemius_ was left behind in a
helpless condition and was taken in tow by a salvage steamer.
The width of the eye of a hurricane commonly varies from a few miles to
twenty or twenty-five. The smallest known was entered by a fishing boat,
the _Sea Gull_, in the Gulf of Mexico, on July 27, 1936. The master,
Leon Davis, was fishing a few miles east of Aransas Pass, Texas, when he
became involved in a small hurricane. “Suddenly,” Captain Davis said,
“the wind died down, the sun shone brightly and the rain ceased. For a
space of about a mile and a half, a clear circular area prevailed; the
dense curtain of rain was seen all around the edge of the circle; and
the roar of the wind was heard in the distance.” On the other hand, one
of the largest eyes yet known attended a big hurricane in October, 1944.
It blasted its way across Cuba and entered Florida on the west coast,
near Tampa. As it neared Jacksonville, the calm center was stretched out
to the remarkable distance of about seventy miles. This was a kind of
freak; some of the storm hunters thought that it had been distorted and
finally drawn into an elongated area by its passage over the western end
of Cuba.
All of the available records of this kind were consulted in due time by
the men who were assigned to the perilous duty of flying military planes
into the vortices of hurricanes in the West Indies and into typhoon
centers in the Pacific. But one of the best of these reports—of weather
and sea conditions observed on many ships caught at the same time in the
central region of a big typhoon—was not available until long after it
happened. The Japanese kept it secret for seventeen years.
The reason for keeping the data secret was the fact that while on grand
maneuvers, the RED Imperial Japanese Fleet was outmaneuvered by a pair
of typhoons and was caught in the center of one of them and severely
damaged. It happened in 1935 and was not reported for publication in
America until 1952.
Just how this happened is not altogether clear. It was in the middle of
September, 1935, when the first typhoon appeared, northwest of the
island of Saipan. It increased in fury as it moved slowly toward Japan.
On the twenty-fifth it crossed western Honshu and roared into the Sea of
Japan, headed northeastward in the direction of the Japanese Fleet. Soon
after this, it dissipated. Before it weakened, however, another typhoon
had formed near Saipan and started toward Japan. It turned more to the
northward than the first typhoon and missed Japan altogether. As it
approached Honshu, late on the twenty-fifth, the RED Imperial Fleet was
passing through the Strait of Tsugaru into the Pacific—squarely in front
of the typhoon center.
The logical explanation for this apparent blunder is that the commanders
wanted more sea room than was at hand in the northeast Sea of Japan to
maneuver in the first typhoon and hoped to get well out in the open
Pacific before they could be cornered by the second one. But it turned
northeastward and went faster and farther out in the Pacific than they
had expected. In fact, its forward motion was more than forty miles an
hour in these last hours before its furious winds surrounded the fleet.
It was a bad calculation for the naval commanders and perhaps for the
weather forecasters. Among the latter, H. Arakawa, one of the foremost
typhoon students in Japan, was then on the staff of forecasters in the
Central Meteorological Observatory in Tokyo. He was in part responsible
for the predictions. In 1952 he made the report which was published by
the U. S. Weather Bureau early in 1953. Taking the view of the
weatherman, Arakawa said that although the damage to the fleet was
unfortunate, there was _fortunately_ a magnificent collection of reports
from the central region of the typhoon for scientific study.
The fleet was caught in the central part of the big storm on the
twenty-sixth of September. Among the ships involved, many of them
damaged, were destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, a seaplane
carrier, mine-layers, transport ships, submarines, torpedo boats, and a
submarine depot ship. The fleet suffered damage mostly from the
tremendous waves in the right rear quadrant of the typhoon. Here the
rapid forward motion of the storm was added to the wind circulation and
the seas were driven to excessive heights. In his report, Arakawa had a
footnote: “The bows of two destroyers, _Hatsuyuki_ and _Yugiri_, were
broken off as a result of excessive storm waves, and many officers and
sailors were lost.”
In the calm center, the clouds broke and faint sunlight came through.
The diameter of the eye was nine or ten miles. To the right of the eye,
some of the waves measured more than sixty feet in height. The maximum
roll of the ships in this area—the total angle from port to
starboard—reached 75° on some of the ships. The wind was steadily above
eighty miles an hour; the gusts were not measured but probably went as
high as 125 miles an hour.
Many of the ships took frequent observations while in the typhoon and
the data would have been extremely valuable if released to the storm
hunters at that time, but when the report was published in 1953 a great
deal of new data had been obtained by airplane, both at the
surface—where Arakawa’s observations were confined—and at higher levels.
It was a little more than nine years after this Japanese incident when
the U. S. Third Fleet was caught in a typhoon east of the Philippines
and suffered at least as much damage as the Japanese in 1935.
One fact is clear. For many years the storm hunters had been gathering
information about hurricane and typhoon centers from observations on
land and sea but they knew very little of what went on there in the
upper air. World War II brought a new era.
_7._ FIRST FLIGHT INTO THE VORTEX!
“_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 to home 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 his weather 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 flying out 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 Wright Flying 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 up and 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 assistants culminated 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 safety _and_ utility 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 the storm—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. The plane 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.
1715 Heavy rain, strong rain static.
1716 Rain continues but static only moderate. Some crash static
intermittently.
1720 Getting darker, cloud more dense, rain very heavy,
turbulence light. Rain static building up, blocking out
Galveston radio range intermittently.
1725 Turbulence light to moderate, rain very heavy.
1728 Altitude 7300′. Free air temperature 46°, cloud getting
somewhat lighter.
1730 Rain less heavy, cloud much lighter, ground visible through
breaks. Surface wind apparently South Southeast.
1735 Crossed east leg of Galveston range and changed course to
330°.
1740 Now flying in thick cloud. Turbulence smooth to light.
1743 Turbulence moderate.
1744 Turbulence moderate to severe.
1745 Sighted clear space ahead and to the left.
1746 Now flying in “eye” of storm. Ground clearly visible, sun
shining through upper clouds to the west. Circling to
establish position. Surface wind South.
1753 Still circling. Altitude 5000′, temperature 73°.
1800 Headed west for Houston. Cloud very dense, rain light,
turbulence moderate, intermittent precipitation static.
1805 Apparently in a thunderstorm. Altitude 5500′. Heavy rain,
turbulence moderate to severe. Free air temperature now 46°.
1815 Changed heading to 10°. Rain light to moderate. Turbulence
light.
1825 Headed 330°. Rain very light, turbulence almost smooth.
Apparently flying between thick cloud layers.
1835 Altitude 5500′. Broken stratocumulus clouds below, high
overcast of altostratus above.
1836 Breaking out into the open with high altostratus deck above.
1900 Landed at Bryan. Sky clear to the northwest.
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 have permission 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 number of 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.
_8._ THE HAMMER AND THE HIGHWAY
_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-penny nail 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 and
Galveston. 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 be lowered 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 of people, 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 their respective 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 combination of wind and wave is
almost irresistible. But even here an occasional citizen chooses to
remain, in spite of the warnings, and when he finally decides to leave
it may be too late to get out and no one can reach him. There have been
many instances of men being carried to sea, clinging to floating
objects, and after describing a wide arc under the driving force of the
rotary winds, being thrown ashore miles away from home. But in other
cases, people are trapped and drowned in the rising waters. In 1919, at
Corpus Christi, warnings were issued while many residents were at their
noon meal, on a Sunday. Many delayed to finish eating while the only
road to higher ground was being rapidly flooded. Of these 175 were
drowned.
The native knows all of the preliminary signs well enough, and it is not
necessary to urge him to take precautions after the moment when the
ominous gusts of the first winds of the storm are felt. He has been in
these situations before and has looked out to see palm trees bent far
over and the rain beginning to blot out the view as the fingers of the
gale seemed to begin searching his walls and roof for a weak spot. Many
prefer not to stay and watch. They board up their windows and doors and
go back to a safer place in the interior. And so this is the time when
the sound of the hammer is heard and streams of refugees are seen on the
highways.
In the early thirties, the increasing population in the hurricane states
caused an annoying shortage of communications in storm emergencies. For
many years the Washington forecasters had sent warnings by telegraph and
the men in weather offices along Southern coasts had talked to each
other by telephone, to exchange notes and opinions, but there were
frequent delays and failures after 1930 because, when a hurricane
approached the coast, the lines became congested with telephone calls
and telegraph messages between relatives and friends worrying about the
dangers, and by residents making arrangements for evacuation, in
addition to emergency calls of many other kinds.
In 1935, the Weather Bureau found a very good answer to the
communication shortage in emergencies. A teletypewriter line called the
“hurricane circuit,” running around the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast of
Florida, was leased on July 1, with machines in all weather offices.
Another line was installed between Miami and Washington and eventually
extended to New York and Boston. No matter how congested the public
lines became, the weather offices were able to exchange messages and
reports without any delay. At the same time, three hurricane forecast
offices were established in the region—at Jacksonville, New Orleans, and
San Juan. After that time, the Washington office issued forecasts and
warnings of hurricanes only when they came northward to about 35° north
latitude and from there to Block Island, where the Boston office took
over.
The first violent tropical storm to strike the coast of the United
States after the hurricane circuit was set up came across the Florida
Keys on Labor Day, 1935. It was spotted in ship reports and by
observations from Turks Island on August 31 as a small storm. It moved
westward not far from the north coast of Cuba on September 1 and turned
to the northwest on September 2, having developed tremendous violence.
This hurricane is worth noting, for its central pressure, 26.35 inches,
was the lowest ever recorded in a tropical storm at sea level on land
anywhere in the world. The average pressure at sea level is about 29.90
inches. The biggest tropical storms have central pressures below 28.00
inches, but very rarely as low as 27.00 inches.
The strongest winds around the center of the Labor Day hurricane
probably exceeded two hundred miles an hour. About seven hundred
veterans of World War I were in relief camps at the point where the
center struck. A train was sent from Miami to the Keys to evacuate the
veterans ahead of the storm, but it was delayed and was wrecked and
thrown off the tracks as the veterans were being put aboard. The loss of
life among veterans and natives on the Keys in the immediate area was
nearly four hundred. There was much criticism in the press. In 1936, a
committee in Congress carried on a long investigation of the
circumstances which led to the establishment of the relief camps in such
a vulnerable position, the failure of the camp authorities to act on
warnings from the Weather Bureau, and the delay of the rescue train.
There was much talk in the committee of increasing the Weather Bureau’s
appropriations, to enable it to give earlier warnings, but nothing came
of it.
The new teletypewriter circuit served well. After this violent hurricane
crossed the Keys, it went through the eastern Gulf and then passed over
Western Florida and overland to Norfolk. In spite of intense public
excitement, communications between weather offices were maintained
without serious interruption. This improved service continued in the
years that followed. Radio circuits to the West Indies and a
teletypewriter circuit to Cuba by cable helped to bring the reports
promptly and at frequent intervals in emergencies.
In this modern drama of fear and violence, the hurricane warning has
become the signal that may cause desperate actions by hundreds of
thousands of people. Colossal costs are entailed in the movement of
populations in exposed places and in the protection of property and
interruption of business. Now, in this emergency, a civil service
employee not used to making decisions involving large sums of money
finds himself in a position from which he has no escape. He has to make
up his mind—to issue the warning or not to issue it. If he fails to get
it out in time, there will be much loss of life and property that might
have been avoided. If he issues the warning and the hurricane turns away
from the coast or loses force, very large costs will have been entailed
without apparent justification. In either case, he will be subjected to
a lot of criticism.
The hurricane hunter and forecaster who stepped into this responsible
position at a critical time was Grady Norton. Born in Alabama, in 1895,
Grady joined the Weather Bureau shortly before World War I, then became
a meteorologist in the Army, after taking training at A. & M. College of
Texas, where a weather school was established early in 1918. But he had
no wish to be a forecaster or to send out warnings of hurricanes.
Nevertheless, the people in Washington were unable to get out of their
minds the fact that whenever Norton made forecasts for practice, his
rating was very high, especially for the southeastern part of the
country. The Bureau encouraged him at every opportunity because he was
one of those who are born with the knack of making good weather
predictions—which is an art rather than a science, even in its present
stage of development.
Then in 1928, Grady went on a motor trip and arrived in southern Florida
just after the Palm Beach hurricane had struck Lake Okeechobee, killing
more than two thousand people. He saw the devastation, the mass burials,
the suffering, and determined to do something about it. By 1930 he was
at New Orleans, getting experience in forecasting Gulf hurricanes. After
five years, the hurricane teletype and the centers at Jacksonville and
New Orleans were established and Grady was put in charge of hurricane
forecasting at Jacksonville. There, and later at Miami, his name, Grady
Norton, coming over the radio, became familiar and reassuring to almost
every householder in the region. For twenty hurricane seasons he took
the brunt of it in almost countless emergencies. In some instances, he
made broadcasts steadily and continuously every two hours, or oftener,
for two days or more without rest, his microphone having direct
connections to more than twenty Florida radio stations, and by powerful
short-wave hook-ups to small towns all over the state. As the hurricane
threatened areas beyond Florida, he continued the issue of bulletins,
warnings, and advices. In the last ten years of this service, he was
warned by his physicians to turn a good deal of the responsibility over
to his assistants, but the public wanted to know his personal decisions.
In 1954, after Hurricanes Carol and Edna had devastated sections of the
northeast with resultant serious criticism of the Bureau in regard to
the former, a fast-moving blow that allowed very limited time for
precautions, Norton died on the job while tracking Hurricane Hazel
through the Caribbean. A tall, thin, sandy-haired Southerner, Norton had
a slow, calm way of talking that put him, in the public mind, at the top
of the list of hurricane hunters of his generation. And it was generally
conceded that to his efforts were to be credited in a large degree the
advances in hurricane forecasting in the years after 1935. But the
outstanding progress was gained from the use of aircraft to reconnoiter
hurricanes, in which Norton played a very important part.
In Grady Norton’s place, the Bureau put Gordon Dunn, who was an
associate of Norton’s at Jacksonville when the service began and who had
more recently been in charge of the forecast center at Chicago.
By the end of 1942 it was plain that the weather offices of the Army and
Navy would have to join with the Weather Bureau in hunting and
predicting hurricanes. It was agreed that the combined office would work
best at Miami. For the 1943 storm season, the Weather Bureau moved its
forecast office from Jacksonville to Miami, with Norton in charge, and
the military agencies assigned liaison officers there for the purpose of
coordinating the weather reports received and the warnings issued. All
the experts felt that military aircraft would have to be used to get the
reports needed. In August, 1943, the news of Colonel Duckworth’s
successful flight into the center of the Texas hurricane was the
decisive factor. Reconnaissance began in 1944.
_9._ WINGS AGAINST THE WHIRLING BLASTS
_Said the black-browed hurricane
Brooding down the Spanish main
“Shall I see my forces, zounds!
Measured in square inches, pounds?
With detectives at my back
When I double on my track!
All my secret paths made clear!
Published to a hemisphere!
Shall I? Blow me, if I do!”_
—Bret Harte
After Joe Duckworth flew into the center of the hurricane near Galveston
on July 27, 1943, there was much excitement about the remarkable fact
that he had experienced no very dangerous weather or damage to his plane
on the trip. But the experts realized that hunting hurricanes as a
regular business would be different. Men who had flown the weather in
the Caribbean and elsewhere in the tropics and subtropics, and those who
had just thought about it, had visions of undulating seas stirred by
soft tropical breezes, white clouds piled in neat balls on the horizon,
blue water, blue sky, and lush palm-covered coasts and islands. And yet
they knew that nowhere is the sly trickery of wind and storm more
dangerous. Suddenly and with no apparent reason, the soft breezes turn
into quick little gusts and wrap themselves around a center, with gray
clouds spreading and rain coming in brief squalls. The whirl spreads,
gathering other winds into its orbit, and hard rain begins. Soon there
are violent gales and the power of the storm is apparent in the roaring
of the wind and sea.
And so it is easy to think of a plane in a hurricane as being like an
oak leaf in a thunderstorm, except that the leaf is bigger in proportion
but lacks the skillful handling of a youthful crew, alert, fearful and
resourceful, straining desperately to keep it from rocketing steeply
into the wind-torn sea below. For these reasons, the men who ventured in
1943 to probe tropical storms by air were exceedingly cautious about it.
They went into it at a high level—usually as far up as the plane would
go—and came down by easy stages, in the calm center, if possible, ready
to turn around and dash for land the moment anything went wrong.
The next after Duckworth and his associates to look into a hurricane was
Captain G. H. MacDougall of the Army Air Forces. The second
fully-developed storm of 1943 came from far out in the open Atlantic and
passed east of the Windward Islands on a north-northwest course toward
Bermuda. MacDougall wanted to have a first-hand view of its insides.
Ships in the Atlantic were reporting extremely high winds and waves
fifty to sixty feet high and five hundred to six hundred feet in length.
MacDougall went to see Colonel Alan, who said he was ready to pilot the
plane. So the two took off from Antigua on August 20.
According to the report by MacDougall, they came in at a very high level
and began to explore the outer circulation of the storm. He said: “We
ran into rain falling from overcast. There were broken cumulus and
stratus clouds below us. As the sun became more and more blotted out, we
seemed to be heading into a bluish twilight. In spite of the low
visibility due both to rain and moderate haze, it was impossible to make
out the ocean through the wind-torn stratus below, and while we were yet
to see the teeth of the storm, the snarl was already too evident. A
surface wind of forty to fifty miles per hour from the southwest was
probably a good estimate in this part of the storm. Colonel Alan now
began to let the plane down and we stopped taking oxygen. At the same
time, the wheels were let down to minimize the turbulence, and the plane
leveled off at an elevation of one thousand feet which was below the
stratus.
“For those of us who had spent enough time in the Caribbean to be
familiar with the magnitude of the waves usually encountered, it was
hard to believe what we saw below. The seas were tremendous and the
crests were being blown off in long swirls by a wind that must easily
have exceeded seventy miles per hour. The long parallel streaks of foam
streaming from one wave to another made it evident from which direction
the wind was blowing.”
About a month later, a tropical storm formed in the western Gulf of
Mexico, not far from Vera Cruz. Shortly afterward, it moved toward the
Texas coast, increasing rapidly in force, and there was general alarm.
People began to abandon the beaches and protect their property in the
coastal towns. At this time there was a young officer, Lieutenant Paul
Ekern, at Tinker Air Field near Oklahoma City, who was anxious to see
the inside of one of these big storms. This one looked like his last
chance for 1943 and he began talking it up. He found Sergeant Jack
Huennekens who was ready to go and they looked for a plane and pilot.
Time went by, but the hurricane center slowed down to a crawl and
described a loop off the coast, taking three days to turn around.
Excited conversations about the storm created interest, and about the
time that Ekern and Huennekens found an Air Force pilot, Captain
Griffin, anxious to go, a Navy man came over from Norman, Oklahoma, and
said he had some instruments he would like to carry into the hurricane
and get records of conditions encountered. He was told that anybody
crazy enough to go was welcome. He introduced himself as a Navy
Aerologist, Gerald Finger, and they all shook hands and got their things
ready.
On the afternoon of the eighteenth, with the hurricane still hanging
ominously off the coast but with some loss of violence, the crew took
off for south Texas, carrying the Navy man and his instruments. They
came into the storm area at about thirty thousand feet and proceeded
cautiously toward the center. At this level there was very little
turbulence, but the view was magnificent. There were mountainous
thunderclouds, some extending fifteen thousand feet above the plane.
Carefully they explored the region and finally came into a place where
they could see the surface of the Gulf white with foam and piled-up
clouds ringing a space where the sky was partly clear. This, they
decided, must be the center.
Cautiously they went down to twelve thousand feet, circling around as
they descended, and keeping records of temperature, humidity, and
pressure. At times they flew through clouds on instruments in the rain,
and now and then there was light icing. After about three hours, they
began to run low on gas, so they flew through the western part of the
storm and back to Oklahoma.
At the end of the hurricane season, these flights were reported to the
Weather Bureau and recommendations were forwarded to the Joint Chiefs of
Staff that military aircraft be used routinely to explore hurricanes and
improve the accuracy of the warnings. The Joint Chiefs referred this to
their meteorological committee, with representatives of the Army Air
Corps, the Navy and the Weather Bureau, and on February 15, 1944, a plan
was approved for the coming season. As far as possible, crews with
experience in flying the weather were selected. Some of these had been
on daily missions on the Atlantic, for the protection of convoys. By the
beginning of the 1944 season, planes and men were at their posts in
Florida, ready to go on instructions from the joint hurricane center in
Miami.
Probing of hurricanes by air came to a sharp focus in September, 1944.
On the eighth, signs of a disturbance were picked up in the Atlantic,
northeast of Puerto Rico. As it approached the northern Bahamas, its
central pressure was extremely low, below 27.00 inches—estimated at
26.85—and it covered an enormous area with winds of terrific force. From
here its center crossed the extreme eastern tip of North Carolina,
sideswiped the New Jersey coast, doing vast damage, and then hit Long
Island and New England with tremendous fury. On account of the war,
ships at sea were not reporting the weather and the hurricane hunters
had a real job on their hands.
On the morning of the tenth, Forecaster Norton at the Miami Weather
Bureau studied the weather map, grumbled about the lack of observations
from the West Indies, and decided to ask for a plane to go out and
report the weather north of Puerto Rico. He had little to go on, but he
thought it was a very bad storm. On the afternoon of the ninth, the Air
Corps had sent a plane out from Antigua. They had reported winds of
eighty miles, very rough seas, and center about 250 miles northeast of
San Juan. Very little information had come from the area since that
time, except the regular weather messages from San Juan. After trying to
get the Navy office on the telephone half a dozen times, Norton gave up.
Every time he started to dial, the phone rang and he answered it, making
an effort to hang up quickly and get a call in before it rang again. But
many people had learned about the storm and were anxious for more
information, hence the phone was constantly busy.
“I thought this was an unlisted phone,” he complained to the map crew.
“It is,” replied an assistant. “We gave the number only to the radio,
press, and a few others, to make sure we could get a call out when we
had to, but these restricted phone numbers leak out. We’ll have to
change the number again.”
Norton squeezed between the map man and the wall and sat down at the
teletypewriter in the corner after the operator had stepped out into the
hall. The office was crowded and when one man wanted to leave his place,
nearly everybody else had to stand up to make room. Norton rang a bell,
rattled the teletypewriter, and finally got Commander Loveland on the
line down at the Navy office.
This was an exclusive line—Weather Bureau to Navy—and Norton pecked out
a message. “Looks like a bad hurricane out there. It’s maybe three days
from Florida if it comes here, but it probably won’t. Looks like it
would go up toward the Carolinas. We can’t be sure. Maybe we should have
a recco this morning. What do you think?”
“Think we can get one up there from Puerto Rico this morning,” came the
message from Loveland. “I’ll see what I can do. Did you check with the
Army?”
“Yes, the Major talked to Colonel Ellsworth and he says they expect to
get a plane out there from Borinquen this afternoon. Also, I asked for
clearance on a public message yesterday and got an OK last night.”
At that time, because of the war, public releases about storms along the
coast were still restricted and had to be cleared with Naval Operations
in Washington. If enemy submarines learned that planes were being
evacuated from airports on the seaboard, they were emboldened to come
out in the open and attack shipping along the coast. Oil tankers and
other ships would have a bad enough time in the storm without running
into submarines openly on the prowl. But the Chiefs of Staff had to
balance this against the possible loss of life and property in coastal
communities.
On their mission to explore the storm, the Navy crew from Puerto Rico
ran into heavy rain and turbulence. Visibility was nil as they
approached the center. They stayed down low to keep a view of the ocean
but found the altimeter badly in error. As soon as they broke out of the
clouds, they found the sea was much closer than they had figured. The
plane was almost completely out of control several times. They changed
course, got out of the storm, sent a message to Miami, and returned to
Ramey Field in Puerto Rico.
Steadily the hurricane kept on a west-northwest course, increasing in
size and violence. As it went along, the aircraft of the Navy and Air
Forces were on its heels and driving toward the center, like gnats
around an angry bull. It was headed for the Carolinas; everybody was
agreed on that now. Ships were in trouble, running to get from between
the hurricane and the coast as the winds closed in, and anxious people
waited for the next report.
At that time, a hurricane was thought to have four stages of existence.
First was the formation stage, often with circulatory winds and rain
developing in a pressure wave coming westward over the Atlantic or
Caribbean. Second, it quickly concentrated into a small but very violent
whirl and, over a relatively small area, had the most violent winds of
its existence. In this stage it might not have been more than one
hundred miles in diameter. Third, it became a mature storm, spreading
out, and although its winds did not become any more violent, they spread
over a much larger area, maybe as much as three hundred miles, or more,
in diameter. Fourth was the stage of decay, when it began to lose its
almost circular shape and the winds began to diminish. Now it went off
to the northward and became an extra-tropical storm or struck inland in
the south and died with torrential rains and squally winds.
This hurricane seemed to be an exception. As it spread out to cover a
bigger area, its winds seemed to develop greater fury. A Navy plane went
in as it approached the Carolinas and found extreme turbulence, winds
estimated at 140 miles an hour, torrential rain that penetrated the
airplane, and no visibility through the splatter and smear on the
windows. And when the stalwart crew came down below the clouds, the sea
was a welter of foam, with gusts wiping the tops off waves that reached
up to tremendous heights.
While no planes were lost in probing this terrible storm, a destroyer, a
mine sweeper, two Coast Guard cutters, and a light vessel were sunk. An
Army plane estimated the winds at 140 miles an hour. The weather
officer, Lieutenant Victor Klobucher, said that it was the worst storm
that had been probed by the hurricane hunters up to that time. The
turbulence was so bad that, with both the pilot and co-pilot straining
every muscle, the plane could not be kept under control, and several
times they thought it would be torn apart or crash into the sea. On
returning to the base, the fliers found that 150 rivets had been sheared
off one wing alone.
On the morning of the fourteenth of September, the terrible tempest was
close to the eastern tip of North Carolina, apparently destined to
sideswipe the coast from there northward with devastating force. There
was some alarm in Washington. It might possibly turn more to the
northward and its center might come up Chesapeake Bay or up the Potomac
River. A violent storm in Washington at that time would have been
detrimental to the prosecution of war plans. In 1933, a smaller
hurricane had taken this course and its destructive visit to the Bay
region and the Capital had not been forgotten. Also, in the minds of the
military was the opportunity offered that day to explore a big hurricane
and find out more concerning its inner workings.
On that critical morning, Colonel F. B. Wood, a veteran flyer in the Air
Corps, came down to Bolling Field outside Washington with
hurricane-probing on his mind. After talking about it to the men around
the field, he decided to try a flight at least into the outer edges of
the storm as it passed to the eastward during the day. He thought about
the junior officers and men being sent into these furious winds and he
felt it was a good idea for one of the head men to go out and see what
it was like.
Wood talked to Lieutenant Frank Record and found he was anxious to go.
He grabbed the telephone and got Major Harry Wexler on the line. Harry
was a Weather Bureau research official who was in the Army for the
duration.
“Harry, how about taking you out in the hurricane today?” Wood asked.
“I’ll pilot the plane. Frank is going along.”
“Sure you can take me out, but you’ve got to bring me back,” Harry
answered. “This is a round trip, Floyd, I hope.” Wood agreed to do his
best to make a round trip out of it.
At two o’clock that afternoon, the trio took off and headed east with
some misgivings. They knew that this was one of the worst tropical
storms that had been charted up to that time. The hurricane was then
centered near Cape Henry, Virginia. The wind at Norfolk had been up to
ninety miles an hour. Colonel Wood described it as follows:
“Immediately after take-off, we penetrated a thin overcast, the top of
which was about fifteen hundred feet, and then proceeded to a point
approximately twenty miles northeast of Langley Field. The boundary of
the hurricane, as seen from the latter location, was a dense black wall
running along the western edge of the Chesapeake Bay. The airplane was
turned on a heading so as to fly a track that would lead straight toward
the estimated position of the center of the hurricane. Altitude was
three thousand feet. A drift correction of 30° was allowed to account
for the estimated one hundred miles per hour cross wind encountered at
the outer edge of the storm. Immediately on entering the outer edge, the
atmosphere turned very dark and a blanket of heavy rainfall was
encountered.”
Very surprisingly, the flyers reported that in this area a strong but
steady down-current was also encountered. The latter was contrary to the
accepted idea that all of the area encompassed by the steep pressure
fall in a hurricane contains ascending rather than descending air up to
great heights. Although visibility was very low, due to the heavy
rainfall, there were very few clouds below the altitude of the airplane
(three thousand feet), except for some scud over Cape Henry.
The waves in Chesapeake Bay were enormous. A freighter plowing through
the Bay was being swept from bow to stern by huge waves which at times
appeared to engulf the whole vessel at once. Spray was being thrown into
the air at heights which appeared to reach two hundred feet above the
surface of the Bay. From the appearance of the water, both within
Chesapeake Bay and east of Cape Henry, it is not surprising that a Navy
destroyer of the 1850-ton class was sunk there. One of the foremost
thoughts in the men’s minds at the time was that should the aircraft be
forced down in the hurricane, neither life rafts, “Mae Wests,” or any
other lifesaving device would have saved them from drowning!
The flight was continued on toward the assumed position of the center of
the hurricane. Although the downdraft continued strong, very little
turbulence was encountered. The airplane lost a speed of about seventy
miles per hour in the necessary climb required to make up for the
downward motion of the air. The heavy rain continued. At a point
approximately fifty to sixty miles inward from the outer edge of the
hurricane, they suddenly entered an area of rising air. This area also
contained fairly dense clouds below, but very thin clouds above. The sun
was visible through the thin clouds overhead. They seemed to be on the
edge of the center. The vertical air movement was of such magnitude that
the airplane was lifted from the three thousand foot level to five
thousand feet before power could be reduced and the airplane nosed
downward. Turbulence in this area was also considerably more severe than
in the zone of descending air just passed through, but was not of such
severity as to endanger the flight.
Although the flight was continued for a few minutes on toward the point
where the center of the hurricane was thought to be, the conditions of
flight remained constant; that is, moderate turbulence, rising air, and
the sun faintly visible through the thin clouds overhead. The men
thought they were off to one side or other of the center, but not
finding it, and not knowing the direction in which to fly to locate it
exactly, the airplane was turned around and flown on a track which was
estimated would lead toward Norfolk. An altitude of five thousand feet
was maintained on the way out. The dark band of descending air and heavy
rainfall was traversed in the reverse order as during the incoming
flight. They emerged from the hurricane at a point approximately thirty
miles east-northeast of Norfolk.
Afterward, Colonel Wood felt more confident about junior officers flying
into hurricanes, but there were many questions yet to be answered.
Incidentally, the three men in this plane and the members of the
squadron who flew into the same hurricane from Miami were awarded the
Air Medal in February, 1945, for their bravery in these flights.
Colonel Wood drew the following conclusions:
“Although one of the more important points indicated by our experience
during the aforementioned flight is that hurricanes can very probably be
successfully flown through after they have reached temperate latitudes,
it should not be accepted as conclusive proof that all hurricanes may be
flown through. Although there have been several instances of flights
into hurricanes before they migrated out of the tropical regions, it is
not known whether, at the times the flights were made, any of these
storms were of an intensity that even approached the maximum possible.
Further, it is not known for certain whether the hurricane that passed
along the Virginia coast on the fourteenth of September is typical of
all hurricanes once they reach temperate latitudes. Indications are that
this hurricane was about as severe as they ever get to be at these
latitudes, but insufficient flying experience in hurricanes has been
obtained to determine conclusively that all hurricanes in temperate
latitudes are safe to fly through. Any pilot who in the future might
desire to repeat the experience referred to in this statement is advised
that any hurricane should be approached gingerly and with a view toward
making an immediate 180° change in his track, should severe turbulence,
hail, or severe thunderstorm activity be encountered.
“It is believed that the method of examining a hurricane by flight
reconnaissance that would produce the most revealing results is to
attempt an approach to it from the stratosphere. It is thought, further,
that such a flight could be made over the outer rim of the hurricane and
a let-down into the center or hollow eye of the storm be made with
complete safety. A record of the temperature at various flight levels
while descending through the central (hollow) portion of the storm,
together with photographs of the cloud structure, would be of tremendous
value.”
In October there was another hurricane in Florida. It began in the
western Caribbean on the thirteenth and crossed western Cuba on the
seventeenth. On the south coast the hurricane winds created an enormous
tide. More than three hundred people were killed, and a Standard Oil
Company barge was carried ten miles inland. When the big winds roared
across Florida on the eighteenth and nineteenth, it was a severe storm
with a calm center that was at one time about seventy miles long.
As it drove violent winds and seas toward Florida, an airline company,
Transcontinental & Western Air, decided to investigate and sent an
experienced pilot, Captain Robert Buck, in a B-17, to fly through and
observe the weather and electrical phenomena in the storm. Of course, he
considered the flight hazardous but he was willing. Any person who had
experienced the violent winds of these storms or read about their
destructive effects was likely to assume that a plane at low levels in
the middle part of the storm might have its wings torn off.
Buck started to climb into the edge of the storm at Alma, Georgia, going
in warily at four thousand feet and finding only light to moderate
turbulence from there to nine thousand feet, after which it became
smoother. This was in accordance with the reports of other fliers who
had ventured in at high levels, and he was reassured.
At eleven thousand feet the rain changed to sleet. This was not
unexpected. Ordinarily it is much colder at such a height than at the
ground. The temperature drops about one degree for each rise of three
hundred feet. Although the plane was flying in instrument conditions and
“blind,” there were no ordinary water-cloud particles, but simply haze
and sleet.
At 12,700 feet, with the temperature at the freezing point, the plane
flew through moderate to heavy snow with very large flakes. The climb
was continued and the snow remained moderate, but as the altitude
increased, the size of the snowflakes decreased. The air was perfectly
smooth, with the exception of about one minute of light turbulence at
16,000 feet. During the entire climb no ice was encountered, but there
were a few patches of snow sticking on the airplane. This was definitely
not ice. Due to loss of radio reception on all receivers, including the
loop, it was difficult to obtain the wind accurately. It was estimated
to be easterly at approximately eighty-five miles an hour, to about
16,000 feet, where it changed to westerly with about the same velocity.
At 19,400 feet, the temperature had dropped to 27°. At 22,800 feet, the
snow was light and fine and the temperature was 18°. The temperature had
dropped to 14° at 24,600 feet.
At 25,000 feet, the plane broke out of the side of the storm near the
top. At 25,800 feet, the plane was flying in the clear where the
temperature was 18°. During the entire climb from 9,500 feet to 25,000
feet, no fog was encountered, only particles of snow.
Near Jacksonville, Florida, the tops of the clouds dropped sharply to
8,000 feet. The plane flew east out to sea to check the eastern side of
the storm and, satisfied that Jacksonville was close to the storm’s
center, proceeded to the coast again and to Daytona Beach, where the
craft landed.
Pilot Buck concluded that the paramount danger lies in an aircraft
becoming lost, due to the failure of radio navigation caused by static,
coupled with the high winds. He said that a tropical storm of the type
flown is not hazardous to aircraft in respect to structural failure and
loss of control, if an altitude of over approximately 8,000 feet is
held.
In December, all the men connected with the hurricane warning service in
the Army, Navy, Weather Bureau and other agencies—including the top
officials, the forecasters, the men who directed the flights, the
pilots, weather officers, and others who made up the crews, the radio
men on shore, and the Coast Guard people—were fully represented in a
conference in Washington. Here they all went over their experiences and
offered every possible suggestion for improving the service. Many things
were needed, but two tough problems worried everybody.
One was how the crew could find out where they were in latitude and
longitude or in distance and direction from some point on an island or
on the coast after they found the center of the storm. After all, the
weather observer, navigator, and the radio man might figure out how to
get in the eye, and the plane might get into it, but if they failed to
get their position accurately, the information was of doubtful value.
This nearly always depended on radio signals from distant shore
stations, for it was seldom that they could get a celestial fix as a
mate does on a ship at sea. The second problem was communications—how to
get the weather message off and be sure it had been received at a shore
radio station, and see also that it reached the forecast offices
promptly. All of this had many sources of delay. In a hurricane, the
atmospherics were often excessive. At times the radio man on the plane
could hear nothing but loud static in his ear phones. He was powerless
to do anything except to send “blind” and hope somebody would receive it
and understand what it was. Slowly these problems were solved in part as
time went on.
_10._ KAPPLER’S HURRICANE
_Black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell._
—Milton
Kappler’s Hurricane was one of the most violent of history. It got its
name from a weather officer, a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps
named Bernard J. Kappler. The story includes the vivid personal
reactions of a number of men who explored this tremendous storm as it
built up its energy while crossing fifteen hundred miles of tropical and
subtropical sea surface and finally ravaged parts of Southern Florida,
including the outright destruction of the big Richmond Naval Air Base.
The fact is that this storm seems to have had its birth over western
Africa. There were signs of it there and near the Cape Verde Islands on
the first two days of September. Later there were some indications of
its winds and low pressure in radio reports from ships but eventually it
was lost for the time being, far out in the Atlantic.
Kappler discovered it on September 12, 1945. He was on a regular
weather-reporting mission to the Windward Islands. Every day one or more
B-25’s took off from Morrison Field at West Palm Beach and explored the
atmosphere on flights to Antigua, British West Indies, returning via the
open Atlantic to Florida. On that day there was nothing unusual until
the plane in which Kappler was flying was about two hours from Antigua.
Here, he noted a black wall of clouds to the east and at his suggestion
the pilot, First Lieutenant D. A. Cassidy, took the plane down to
fifteen hundred feet and they looked around.
Without any doubt, a tropical storm was in the making. Its winds already
were blowing around a center with gusts at about seventy miles an hour.
There was moderate turbulence, with stretches of rain, but they had no
particular difficulty in flying through it. They reported it to
headquarters and were told to land at Coolidge Field in Antigua and be
prepared to take another look and report in the morning.
This operation was known as “Duck Fight,” consisting of five B-25
aircraft and five crews made up of twenty officers and fifteen men. This
particular group had been at British Guiana but had moved up to Florida
in May for the new hurricane duty. It was their job to explore this
region twice daily, looking for weather trouble when no storm was known
to be in progress. If a suspicious area was found, they were deployed
and used in accordance with directives from the hurricane center at
Miami. The Navy also had planes assigned to similar missions.
After breakfast on the thirteenth Kappler’s crew took off again. About
two hours out of Antigua, they encountered winds up to about eighty
knots (a little above ninety miles an hour) but flying was smooth. The
crew made a few jokes on the general subject of how easy it was to fly
through hurricanes. The co-pilot, Lieutenant Hugh Crowe, had the
controls. He turned toward the center and the wind picked up to 120
knots. Soon they were in trouble, with severe turbulence and heavy rain.
The air speed fluctuated between 160 and 240 miles an hour and cylinder
temperatures began to fall rapidly. Crowe fed power to the engines, but
the plane began getting out of control. Cassidy had to help him keep the
ship level. Kappler shouted that the pressure was dropping rapidly—the
pressure altitude was seventeen hundred feet but their actual height was
only nine hundred. Crowe said the turbulence was the most severe he had
ever experienced. The plane yawed fifteen degrees on either side of the
heading. The navigator, Lieutenant Redding W. Bunting, said dryly, “In
my opinion a hurricane is not the place in which to fly an airplane.”
By the fourteenth, it was obvious to all concerned that they had a
really big storm on their hands. Its center had been north of Puerto
Rico on the thirteenth, and on the fourteenth, moving rather rapidly, it
was passing north of Haiti. The first plane took off from Borinquen
Field, Puerto Rico, in the morning, Cassidy at the controls, and within
an hour the crew were getting into it. At the end of this flight,
Co-pilot Crowe said, “My respect for hurricanes has increased
tremendously!”
First, the right engine was not running smoothly and after a little it
almost stopped. Cassidy asked Bunting where the nearest land was and
when he said Cuba, they turned 90° and made for it. After twenty minutes
the engine was doing better, so they had a brief conference and decided
to try for the hurricane center. Turning back, they saw gigantic sea
swells and a white boiling ocean ahead. Soon they hit the worst
turbulence Cassidy had ever seen, and with it there were intervals of
torrential rain. It was terrific. The cockpit was leaking like a sieve.
Most of the time it took full rudder and aileron to lift a wing. The
plane got into attitudes they had never dreamed of. It was impossible to
hold a heading, for the ship was yawing more than 30° and taking a
terrible side buffeting. Maybe this lasted three to five minutes but it
seemed like hours. Suddenly they passed through the edge of the center,
it was smooth for about a minute, and then they were in the worst part
again. Bunting noted a piece of advice, “When you are near the center,
about all you can do is brace yourself and hold on to something that
won’t pull loose.”
Bunting reported afterward that it took both pilot and co-pilot to
control the ship and at times the RPM set at 2,100 would drop to 1,900
and then rise to 2,200, due to the terrific force of the wind. Kappler
kept phoning the correct altitude to the pilot at short intervals
because of the enormous changes in pressure. It was impossible to write
in the log book so he scribbled as best he could on a piece of paper and
copied it afterward. He noted that before entering the eye it was very
dark. Inside it was cloudy but the light was better, indicating that the
upper clouds were missing. When the flight was finished the crew was
glad to be back at Morrison Field—to put it mildly!
Another plane at Morrison Field had been out the day before and soon was
taking off again, at 2:00 P.M. The pilot was Lieutenant A. D. Gunn. He
flew a direct course to the center of the storm—he hadn’t realized the
day before that he was elected to go through it again today, so he
wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. These two days had
provided his first such experience. One cylinder head slid to a very low
temperature in the heavy rain and Gunn dropped the landing gear and
tried to keep it up to 100°, but one engine died. The turbulence was so
bad that neither he nor the co-pilot could tell which engine was out.
The severe turbulence lasted for a full thirty minutes, about ten
minutes of this being flown on one engine, with the crew desperately
working on the other while they bounced around. The flight engineer,
Sergeant Harry Kiefaber, had to leave his seat because of water pouring
down his back and the tossing up and down, with his head repeatedly
hitting the top of the plane. He tried to go back to join the navigator
but the plane started to fall off to the right and he had visions of
ditching in a mass of white foam. The pilot got it under control but it
seemed that they were being tossed around like popcorn in a popper.
Gradually the turbulence ceased, the other engine began running smoothly
and they headed straight for Morrison.
But the conditions on the fourteenth were just an introduction to what
happened on the fifteenth. The first crew took off at 7 A.M., with the
edge of the hurricane causing rough weather at the field. Here is the
story told by the navigator, Lieutenant James P. Dalton:
“Frankly speaking, throughout my entire life I have been frightened,
really frightened, only three times. All of this was connected
intimately with weather reconnaissance. I think I can truthfully and
without exaggeration say that absolutely the worst time was while I
was flying through Kappler’s Hurricane on September 15, 1945. We were
stationed at Morrison Field, West Palm Beach, Florida, at the time.
Everyone except the Duck Flight Recco Squadron had evacuated the field
for safer areas the day before.
“Hurricane reconnaissance being our business, we of course stayed on,
in order to operate as closely as possible to the storm. We were to
take off at 7:00 A.M. local time and by then several thunderstorms had
already appeared, thoroughly drenching us before we could climb into
our plane. But each crew member was keenly alert, for he knew what to
expect. I’ve flown approximately fifteen hundred normal weather
reconnaissance hours; that is, if you can call going out and looking
for trouble ‘normal flying.’ I have covered the Atlantic completely
north of the equator to the Arctic Circle, flying in all kinds of
weather and during all seasons but never has anything like this
happened to me before.
“One minute this plane, seemingly under control, would suddenly wrench
itself free, throw itself into a vertical bank and head straight for
the steaming white sea below. An instant later it was on the other
wing, this time climbing with its nose down at an ungodly speed. To
ditch would be disastrous. I stood on my hands as much as I did on my
feet. Rain was so heavy it was as if we were flying through the sea
like a submarine. Navigation was practically impossible. For not a
minute could we say we were moving in any single direction—at one time
I recorded twenty-eight degrees drift, two minutes later it was from
the opposite direction almost as strong. But then taking a drift
reading during the worst of it was out of the question. I was able to
record a wind of 125 miles an hour, and I still don’t know how it was
possible, the air was so terribly rough. At one time, though, our
pressure altimeter was indicating twenty-six hundred feet due to the
drop in pressure, when we actually were at seven hundred feet. At this
time the bottom fell out. I don’t know how close we came to the sea
but it was far too close to suit my fancy. Right then and there I
prayed. I vouched if I could come out alive I would never fly again.
“By the time we reached the center of the storm I was sick, real sick,
and terribly frightened, but our job was only half over. We still had
to fly from the center out, which proved to be as bad, if not worse,
than going in.
“Mind you, for the first time, and after flying over fifteen hundred
hours, I was airsick; and I wasn’t alone. Our radio Operator spilt his
cookies just before we reached the center.
“After a total of five hours we landed at Eglin, the entire crew much
happier to be safely back on the ground. At the time of our take-off
we really didn’t think it possible to fly safely through a hurricane.
Personally I still don’t. And I say again, I hope never to be as
frightened as the time I flew through Kappler’s Hurricane. It isn’t
safe.”
Lieutenant Gunn, the pilot who had been in it the day before, was a man
who took things calmly. He reported his experience:
“This morning the storm was only an hour and a half from the field.
The usual line of squalls around the edge of the storm was hitting
Morrison Field about every hour and a half. Of course this trip was to
take us through the very center.
“We left Morrison at one thousand feet. The entire flight was
turbulent and rainy. We circled the storm counterclockwise again and
ran into the same turbulence and rain as before. This time the clouds
must have been as low as five or six hundred feet, as even though we
were only at one thousand feet, we could seldom get a glimpse of the
ocean, which was churned up to such an extent that it seemed to be one
big white cap. The altimeter was off one thousand feet at one point
placing us at five hundred feet; then we could see the water. I
believe even the fish drowned that day. As we entered the northeast
quadrant, it got so rough that both pilot and co-pilot were flying the
ship at the same time. The winds were so great at this point one could
actually see the ship drifting over the sea. I think we had a drift
correction of thirty-five to forty degrees at times.
“I don’t think anyone will form a habit of this particular job. Prior
to taking off I tried to take out hurricane insurance but it seems
that they have no policies covering B-25 planes. Anyway, all the
insurance salesmen had evacuated to some distant place like Long
Beach, Calif.”
Sergeant Robert Matzke, the radio operator, put it this way:
“September 15 was the day that I was picked on a crew to fly the
hurricane. Having been forewarned by several of the boys who had
returned from the hurricane the day before, I set myself for something
a little rougher than a weather mission with occasional turbulence. I
figured that we had flown through what could well be considered rough
weather while flying reconnaissance out of the Azores and maybe the
boys were trying to throw a little scare into us as new men to the
Morrison initiation.
“It seems that we had no sooner left the ground when we encountered
rain and turbulence. This made me sort of leery of what was to come
and I figured that if I were to send weather messages while in a
hurricane, I’d have to send blind as the receivers were noisy already,
and to hear and answer to a call would be almost an impossibility. As
we proceeded toward the storm the rain became more intense and things
were getting quite ‘damp’ in the ship. There was a leak right over my
table and the steady downpour of water through this opening made it
necessary for me to write with the log tablet braced against my knee
to keep it from getting wet.
“The awful bouncing was getting my stomach and when we actually
entered the hurricane it took all my strength to reach for the key to
send a message. After a while I called to Lieutenant Schudel, our
weather observer, and told him that I was sick and would have to rest
my head on the table for a while. I had felt bad in a plane before but
this was the first time that I was deathly sick. After a few minutes
it was with all the strength that I could muster that I rolled my head
to one side of the table and lost a few cookies.
“After I vomited a while I felt one hundred per cent better and I went
to work pounding out the messages that had accumulated. It was
impossible for me to hear any signals on the receivers due to
atmospherics, so I sent blind, repeating myself over and over, in the
hopes that someone would copy and relay to Miami for me. Our ships
were vacating to Eglin Field that day and Sergeant Le Captain was
standing watch on the frequency I was using. He came through with a
receipt when I got to where I could hear in my receivers again.
“The flight that day was the roughest I have ever been on and a lot of
my time was taken up just holding on for dear life and watching the
B-4 bags bouncing up and down en masse like a big rubber ball. I was
glad when the wheels hit the runway at Eglin Field and hungry, too,
for my breakfast had stayed with me for a very short time. I imagine I
looked rather beat up when I stepped from the plane but the ground
felt so darn good under my feet and I didn’t care who knew that I had
been sicker than a dog.”
Each member of the crew saw a little different part of the picture. Boys
who flew these missions regularly became matter-of-fact in their reports
and it was only when they were involved in a really big storm that they
talked frankly about their feelings. Here is the story of the flight
engineer, Sergeant Don Smith, in Kappler’s Hurricane on September 15:
“The morning of the fifteenth loomed dark and formidable. This was our
day to take a fling at the hurricane the other boys were telling us so
much about. As a matter of fact it doesn’t make you feel as though you
were going on a Sunday School picnic. From the time we took off until
we hit the storm we encountered turbulence and white caps were dashing
around like mad but they were mild compared to what was coming.
“We circled the storm before heading for the center. We were hitting
rain and moderate turbulence all this time. All at once we broke
through the overcast and for a few seconds I wondered if it were
letting up, but only for a second. One instant everything was peaceful
and the next instant we were getting slapped around like a punching
bag with Joe Louis on the prod. I looked at the bank and turn
indicator and the rate of climb, and they both looked as if they were
going all out to win a jitterbug contest. Now it was really raining.
You’ve never seen it rain until you’ve been in a hurricane. I couldn’t
even see the engines from the cockpit window. I knew our right engine
was the least bit rough before we started out and all I could think of
was ‘For gosh sakes, don’t be cutting out now.’ Before we were out of
it, the engine sounded like a one-cylinder Harley motorcycle but
really she never missed a beat. It was about this time that our
cylinder head temperature dropped down to about 90° and the pilot
dropped the wheels to bring it back up. And it was also about this
time that we started for a milder climate.
“Don’t ask me if I was scared or not. It would only be a fool or a
liar who would say he wasn’t worried. One thing about it is that
you’re so busy hanging on and trying to keep from getting thrown on
your face that there isn’t much time to think whether you’re scared or
not. It’s really rough but there are no words to describe it. You’d
have to go along to get the picture.”
Lieutenant Kappler, for whom the hurricane was named, was due to go to
Eglin Field with the crew that penetrated the hurricane on the
fourteenth, but he wanted to stay over and see more of it. So they took
him on, and although they already had a weather officer, Lieutenant
Howard Schudel, Kappler was allowed to go as photographer. Schudel made
the weather report from which the following is extracted:
“The rain was moderate at a distance from the center but already I was
drenched because of a leaky nose in the ship. We flew almost
completely around the center with nothing especially spectacular. At
about twenty miles from the center we encountered severe turbulence
which lasted only until the center was hit. During this time is when I
found myself trying to code two weather messages at once and not doing
a very good job on either. I actually was too busy to get very scared
as to whether or not the plane would hold together. Between the severe
turbulence and the water which by then had covered the entire desk, I
could hardly read my own writing a half hour later when I was able to
send the messages to the radio man. The turbulence near the center was
of a nature I had never experienced previously. It was not a sharp
jolt as experienced in a cumulus cloud but more of a rhythmic up and
down motion. But on top of this there was a motion from side to side
that made it especially rough.
“To me the most unwelcome sight of the whole trip was the swelling,
churning sea. From nine hundred feet, which seemed to be our average
altitude, the height of the spray above the ocean could not be
determined. In places the surface was covered with sharp white
streaks. If one thought for very long about what would happen to him
if he were forced down upon this boiling ocean, he would be cured of
hurricane flying for some time to come.
“The center was very welcome. The turbulence there was only light and
the intense rain stopped completely. This gave me a momentary
‘breather’ so that I could swallow my stomach, assure myself that I
was not sick, and code up a few back messages.”
The morning crew went to Eglin Field and only one ship and crew was left
at Morrison as the big storm closed in. The weather officer on this last
flight was Lieutenant Edward Bourdet. He said:
“The weather during the entire morning at Morrison was bad. There were
numerous thunderstorms with heavy rain showers that reduced visibility
at times to less than one-quarter mile. Our flight took off at 10 A.M.
We went just east of Miami where the wind was easterly at about fifty
knots. We circled the storm center according to instructions and the
wind went around from east to north and then through west to south. We
experienced not only vertical currents but shearing horizontal
currents. It is surprising that an airplane can hold together under
such punishment. I found that there is no dry place in the nose of a
B-25 in hurricane rain and I had to sit on the papers to keep them
fairly dry, but I was also troubled in trying to keep myself from
being battered against the side of the plane. We did not enter the eye
of the storm but were in the northeast corner. The pilot later
remarked, ‘Our left wing tip may have been in the calm, but we sure as
hell weren’t.’ It was here that I experienced the worst turbulence and
the heaviest rain I have ever seen. The noise was terrific.”
Lieutenant Bourdet added:
“The worst part of flying hurricanes is the fact that if there should
be some trouble, structural or otherwise, that would force the plane
down, the crew would not have a chance of getting out alive. The best
part is the fact that you know that you are instrumental in providing
adequate warning to all concerned and in saving lives and property.”
During the time when these crews were flying into Kappler’s Hurricane
and sending reports to the Miami center, on September 15, the people of
Florida were making last-minute preparations. Windows were boarded up,
streams of refugees filled the highways, the radios were full of
warnings, and the venturesome stood on the street corners as the gales
began roaring in the wires and big waves came booming against the coast.
Palm trees bent nearly double and debris began to fill the air. There
was great damage at the Richmond Naval Air Base. Three big
lighter-than-air hangars were destroyed. They collapsed in the wind at
or near the peak of the hurricane and intense fires, fed by high octane
gasoline, consumed the remains.
An investigating committee found that the winds must not have been less
than 161 miles an hour to account for the bending of the large steel
doors. Weather records recovered from the base indicated a two-minute
wind of more than 170 miles an hour and as high as 198 miles an hour for
a few seconds.
The center of the hurricane crossed the southern tip of Florida and
moved up the west coast on the sixteenth as it turned
north-northeastward, and then swept over Georgia and the Carolinas. Its
center lay on the Georgia coast on the seventeenth. The boys who flew to
Eglin Field had to take it again as its center came near and some of
them flew into the hurricane after it passed Eglin. Among these was
another weather officer, Lieutenant George Gray, who had seen this storm
in several different places and now viewed it from the air as it whipped
the Georgia coast. His report is worth reading:
“Riding through ‘Kappler’s Hurricane’ was as rough a trip as I ever
care to take. Admittedly, I know very little about flying from a
pilot’s point of view—how hard it is to keep a ship steady, the gyro,
the cylinder head temperature, and all the rest that had the boys so
worried. My criterion for roughness has always been how hard it is for
me to hold on and how much the air speed fluctuates. We up front had
to hold on with both hands when the going got bad. Some of the boys in
back, we heard, with close to a thousand hours reconnaissance flying,
actually got sick. The thing, though, that really frightened us was
not the turbulence so much, because we had had to hold on with both
hands before—it was the rain and the white sea below us.
“We saw the rain first from aloft. It looked absolutely black, as if a
sudden darkness had set in in that part of the sky. The blackness
seemed to hang straight down like a thick dark curtain from a solid
altostratus deck at about fifteen thousand feet. How much further
above this layer the build-up extended, I do not know. I kept
thinking, ‘We’re not actually going into that.’ We did though, and
somehow with all the rush, we didn’t have so much time to worry and
become frightened as we expected. The rain was really terrific. It
leaked in the nose and ran in a flood down the crawlway. The nose
usually leaks and a soaking on a trip is not at all unusual, but this
was different. I have never seen the water pour in and spurt so
before. Where the plexiglass meets the floor section there was a
regular fountain about six inches high that flooded the whole area.
The noise was terrific. It pounded and crushed against the top and
sides till we thought it would all collapse in upon us. I didn’t
notice any particular temperature change in the heavy rain though the
pilots afterward all reported enormous cooling in the engines. Writing
was almost impossible. The forms and charts on the table were like so
much papier-mâché. There was no place that we could put them out of
the water’s way.
“We noticed the ocean particularly on the last day when the storm
swept out to sea again off the Georgia coast. The day before on our
way back to Morrison Field from Eglin where we rode out the blow, we
flew low over the Everglades and saw roofless homes and millions of
uprooted palmettos. The next day as we flew up the coast, we could see
other remnants of the storm—huge pieces of timber, trees, roofs of
outbuildings, and maybe even houses. The interphone was busy all the
while as first one and then another of the crew saw something also
afloat. As we got nearer the storm but still only in the scattered
stratocumulus which is typical of almost any over-water flight, the
rubbish seemed to disappear. Whether it was simply that the water
itself was too rough for the timber to stand out or whether everything
lay below the seething whiteness, I don’t know. On our first trip into
a tropical storm, the navigator kept repeating over the interphone,
‘That water gives me the creeps.’ It did. I kept thinking about
ditching in it and floundering around in a ‘Mae West’; I guess we all
did. The waves were huge. Every now and then one would crest up and
just as it was about to crash, the wind would grab hold of the foam
and mist and crash it back into the sea. I took several pictures of
the gradually heightening sea, though I doubt that its seething, alive
look could be transposed to paper.
“We saw the storm hit the Carolina Cape. It was easy to see how trees
in the Florida swamps without much root to grasp the earth were
uprooted. Trees along the Carolina and Georgia coasts—big ones, taller
than the houses in the vicinity—were bending before the blow the way
wheat seems to ebb and flow in a summer’s breeze. The seas were very
high and in occasional breaks in the lower clouds we could catch
glimpses of yellowish breakers and a littered beach. It looked as if
the rain and thrashing surf had churned up the bottom, and mud had
mixed with the foamy water. The shore was littered with debris, big
trees, and blackened seaweed, mostly. As a sort of aside, on the
matter of stirring up the bottom, we found several conch shells and
bits of coral on the beach after the storm that are not considered
native in these parts.
“Whether this next is typical of hurricanes or merely evidence that
the storm had spent itself, I don’t know, but I do think it worthy of
mention. We noticed occasional breakups in the clouds—not large areas,
just a few seconds when everything brightened and when the firm
outlines of a large cumulus could be seen through thin low scud. This
was not in the center but as much as forty miles away where the stuff
should have been most solid and where the sea was near its roughest. I
have seen the ‘Eye’ of a hurricane on land as a weather forecaster. At
that time we noticed a real breakup with stars and moonlight visible.
The wind and noise stopped for a while and we could see an occasional
bulging cumulus through the night. Whether this phenomenon is due
merely to less energy available over land than over water, I wouldn’t
even guess. In any event we noticed no such complete break in the eye
at sea. In the center, so-called calm, though for my money it was
mighty rough, about all that we noticed was that the pounding rain
stopped for a minute or so. The clouds did not break clear through.
There was a slight breakup to perhaps five thousand feet. There were
bases of cumulus and several indefinite layers below this overcast
though. The terrific bouncing around also stopped. We were out of the
place in just a minute or two, so the eye couldn’t have been much more
than five miles in diameter. Some of the other ships circled in the
center, saw a flock of birds milling around there, and noted violent
up and down drafts near its edge. We were in and out of the thing so
fast that, frankly, we hardly had time to notice anything. I think we
could have fallen the seven hundred feet to the water without my
knowing it, we were so busy with the camera, papers, and instruments.
“I might say a little more about the cloud formations we noticed since
it was my job on this day to note them and take pictures of them while
the other observer tried to compute pressure. Ahead of the storm here
at Morrison Field on the morning of the sixteenth, we got a good
picture of pre-hurricane thunderstorms. Squalls with forty-mile gusts
swept across the runways. The rain came down in sheets so that we
could watch it move toward us like a dark wall. Some of the boys out
loading one of the ships for evacuation saw one of these terrific
showers bearing down on them and they started to run for cover. The
water was moving faster than they could run and before they’d moved
fifty feet they were soaked to the skin. On the morning of the
seventeenth, it lay just off the Georgia coast and had started to
re-deepen. We flew up the eightieth meridian though it was hard to
hold any steady course. As some of the navigators have probably
mentioned, we could see our own drift. After we noted a good windshift
into the east to assure us that we were in the northeast quadrant, we
headed across current for the center and once there headed roughly for
the great outside to the west. With such terrific drift, I don’t see
how anyone knew where he was going.
“Heading north: The usual over-water five-tenths stratocumulus bases
at two thousand, tops at thirty-five hundred, gradually began to lower
at about one hundred twenty-five miles from the center to roughly
eight hundred feet, and a fairly solid lower layer of clouds. Flying
above this layer at about forty-five hundred feet we could see tall
bulging cumulus and thickening altostratus at about fifteen thousand
ahead. There were other thin layers of stratocumulus and altostratus,
but it wasn’t until we got within fifty miles or so of the center and
the rain really began to come down and the cumulus were as thick as
trees in a forest that these intermediary layers began to thicken and
thatch in between the tall cumulus the way they do in any
well-developed storm system. By fifty miles out we were in solid cloud
and heavy rain. Picture-taking became impossible except in the
occasional breaks mentioned above. Even these breaks, if they should
come out, would show little because continuous instrument weather, to
me at least, looks pretty much the same whether it’s part of a violent
hurricane or smooth circulation stratus over a seaboard town. You can
see the wing tips and not much more.
“If a general conclusion is necessary, mine would simply be that I’d
just as soon not tempt fate in any more such storms.”
Sometimes birds such as Lieutenant Gray describes are carried hundreds
of miles before they escape from the hurricane. Species from Florida
have been found as far north as New England.
_11._ TRICKS OF THE TRADE
_A gallant barque with magic virtue graced,
Swift at our will with every wind to fly;
So that no changes of the shifting sky,
No stormy terrors of the watery waste,
Might bar our course,_
—Dante
After two years of probing tropical storms by air, nearly everybody
connected with the operation agreed that it was hazardous. But most of
the men who were active in it had one main idea. As soon as the winds,
rain, clouds, seas, and calm center of the average hurricane had been
thoroughly mapped, a standard method should be devised for flying into
the center and getting the vitally needed weather information en route
with the least possible danger to the craft and crew. They thought of
something like a football team, each man highly trained in a definite
job, with faultless teamwork, and all members of the crew on the alert
every moment.
Courses of instruction were organized. In all of them one fact became
abundantly clear in the first two years. No two hurricanes are exactly
alike. All of them are big compared with thunderstorms and tornadoes,
but some are much larger than others. The recco crew may run into one in
the uncertain stages of formation and at other times they may be nosing
into an old storm with strange and unsymmetrical parts. Of certain
elements they were reasonably sure—all these storms have clouds, rain,
squalls, and central low pressure, with strong winds spiraling more or
less regularly in a direction against the motions of the hands of a
clock.
With these thoughts in mind, the instructors tried to devise methods
that would prevent accidents. “What do you mean, accidents?” asked a
junior weather officer at one of the conferences. “The whole thing is
just one big accident, if you ask me. There’s only one rule that’s any
good. Just be careful and don’t fall in the ocean!” As a matter of fact,
most of the rules had that one vital thought in mind, but there were
different ways of doing it.
The Air Corps and Navy soon developed their own special methods. From
the beginning the Navy preferred the low-level method; that is, they
flew by the quickest route to the calm center of the storm, going in at
a low level, generally at an elevation between three hundred and seven
hundred feet. There are good reasons for this. Weather
information—especially the facts they want about tropical storms—is
vital to the safe operation of surface ships such as cruisers,
destroyers and mine sweepers, and it is also used in the movement of
aircraft from and to the decks of carriers. Task forces want to know
about the speed and direction of winds at sea level, as well as the
condition of the sea when storms are imminent.
It was the aim of the Navy to keep their weather reconnaissance aircraft
below the level of clouds, where the aerologist could watch the surface
of the sea as much of the time as is possible within the limits of
reasonably safe operation. When in a tropical storm, the aerologist
guided the pilot around or into the center. Down near the water, say one
hundred to three hundred feet altitude, turbulence is apt to be very
bad, sometimes extremely violent. Above seven hundred feet, clouds are
likely to interfere and this was extremely dangerous at that altitude in
those early years because the altimeter which they used to indicate
height of the aircraft by pressure of the atmosphere was sometimes badly
in error in a tropical storm. If the pilot and the aerologist lost sight
of the water’s surface for a few minutes, they suddenly found the
aircraft about to strike the precipitous waves of a storm-lashed sea.
Pressure of the atmosphere falls with increase of elevation, roughly one
inch drop in pressure for each one thousand feet. If we put an ordinary
barometer reading 29.90 inches in a plane on the ground and go up one
thousand feet, it will read about 28.90 inches. The pressure altimeter
is a special type of barometer that shows elevation instead of pressure.
When the pressure is 29.90 inches and the altimeter is set at 0, we go
up to where the pressure is 28.90 inches and it reads one thousand feet.
But if the pressure over the region falls to 28.90 inches and the
altimeter is not adjusted, it will read one thousand feet at the ground
and be roughly one thousand feet in error when we go up to where the
reading is 27.90 inches.
In ordinary weather, big changes in the barometer take place slowly and
there usually is plenty of time for correction. In a flight into a
hurricane, big changes take place rapidly. The change caused by the
plane going up may be confused with the drop in pressure in the
hurricane. If the plane is in the clouds when these changes take place,
the pilot may have a frightening surprise on coming into the clear
again. More recently, the hunters have been equipped with radar
altimeters which give the absolute altitude for check. They send a radar
pulse downward and it is bounced back from the sea surface to the
instrument. The time it takes to go down and back depends on the
height—the higher, the longer it takes—and the instrument is designed to
give the indication very accurately in feet. Thus, the radar altimeter
removed some of the dangers of low level flight.
So the Navy hunters moved in at low levels, preventing the “mush from
becoming a splash” as they put it, and although their experienced pilots
were marvelously efficient in flying on instruments in clouds or “on the
gauges,” they kept the white welter of the storm-lashed sea in view
whenever possible. Of course, it is not possible to fly straight into a
storm center. The big winds carry the plane with them and so the pilot
might as well use the winds to good advantage—he will go with them to
some extent, whether he likes it or not.
If we imagine ourselves in the center of the hurricane, facing forward
along the line of motion of the storm itself—not the motion of the winds
around the center—we know that the safest sector to fly in is behind us
on our left, and the worst is in front of us on our right. At the left
rear, there is likely to be better weather—less dense cloudiness and not
so much rain. The winds are not so violent. So the Navy pilot flies with
the wind. He goes in until he has winds of, say, sixty miles an hour. He
puts the wind on the port quarter and this carries him gradually toward
the center of the hurricane.
When he gets the wind speed to suit him, he brings the wind between the
starboard quarter and dead astern and flies ahead to the point where he
thinks he has the best place to go for the center. According to
Commander N. Brango, one of the Navy’s top specialists in hurricane
navigation by air, “Choosing the proper run-in spot is tricky business,
for it is the point at which the wind is the reciprocal of the storm’s
direction of motion. The pilot must watch for this point carefully, as
he may pass it quickly; if he does there is imminent danger that the
drift may carry the aircraft into the most severe quadrant of the
hurricane.” So the pilot goes into the center without wasting any time.
Delay results in fatigue and it is important that the men be freshly
alert. The pilot puts the wind broad on the port beam and he cannot
possibly miss the eye. The next thing, the plane is in that amazing
region where the sea boils, the breezes are light or missing altogether,
the rain has ceased and the clouds are arranged in circular tiers, like
giant spectators in a colossal football stadium.
This is a marvelous place. The crew is at ease. Coffee goes around. In
the last few moments before coming into the eye, the craft leaks like a
sieve. Everything is wet but the squirting from a hundred crevices in
the plane ceases in the center and now it is possible to do some paper
work. The aerologist is busy with the weather code and the radio man
begins pounding out a message. They circle around. The pilot takes them
up to maybe five thousand feet altitude and back down again, circling
around.
And then the time comes to leave the center. The pilot calls a warning
over the phone and there are two or three wisecracks. But this departure
from the eye is dangerous. The plane begins to catch the shear of
powerful winds around the center. Here a man can get thrown around
violently and be seriously hurt, if he fails to get a good grip on
something or neglects his safety belt.
Now the pilot sets the wind broad on the starboard beam and both he and
the co-pilot hang onto the controls. This is rough going and there may
be some surprises, but after a little they are out of the big wind
circle and the navigator thinks the gales are down to something like
fifty knots. The pilot sets course for the Navy airfield and the
staccato notes of the radio continue to carry vital weather information
to the forecasters. On this subject, Captain Robert Minter, an old hand,
at one time in charge of aerology in the Office of Naval Operations, is
full of enthusiasm. He guaranteed that the Navy could get a ship off the
ground on a hurricane probe within an hour after the Weather Bureau
forecaster asked for the information.
The Air Force has a different problem. Like the Navy, they are dedicated
to the task of getting vital weather data for the forecasters, but their
own problem is to evacuate military aircraft from threatened bases and
get information needed for aeronautics. Also, they have the
responsibility of giving weather forecasts and warnings to the Army.
Until a few years after World War II, the Air Corps was a part of the
Army, and when all three services were joined in the Department of
Defense, the Air Force kept the weather job for both departments as a
matter of economy and efficiency. Therefore, for this and other reasons,
the Air Force follows a hurricane-probing plan which differs from the
Navy’s.
Flying generally at higher levels in tropical storms, the Air Force, as
much as the Navy, puts a great deal of reliance on radar, which has
become a marvelous aid in watching the weather. In the beginning—years
ago—radar was not designed for weather purposes, however. During World
War II, radar was used to spy on enemy ships and aircraft in fog or in
darkness, to distances of 150 miles or more. The high-frequency rays
sent out by the radar strike the object and are reflected back to the
transmitter, where a sort of a silhouette appears on a scope. It may be
black with white areas showing images of solid objects, such as planes
and ships. In those days early in World War II, the weather was a
nuisance to the radar people. It often seemed to interfere with the use
of radar for military purposes, but the operators soon learned that the
interference came from rain drops in local or general storms and that
the rainy areas could be located and followed on the scope and, with the
proper design, the apparatus could be used as a weather radar.
The first experiments with radar carried on board aircraft in organized
tropical storm reconnaissance were made in 1945. Within three years, all
the planes were carrying radar sets and had crew members whose sole
business it was to watch the radar scope and tell the pilots and weather
officers what kind of weather lay ahead.
Scarcely had these observations begun when the radar weather men
discovered an amazing fact. On the radar, a tropical storm looks like an
octopus with a doughnut for a body and arms that spiral around the body
as if the creature had been caught in a whirlpool. These arms are bands
of squally weather, oftentimes violent turmoil. Between the bands (or
octopus arms) the wind is furious, of course, but there is less
turbulence and cloudiness, and here the aircraft is in much less trouble
than in the squall bands. The cause of these violent bands spiraling
around the center has not been figured out yet for sure, but all
tropical storms have them, and the hunters are beginning to understand
them better.
The distance you can see from the radar station depends on how much
weather there is. If there are large patches of dense rain, they may
reflect all the rays back to the receiver and none may go through to
show other rain areas farther away. Because of this, the radar shows the
eye of the storm, but usually not the entire circle of clouds around a
distant eye. Not enough radar energy is left to reflect from the
opposite side of the eye. For this and other reasons it is necessary to
have an experienced man to interpret the images on the radar scope.
From a radar in an airplane at high levels, these limitations are not so
troublesome. Recently, too, the range of military radars has been
increased. Whereas the radar formerly was very useful in getting a view
of the eye from the aircraft, it did not give the eye’s geographical
position, which had to be determined by other means, except when the eye
was close enough to be seen from the coast. With increased range, the
aircraft can get between the hurricane center and the coast or an
island, and both appear on opposite sides of the radarscope. In such
cases, the distance and direction of the eye from a known point on a
coast or island can be figured.
In the last two years, the Navy has used radar methods of this type
extensively to obtain fixes of hurricane centers at night. In these
instances, the crews fly at greater heights than in daylight and can get
the eye and the coast on the scope at the same time. This gives a good
estimate of center location to supplement the daylight penetrations
without flying into the storm center in darkness. Actually, night
flights directly into hurricane centers were not profitable, as
non-radar observations of sea surface, clouds and winds were not
possible in darkness.
It is apparent that a plane going into a storm at some upper level soon
gets into the clouds and the sea surface is no longer visible. But the
crew can depend on the radar to help find the center and they can go
down in the eye of the storm and look around and, if necessary, the
plane can descend in the outer parts of the storm and get estimates of
the wind by a drift meter. For this latter procedure, the Air Forces at
one time used what they called a “low-level boxing procedure.” On this
we can get the facts from the instructions issued by the head of the Air
Weather Service, Brigadier General Thomas Moorman, Jr., a veteran of
weather operations in World War II and in charge of weather
reconnaissance in the Pacific, including the work done so effectively
during the Korean War.
In 1953, Moorman directed that, in the interest of flying safety, there
will be no low-level penetration of hurricanes. The Air Force pilots
were asked to go into and out of the eye at the pressure level of seven
hundred millibars which, under average conditions, is at about ten
thousand feet altitude. Within 100 miles of a land mass, the flights in
a hurricane would be at a minimum altitude of two thousand feet. To put
it, in part, in the General’s words, the hurricane mission would be
conducted as follows:
For high-level penetration, the first priority would be given to
obtaining an observed position of the storm center, either by a radar
fix plus a navigation fix on the aircraft position, or a position found
by penetrating the storm and obtaining a navigation fix in the eye. The
storm would be approached on a track leading directly toward the center.
If the storm center could not be reached at the seven hundred millibar
level, the low-level boxing procedure could be followed, but if the
radar set was not operating, no attempt would be made under these
conditions to go into the eye.
For the low-level boxing procedure, the following instructions applied,
quoting General Moorman in part:
“The storm area is approached on a track leading directly to the storm
center and may be approached from any direction. As the winds increase
in velocity, corrections will be made so that the wind is from the left
and perpendicular to the track. The point at which the box is started is
the mid-point of the base side of the rectangular pattern to be flown
around the storm. When winds of sixty knots are encountered, the first
leg will be started with a 90° turn to the right.
“The low-level box will be flown within the 45-60 knot wind area
maintaining a true track for the first half of the leg, then a true
heading for the succeeding legs. Surface winds should be 45° from the
right when the left turn is made to the next leg. Double driftwinds
should be obtained on each corner observation and each mid-point when
practical. Reconnaissance of an area of a suspected hurricane will be
flown with the same procedure.
“The weather observer will check the co-pilot’s altimeter at frequent
intervals to insure that it is reading the same as the radar altimeter.
“All flights will depart storm area prior to sunset, regardless of the
degree of completion of the mission.
“Flight altitude while boxing the storm will be a minimum of five
hundred feet absolute altitude, or at such higher altitude as will
permit observations of the sea surface without hazard to safety. If
contact flight cannot be maintained at five hundred feet, the legs will
be flown a greater distance from the eye.”
The “boxing procedure” was used a great deal by the Air Weather Service
in the early years but by 1954 it had been eliminated. The
seven-hundred-millibar method was revised, and as used in flights out of
Bermuda in 1954 was described by Captain Ed Vrable, navigator, in part
as follows: “(1) The aircraft flies down wind at right angles to the
storm path to a point of lowest pressure, about twenty miles directly in
front of the eye; (2) Flight is continued down wind for three minutes
beyond the low point and then the heading of the aircraft is changed
135° to the left; (3) The aircraft continues on this course until the
pressure begins to rise and then turns 90° to the left and into the
center.”
This new Air Force plan of flying into the hurricane at seven hundred
millibars (ten thousand feet, roughly) is much like the Navy’s low-level
method, except that the Air Force crews enter down wind across the front
of the storm, but this is nearly always an advantage for aircraft based
at Bermuda. From that island their most direct approach to an oncoming
storm is into the front semicircle.
The Air Force has another aid in measuring weather in a storm. It is an
instrument called a “dropsonde,” a specially designed apparatus which
works on the same principle as the older “radiosonde.” A marvelously
ingenious instrument, the radiosonde is a unit of very small weight
containing miniature instruments for measuring pressure, temperature and
humidity. It also has a metering device, a battery, and a small radio
transmitter. The apparatus is carried aloft by a rubber balloon filled
with helium. As the balloon rises, the radio transmitter sends signals
for pressure, temperature and humidity at each level reached, and the
signals are copied on a register at the ground weather station.
The dropsonde is a radiosonde that is thrown out of the aircraft flying
at a high level, and allowed to descend by parachute, instead of being
carried up by a balloon. There is a special listening post in the plane,
where the data are recorded as the apparatus descends. The data are then
put into the form of a message for transmission by the plane’s radio
operator to the forecasting base. This work with the dropsonde is
usually done by the radar operator, in addition to his other duties.
Much of this fascinating work is done by the Air Weather Service of the
Air Force on routine daily flights, whether or not there is a tropical
storm to be studied. As an example, they have made daily flights from
Alaska to the North Pole and back, to keep tabs on the strange weather
up there. In this way, there—and in other parts of the world—they get
weather daily from places on land and sea where there are no weather
stations, no merchant ships to report, and no people to act as weather
observers. These flights are named after some bird common to the region.
The North Pole flight is called “Ptarmigan”; others are called
“Vulture,” “Gull,” etc. Special flights into tropical storms in the
Atlantic and Caribbean are called “Duck” missions.
Some of these improvements in the hurricane-hunting methods of the Air
Weather Service were mentioned in a report by Robert Simpson, a Weather
Bureau meteorologist, who flew with the Air Force into “Hurricane
George” in 1947. This was a big storm which appeared first over the
ocean to the eastward of the Lesser Antilles. The squadron assigned to
the job had been moved to Kindley Field, at Bermuda. Simpson saw
Lieutenant Colonel Robert David, who was in command, and arranged for
the flight in one of the new planes piloted by an experienced officer,
Lieutenant Mack Eastburn.
Hurricane George, so-called by the Air Force boys, although such names
were not then official, moved slowly and menacingly across the Atlantic,
north of Puerto Rico, and headed toward Florida. Simpson was in it
several times with the Air Force. On the first flight, they were in an
old B-29 which had too many hours on the engines and had been a bad
actor on previous missions, but this time it behaved like a lady and
they picked up a great deal of useful information. On the next trip they
had a new plane. Here is a part of Simpson’s story:
“Success is a marvelous stimulant. While we had every right to be near
exhaustion after our thirteen trying hours this first day in ‘Hurricane
George,’ we did not get to bed early that night. There was too much to
tell, and too much to discuss concerning the flight scheduled to leave
early the next morning. This second flight promised to be even more
lucrative of results than the first, for we were scheduled to fly in the
newest plane in the squadron. It had only 100 hours or so in the air and
contained many new features the other planes didn’t have. Moreover it
had bomb bay tanks and could leave the ground with nearly eight thousand
five hundred gallons of gasoline.
“There were a few changes in the crew but Eastburn was the pilot again
on the second flight. The takeoff was scheduled for 6:30 A.M. The storm
was in a critical position as far as warnings were concerned, and the
Miami office was anxious to get information as early as possible upon
which to base a warning for the East Coast. ‘George’ was located over
the eastern Bahamas and was moving slowly westward, a distinct threat to
the entire Eastern Seaboard but immediately to the Florida coast.”
The first hint of what was in store for the hurricane hunters that day
turned up as they completed their briefing at the ship and prepared to
board the plane. The engineer, in a last-minute checkup, found a
hydraulic leak and there was a delay of a little more than an hour
before that could be repaired. Finally they pulled away from the line
and out to the end of the runway. Number 4 engine was too hot. There was
another delay while further checks were made into the power plant.
Finally they were off—all one hundred thirty-five thousand pounds. This
was to have been a very long flight and every available bit of gasoline
storage had been utilized.
The plan on this day was once again to make a try for data near the top
of the storm, to verify and expand the startling information gained the
preceding day. This plane had de-icer boots and they were not concerned
about the rime ice that might tend to accumulate, as it had the day
before. First, they were anxious to get certain data from a low-level
flight, and to learn how effectively the radar could be used for
navigating a large plane like the B-29 near the center of the storm.
They went out at ten thousand feet again but continued to a point about
eighty miles north of the storm at this elevation. By this time they had
crossed about four of the spiral rain bands (the spiraling arms of the
“octopus”). Here the plane turned downwind parallel to another of the
rain bands and flew through the corridor to within viewing distance of
the eye. They gradually descended as the base of the middle-level clouds
lowered near the storm center. Leveling off at seven thousand five
hundred feet, they were in and out of clouds with horizontal visibility
low much of the time. However, there was scarcely a thirty-second period
when the crew were unable to see the sea surface below. Navigation at
this stage was entirely by radar. Again the amazing thing was the lack
of turbulence throughout this flight. This was a really big storm. They
were flying at only seven thousand five hundred feet through one of the
most violent sectors, only twenty to thirty miles from the eye itself,
yet they encountered nothing that could be described as important as
moderate turbulence. Simpson’s early experience in hurricane flying in
1945 in a C-47 had been repeated. They were flying in comfort under
conditions which gave them a command of all the information needed to
report the position and intensity of the storm. Simpson remarked: “What
a difference this is from the battering flights at five hundred feet in
the B-17’s which have been standard operating procedure (‘SOP’) with the
squadron until this season!”
The fascination of flying in comfort so near the storm center tempted
them to continue this exploration of reconnaissance tactics somewhat
longer. However, there were many other important things to be done on
this flight and there was no time to waste. They picked their way across
one of the bands to an outer “corridor” and retreated to a point about
150 miles from the center and once again began to climb. Perhaps in the
fascination of traveling so close to the eye in such comfort they had
become complacent. In any case, the events which followed in fast
succession left no room for further complacency. They had climbed no
higher than twelve thousand feet when someone spoke on the interphone
with a bit of a quiver in his voice, “I smell gasoline.” The hatches
were opened and the plane vented hurriedly. Eastburn went aft to
investigate and returned with a worried look on his face. He spoke to
the engineer, who scrambled through the tube (connecting the fore and
the aft sections of the plane) on the double. It was not until after he
returned, about twenty minutes later, that the rest of the crew learned
that they had developed a very serious gasoline leak in one of the hoses
connecting the bomb bay tanks. Nearly a thousand gallons of gasoline had
been streamed through the bomb bay doors. The engineer had completed the
repair satisfactorily and, after a brief consultation with the plane
commander, the crew consented to go ahead with the project.
“We climbed to twenty thousand feet,” said Simpson in his report. “I was
seated on the jump-seat between the radar operator and the engineer,
looking through the tube. I saw from the tube a wisp of smoke drifting
lazily toward the aft section. I do not recall my exact reaction but I
am sure I was not a picture of composure when I called this to the
engineer’s attention. Nor did he stop to check with the plane commander
before demonstrating that he also was a handy man with a fire
extinguisher. The cause was a simple thing. As we climbed, the engineer
had turned on the cabin heater, the insulation of which was a bit too
thin in the tube so that the padding in the tube began to smolder.
Perhaps this wasn’t a very important item but it didn’t contribute to
the peace of mind of any of the crew, especially when it was remembered
that only a few minutes earlier the bomb bay gas tank immediately
beneath that tube had been leaking like a sieve. Again the plane
commander checked with the crew. Again, but with noticeable hesitation,
it was agreed that we would proceed with the project. Higher and higher
we climbed. This time we reached the forty thousand feet mark with the
base of the high cirrostratus still above us. So we leveled out, trimmed
our tabs and set our course for the storm center. This time we were
determined to descend from forty thousand feet in the eye to get a
sounding there and then return home at low levels.
“We soon reached the base of the cirrostratus and entered the clouds.
The de-icers were working. Again the data began to roll in along the
same pattern as observed the previous day—at least for several minutes,
until the interphone was filled with the excited voice of the right
scanner with a spine-tingling report to the commander, ‘Black smoke and
flame coming from number 4.’ At the same time the plane began to throb,
roll and yaw. In less time than it takes to say it, the ‘boys’ in the
front compartment of this B-29 became _mature men_—wise, efficient,
stout-hearted men, each with a job to do and each one doing it with
calculated deliberateness, yet speedily. There was grim determination
here but no evidence of emotion. This magnificent tribute to topnotch
training had an exhilarating effect upon me and tempered to some extent
the abashment which I could not help feeling as a result of my
helplessness in this situation, and the fear which clutched my heart.
“We were lucky! The single carbon dioxide charge released by the
engineer extinguished the fire in the engine. Number 4 was feathered and
began to cool but our troubles were far from over. The engineer had
manuals and technical orders spread out on all sides of him and was
working feverishly to restore some power to number 4, as the indicated
air speed dwindled from 168 to 166 to 164 or 5, hovering precariously
above the deadly stallout at 163. We were only a few miles from north of
the center by this time but no one had recorded the data. We were too
busy worrying. The pilot was in the process of putting the plane into a
long glide to increase the air speed, when the left scanner claimed the
interphone circuit with, ‘Black smoke and flame coming from number 1.’
This time we _were_ in real trouble. However, the engineer had
anticipated further difficulty and was ready again. It was only a matter
of seconds before the fire was out and some semblance of power had been
returned to number 1. But we were still five hundred miles from the
nearest land and very near the center of a granddaddy of hurricanes. So
we declared an emergency and headed for MacDill Field.”
Altogether, this was an ironical turn of affairs. An old plane had acted
like a lady the day before and now a new one had frightened the crew
with its mechanical troubles, but the newer methods of hurricane
hunting, the “tricks of the trade,” had fortunately taken some of the
danger out of the storm itself. Otherwise the mechanical troubles might
have combined with the weather to spell disaster.
_12._ TRAILING THE TERRIBLE TYPHOON
“_The workshop of Nature in her wildest mood._”
—Deppermann
So far as anyone knows, the most furious of the typhoons of the Pacific
are no bigger or more violent than the worst of the huge hurricanes of
the Atlantic and the West Indies. They belong to the same death-dealing
breed of storms, but the typhoons come from the bigger ocean; they sweep
majestically across these vast waters toward the world’s largest
continent; and to the south and southeast lies a longer stretch of hot
tropical seas than anywhere else on earth. Perhaps it is the enormous
extent of the environment that explains the fact that in the average
year there are three or four times as many Pacific typhoons as there are
West Indian hurricanes. The greater excess of energy generated in this
enormous Pacific storm region by hot sun on slow-moving waters is
evidently released by a more frequent rather than a more violent
dissolution of the stability of the atmosphere.
But there is something about typhoons that causes the people to look
upon them with even greater terror than in the case of hurricanes.
Likewise, the storm hunters tackle the job of tracking them with less
confidence. Typhoons come from greater distances. Their points of origin
may be scattered over a wider area. Much more often than is the case
with hurricanes, there may be two or more at the same time. In their
paths of devastation they fan out over a bigger and more populous part
of the world. It takes more planes, more men and longer flights to keep
up with typhoons than with hurricanes.
For many decades the people of the Far East struggled valiantly against
the typhoon menace without much interest on the part of the Western
World. Native observers reported them when they showed their first
dangerous signs and then came roaring by the islands in the Pacific,
including the Philippines, as they swept a path of devastation on the
way to China or Japan. Men on ships equipped with radio sent frantic
weather messages to Manila, Shanghai or Tokyo as they were being
battered by monstrous winds and seas. Father Charles Deppermann, S.J.,
formerly of the Philippine Weather Bureau, who did as much as any man to
help people prepare for these catastrophes, made an investigation to see
why some of the typhoon reports from native observers were defective. He
listed a few of the reasons.
One observer said his house was shaking so much in the storm that he was
unable to finish the observation. He added that ninety per cent of the
houses around him were thrown to the ground. Another common complaint
was that the observers could not read the thermometers because the air
was full of flying tin and wood. Another apologetic man put on the end
of his observation a note that the roof of the weather station was off
and the sea was coming in. The observer on the Island of Yap fled to the
Catholic rectory and looked back to see his roof, walls, and doors
blowing away, but he sent his record to the forecast office! Another
observer on Yap was reading the barometer when it was hit by a flying
piece of wood and the observer was knocked to the floor. One of the
observers had excuses for a poor observation because he had to run
against the wind in water knee deep. In another place, the wind blew two
rooms off the observer’s house at observation time. But the most
convincing excuse for failure was from another town where the observer
was drowned in a typhoon before the record was finished.
It is a strange fact, too, that one can look at all these records and
the reports written by the Pacific storm hunters after they got going,
and seldom see a vivid description of the fearful conditions in the
typhoon. The white clouds turning grayish and then copper-colored or red
at sunset. The rain squalls carried furiously along. The roar of giant
winds and the booming sea as the typhoon takes possession of its empire
in huge spirals of destruction. With death and ruin on all sides, nobody
seemed to have the energy to write about it. The tumult passed, the wind
subsided, the water went out slowly, and the observer wrote a brief
apology for the bedraggled condition of the records.
In the same way, the typhoon hunters let their planes down at home base
too tired to do anything except compile a few technical notes. The
vastness of the thing seemed to leave them speechless. The plane went
out on a mission and the base soon vanished, a shrinking dot on the
horizon. The mind tired of thinking about the near-infinite expanse of
Pacific waters, of thinking about running out of fuel in an endless
search of winds, clouds and waves, of thinking about never getting back
to that little dot beyond the horizon.
Into this ominous arena the American fleet nosed its way, island by
island, in the war against the Japanese. By methods which had been
handed down from older generations, strengthened by all the modern
improvements that could be added, the Americans tried to keep track of
tropical storms in this enormous region where trade winds, monsoons and
tropical winds hold their several courses across seemingly endless seas,
but here and there run into conflict or converge in chaos. Twice when
their predictions were not very good, the fleet suffered and in the
second instance the typhoon humbled the greatest fleet that ever was
assembled on the high seas. The Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, demanded
reconnaissance without delay. As men do in time of war, the Navy
aerologists moved swiftly and effectively to meet the challenge. In
fact, they had anticipated it in part and had plans in the blue-print
stage, even before the big Third Fleet took its brutal beating in
December, 1944.
Most of the stimulus came from the Atlantic side, where organized
hurricane hunting had begun in the middle of the year. But it was not
long until the Japanese were driven out of the typhoon areas. In June,
1945, they were being blasted out of Okinawa as typhoon reconnaissance
was beginning. In fact, the first men to go out to penetrate a typhoon
had to be careful to keep away from Okinawa. By that time the Japanese
had committed all their fading sea and air power, including their last
remaining battleship, to the defense of Okinawa, and after June, the U.
S. Navy had no real enemy except the typhoon.
Beginning in June, 1945, the Navy airmen and aerologists flew two kinds
of missions. Almost daily they went out to check the weather, and if
they found a full-grown typhoon or one in formation in an advanced
stage, special reccos were sent out. One flight went out as soon as it
was daylight and the second took off about six hours afterward, early
enough to make sure that the second would be completed by nightfall.
This was rather tough going. As one of the aerologists pointed out,
Pacific distances were so large that if they were considered in terms of
similar distances in the United States, a common mission would be like a
take-off from Memphis and a search of the area of a triangle extending
from Washington, D. C., to New York City and back to Memphis.
Aircraft used by the Navy were Catalinas (PBY’s), Liberators (PB4Y-1’s),
and Privateers (PB4Y-2’s). All were four-engined, land-based bombers,
some fitted with extra gasoline tanks for long ranges. Before leaving
base in the Philippines or the Marianas, the aerologists briefed the
crews. In flight, the aerologist directed changes in the course of the
plane, but the pilot could use his own judgment at any time when he
thought the change might exceed operational safety. From June through
September, 1945, the Navy flew a total of one hundred typhoon missions,
averaging ten hours each. Lieutenants Paul A. Humphrey (a Weather Bureau
scientist after the war) and Robert C. Fite, both of whom flew
constantly on these missions, gathered data from all flight crews, and
at the end of the season wrote descriptions of five typhoons which were
more or less typical.
Some of the most interesting of these missions were directed into the
big typhoon which came from the east, crossed Luzon in the Philippines
and roared into the China Sea, in the early part of August. On the
fourth of the month, one of the Catalinas was checking the weather three
hundred miles east of Leyte and saw a low pressure system developing a
small tropical disturbance. It grew, was checked daily, and on the sixth
blew across Luzon and reached its greatest fury in the South China Sea
on the seventh.
The first plane that went into the typhoon in this position was directed
to the right and north of the center, to take advantage of tail winds
and to spiral gradually into the center. As it approached the center,
the plane climbed to about five thousand feet, and the crew had a
beautiful panoramic view of the clouds piled up on the outer rim of the
eye. On account of the awful severity of the turbulence the plane had
experienced around the eye, they descended again and flew to home base
at altitudes between two hundred and three hundred feet.
On examination of the aircraft after the battered crew had let down at
home base, it was found that the control cables were permanently
loosened, the skin on the bottom of the port elevator fin had been
cracked away from the fuselage, one Plexiglas window was bowed inward,
and the paint was removed from the leading edges. Because of the
violence of turbulence on this flight, the nervous crew of the second
recco plane on that day was instructed to reconnoiter but not to try to
go into the center.
On the fifth of September a violent typhoon formed between the
Philippines and Palau and moved northwestward toward Formosa. On the
tenth a recco plane ran into trouble in this storm. Twice while flying
at two thousand feet, it met severe downdrafts, losing altitude at five
hundred to one thousand feet per minute while nosed upward and climbing
at full power. The eddy turbulence was extremely severe and most of the
crew members became sick. The second recco plane on that date ran into
violent turbulence also, and at times it was almost impossible for the
pilot and co-pilot to keep the plane under control.
And then disaster struck! By the end of September the Navy storm hunters
had gone out on one hundred missions into the hearts of typhoons and,
although many of them had been frightened and badly battered, there had
been no casualties. They made up a report as of September 30, commenting
on their phenomenal good fortune on these many flights. But on the very
next day, October 1, one of the crews which had been making these
perilous missions departed on a flight into a typhoon over the China
Sea. Those men never came back. No one had any idea as to what had
actually happened, but the members of other crews could well imagine
what might have happened, and whatever it was, it must have ended in
typhoon swept waters where none of the storm hunters expected to have
any chance of survival. It could have happened in the powerful winds
around the eye or in one of those bands extending spirally outward from
the center, filled with tremendous squalls and fraught with danger to
brave men venturing into these monstrous cyclones of the Pacific. The
report—even before this sequel—had stressed the hazardous nature of
reconnaissance.
In these Pacific missions, the pilots and aerologists, even without
radar, had become aware of the doughnut-shaped body of the storm with
squall bands spiraling outward (the octopus arms). But they got very
little information that they thought would help in predicting the
movements of typhoons, except the old rule that the storm is likely to
continue on its course unchanged, tending to follow the average path for
the season. The explorations by aircraft as a means of getting data were
far more useful in locating storms and determining their tracks,
however, than any other methods.
After the end of 1945, the reconnaissance of tropical storms, both in
the Atlantic and the Pacific, was in trouble, owing to demobilization.
Many experienced men returned to civil life and it was necessary to
start training all over again. The Navy set up schools for two squadrons
of Pacific storm hunters late in 1945, at Camp Kearney in California.
The graduates were in action in 1946.
After the surrender of the Japanese, the Air Corps maintained a Weather
Wing in the Pacific, with headquarters in Tokyo. Part of its job was to
give warnings of typhoons threatening Okinawa, where the United States
had established a big military base. Here they thought they had built
structures strong enough to withstand typhoons, but they learned some
bitter lessons. The most violent of all the typhoons of this period was
one named “Gloria” which almost wiped Okinawa clean in July, 1949.
A most unusual incident occurred over the Island of Okinawa when the
center of Gloria was passing. The Air Force was short of planes in safe
condition for recco, but managed to get enough data to indicate the
force and probable arrival of this violent typhoon. It happened that
Captain Roy Ladd, commander of Flight #3, was in the area, with Colonel
Thomas Moorman on board, making an inspection of recco procedures in the
area. Their report gave the following information:
“As Gloria roared over a helpless and prostrate Okinawa, weather
reconnaissance members of Crew B-1 circled in the eye of the big blow
and watched the destruction of the island while talking to another
eyewitness on the ground. That hapless human was the duty operator for
Okinawa Flight Control, who, despite the fact that his world was
literally disappearing before his eyes and the roof ripping off
overhead, nevertheless stuck to his post and eventually contacted three
aircraft flying within the control zone and cleared them to other bases
away from the storm’s path.”
Describing the situation, Captain Ladd stated that he had attempted
radio contact with Okinawa for some time but was prevented from doing so
by severe atmospheric conditions. After a connection had been
established, one hundred miles out from Okinawa’s east coast, the
control operator requested them to contact two other aircraft in the
area and advise them to communicate with Tokyo Control for further
instructions.
Shortly thereafter, the RB-29 broke through heavy cloud formations into
the comparatively clear eye of the big typhoon. The southern tip of the
island became visible, just under the western edge of Gloria’s core.
Gigantic swells were breaking upon the coast and the control operator
advised that winds had been 105 miles per hour just thirty minutes
before and had been increasing rapidly. He reported that the control
building’s roof had just blown off, all types of debris were flying by,
and aircraft were being tossed about like toys.
A little later, the ground operator had to crawl under a table to get
shelter because nearly all of the building had been blown away, bit by
bit. Structures of the quonset type were crushed like matchboxes and
carried away like pieces of paper. Their roofs were ripped like rags. A
cook at the Air Force Base hurried into a large walk-in refrigerator
when everything began to blow away. “It was the only safe place I could
find,” he explained afterward. “The building blew away but the
refrigerator was left behind and here I am.”
One of the meanest of the typhoons of this period was known as “Vulture
Charlie.” It was dangerous to airmen because of the extreme violence of
its turbulence. Ordinarily, the typhoons were known by girls’ names, and
for that reason the typhoon hunters in the Pacific were known as
“girl-chasers.” But “Vulture Charlie” got the first word of its name
from the type of mission involved, and “Charlie” from the third word in
the phonetic alphabet used in communications.
On November 4, 1948, an aircraft commanded by Captain Louis J. Desandro
ran into the violent turmoil of Vulture Charlie and described it as
follows:
“We hit heavy rain and suddenly the airspeed and rate of climb began to
increase alarmingly and reached a maximum of 260 miles per hour and four
thousand feet per minute climb to an altitude of three thousand seven
hundred feet. The sudden increase in altitude was brought about by
disengaging the elevator control of the auto-pilot and raising the nose
to control the airspeed. Power was not reduced because of our low
altitude. After about thirty seconds to one minute of this unusual
condition we hit a terrific bump which appeared to be the result of
breaking out of a thunderhead. The airspeed then decreased to 130 miles
per hour in a few seconds due to the fact that we encountered downdrafts
on the outer portion of the thunderhead and were momentarily suspended
in air. At this point the left wing dropped slightly and I immediately
shoved the nose down to regain airspeed. Before a safe airspeed was
again reached, we had descended to an altitude of one thousand one
hundred feet.
“As a result of this turbulence my feet came up off the rudder pedals.
The engineer, who was sitting on the nose wheel door instructing a
student engineer, came up off the floor like he was floating in the air.
The navigator and weather observer were raised out of their seats. A
coffee cup, which was on the back of the airplane commander’s instrument
panel, was raised to the ceiling and came down on the weather observer’s
table. Cabin airflow was being used and the airflow meter exploded and
glass hit both engineers in the face.”
In December, 1948, a crew under the command of Lieutenant David Lykins
was instructed to use the boxing procedure in a typhoon called
“Beverly.” On one of their missions, they flew into it on December 7.
The following is based on his report:
The operations office instructed the crew to climb to the seven hundred
millibar level (about ten thousand feet) after take-off, penetrate the
eye of the storm, take a fix in the center, then make a spiral descent
and sounding down to one thousand five hundred feet and proceed out of
the storm on a northwesterly heading, to begin the pattern around the
storm center.
After the briefing, the crew ate dinner, while talking anxiously about
the trip, and returned to the aircraft to load personal equipment. When
they were airborne with the gear and flaps up, they made an initial
contact with Guam Control. There was no reported traffic, so they were
cleared. The instructions were complied with and a heading of 270
degrees was taken up. Soon there was discernible on the horizon a vast
coverage of high, thin clouds at about thirty thousand feet. This
indicated the presence of the storm, verified by the south wind and
slight swells that were perpendicular to the flight direction of the
plane. The wind was increasing and the swells were noticed to intensify.
The boundary of the storm area was very distinct as they approached the
edge. At this point, the surface wind was estimated to be thirty-five
knots from 180 degrees.
A few minutes later they were on one hundred per cent instrument flying
conditions and the moderate to heavy rain and moderate turbulence
persisted until they missed the eye and flew south for fifteen minutes.
Because they were on instruments and could not see the surface, they
were unable to determine the highest wind velocity in the storm. It was
estimated close to one hundred knots. At this point they noticed that
they had a good drift correction for hitting the center satisfactorily,
so they held the 270 degrees heading, relying on the radar observer to
be able to see the eye on the scope.
Approximately fifteen or twenty minutes later, the radar observer
reported seeing a semi-circular ring of clouds about twenty-five degrees
to the right at about twenty-five miles range. The same kind of ring was
detected to the left, about the same distance, however. Figuring they
had drifted to the right of the center, they elected to intercept the
left center seen on the radar and flew until they received an ill-omened
pressure rise, when it was apparent they had made a wrong choice!
To make sure they were not chasing circular rings of heavy clouds or
false eyes on the scope, they made a turn to 180 degrees and held it
long enough to enable them to see the surface wind. After about ten
minutes they saw the surface and judged the wind to be coming from
approximately west-northwest. They headed back for the center of the
storm with the wind off their left wing, allowing fifteen to twenty
degrees for drift. In approximately fifteen minutes the radar observer
reported the eye as being almost directly ahead. Lieutenant Lykins said:
“At 0906Z (1906 Guam time) we broke out into the most beautiful and
well-defined eye that I have ever seen. It was a perfect circle about
thirty miles in diameter and beautifully clear overhead. The sides
sloped gently inward toward the bottom from twenty-five thousand feet
and appeared to be formed by a solid cloud layer down to approximately
five thousand feet. From one thousand feet to five thousand feet were
tiers of circular cumulus clouds giving the effect of seats in a huge
stadium.”
They descended in the eye, made their observations and then prepared to
depart. Lieutenant Lykins continued:
“As we entered the edge of the eye we were shaken by turbulence so
severe that it took both pilots to keep the airplane in an upright
attitude. At times the updrafts and downdrafts were so severe that I was
forced down in my seat so hard that I could not lift my head and I could
not see the instruments. Other times I was thrown against my safety belt
so hard that my arms and legs were of no use momentarily, and I was
unable to exert pressure on the controls. All I could do was use the
artificial horizon momentarily until I could see and interpret the rest
of the instruments. These violent forces were not of long duration
fortunately, for had they been it would have been physically impossible
to control the airplane.
“Since the updrafts and downdrafts were so severe, we were unable to
maintain control of the altitude; all we could do was to hold the
airspeed within limits to keep the airplane from tearing up from too
much speed or from stalling out from too little. After the first few
seconds, we managed to have the third pilot, who was riding on the
flight deck, advance the RPM to 2400 so we could use extra power in the
downdrafts, and so we could start a gradual ascent from the area.
Neither of us at the controls dared leave them long enough to do it
ourselves.
“The third pilot received a lump on his forehead when he struck the rear
of the pilot’s seat, and bruised his shoulder from another source in
doing so. Since he had no safety belt, he was thrown all over the flight
deck.
“This area of severe turbulence lasted between five and six minutes and
every second during this time it was all both of us could do to keep the
airplane in a safe attitude and to keep it within safe airspeed limits
and maintain a general heading.
“It is almost impossible for me to describe accurately or to exaggerate
the severity of the turbulence we encountered. To some it may sound
exaggerated and utterly fantastic, but to me it was a fight for life.
“I have flown many weather missions in my thirty months in the 514th
Reconnaissance Squadron, I have flown night combat missions in rough
winter weather out of England, and I have instructed instrument flying
in the States, but never have I even dreamed of such turbulence as we
encountered in typhoon Beverly. It is amazing to me that our ship held
together as it did.”
When the severest turbulence subsided the hurricane hunters found they
had gained an altitude of about six thousand feet. At this point they
decided to climb to 10,500 feet and proceed directly to Clark Field. It
was night time and, since they were shaken up pretty badly, this seemed
the most sensible course of action to be taken. They had no way of
knowing the extent of any damage they might have sustained. The engineer
reported that the booster pumps had all gone into high boost; one
generator had quit. The radar observer said that the rear of the
airplane was a mass of rubble from upturned floorboards, personal
equipment, sustenance kits, and such. The flight deck had extra
equipment all over it. In addition, the co-pilot had twisted off a
fluorescent light rheostat switch when the plane hit the turbulence as
he was adjusting it. The radar observer reported his camera had been
knocked to the floor.
After his experience in leaving the eye of Beverly at one thousand five
hundred feet, the lieutenant had one statement to make and he said it
could not be overemphasized.
“An airplane with human beings aboard should never be required to fly
through the eye of a typhoon at an altitude below ten thousand feet. If
a pattern must be flown at one thousand five hundred feet in the storm
area, it should be clearly indicated that the area of the eye be left at
the seven hundred millibar level and the descent be made at a distance
of not less than seventy miles from the center. Full use of radar
equipment should be exercised in avoiding any doubtful areas.”
On inspection after landing, the following damage to the airplane was
found: A bent vertical fin, warped flaps, tears in fairing joining the
wing and fuselage, untold snapped rivets on all parts of the airplane,
fuselage apparently twisted, and one unit in the center of the bomb bay
was torn from its mountings.
Reports of this kind leave some doubt as to whether the typhoon actually
is not more violent than the West Indian hurricane.
Another typhoon of extraordinary violence which gave the storm hunters
serious trouble struck Wake Island on September 16, 1952. Wake is a
little island in the Pacific Ocean, a small dot on the map, the only
stopping-place between the Hawaiian Islands, more than two thousand
miles to the eastward, and the Marianas, more than one thousand miles to
the westward. This spot, a stop for Pan American planes, was captured by
the Japanese and then recaptured by the United States in World War II.
When the Korean War opened, military planes used this small island as a
refueling place en route from the Pacific Coast of the United States to
Japan.
Before taking off from Honolulu, the airmen wanted a forecast for this
long route and a report of the weather at Wake. Also, before taking off
from Wake, they asked for a forecast for the trip to the next stop at
Guam, Manila or Tokyo. The military called on the Weather Bureau and
Civil Aeronautics Administration to furnish the weather service and the
communications. They started operations at Wake very soon. By 1952 men
from these two agencies were on the island, some with their wives and
children. The Standard Oil Company and Pan American Airways also had
people there. For the most part, they were housed in quonset-type
structures, but some old pillboxes constructed during the war still
dotted the island and could be used for refuge from typhoons if the
wind-driven seas did not rise high enough to flood them. There were only
three concrete buildings and they were used for offices and storage.
On the morning of September 11, 1952, the Weather Bureau forecaster drew
a low center on his weather chart far to the southeast of Wake. His
analysis was based largely on two isolated ship reports, the only
information available from a one million square-mile ocean area lying to
the east-southeast of his tiny island station. Here was just enough data
to arouse suspicion and alarm that a developing tropical disturbance was
somewhere—anywhere—within this vast expanse of sea and air; but not
enough information to indicate a position, or probable intensity, or
actually to confirm the existence of a well-defined storm.
During the next three days, the question of continuing the low on
successive charts, and the problem of deciding its position, were mostly
matters of guesswork on the part of the Weather Bureau staff at Wake;
there was only one ship report from the critical area during the time.
Then on September 14 the existence of a vortex was established. A single
ship report, together with reports from Kwajalein and Eniwetok, gave
good evidence of cyclonic circulation.
From this time on, until the storm struck at daybreak on the sixteenth,
everybody on the island worried about it, and the weathermen went all
out in tracking it and disseminating information. Meanwhile the
typhoon—which had been named “Olive”—grew into the most destructive
storm to hit Wake since it was first inhabited in 1935. The forecasters’
job was a difficult one because of meager observational data. There were
heartbreaking delays in securing airplane reconnaissance due to
mechanical breakdown that grounded the B-29 stationed at Wake for that
purpose until an engine part could be flown in from Tokyo.
Early on the morning of the sixteenth, strong winds of the typhoon began
to sweep across the island, a very rough sea was breaking on the shores,
and debris was flying through the air. One can easily imagine the alarm
of these people in the vast Pacific, on a tiny island beginning to
shrink as the waters rose, and giving up its soil, rocks, and parts of
buildings to the furious winds, steadily increasing. A large power line
fell across several quonsets just north of the terminal building, and
huge sparks began flying where they touched the Weather Bureau
warehouse.
The account which follows is condensed from the report made by the
Weather Bureau man in charge, Walton Follansbee:
The wind indicators in the Weather Station shorted out early, and
expensive radiosonde and solar radiation equipment was badly burned by
the runaway power. The indicators in the tower, however, remained
operative until the last weatherman abandoned it. They took turns
climbing the tower steps to check the velocities, calling the readings
off over the interphone from tower to weather station. On Follansbee’s
last trip to the tower, the strongest gusts observed were eighty-two
miles per hour, although one of the observers had caught gusts to ninety
miles per hour shortly before. The strain on the structure was severe,
and he was happy to get down the stairs safely. Soon afterward, Jim
Champion, observational supervisor, took full responsibility for this
unwanted task. He then reported over the interphone that the wind was
north-northwest at eighty miles per hour with gusts to 110. Follansbee
advised him to abandon the tower. He replied that he believed he was
safer staying there than trying to come down the stairs, which were wide
open to the elements. He was told to use his own judgment, since it was
his life at stake.
Women and children had been taken to the terminal building or other
safer places than the quonsets, which now began to break up. Anybody who
ventured in the open was likely to be blown off his feet and that was
exceedingly dangerous, for the sea was close by, and now and then the
roof of a quonset went off and was carried dangerously across the island
and out to sea. Winds of hurricane force blew the water from the lagoon
which began engulfing the south and east parts of the island. The wind
reached a steady velocity of 120 miles an hour, with gusts up to 142 at
the height of the storm.
By that time, most of the women and children were huddled in the
operations building and they were terrified when the roof went off,
leaving them exposed to the torrential rain and furious winds, but the
walls held. About this time, a report was received from a reconnaissance
plane that had come from Guam and made its way into the center of the
typhoon. The crew put the center about thirty-five miles northeast of
Wake but said the plane was suffering structural damage and was heading
for Kwajalein.
By evening the winds were subsiding and a check showed that owing to
such preparations as they had been able to make and the constant
struggle of all on the island to prevent disaster, not a single life was
lost and no one was seriously injured. Wake Island, however, was a
shambles, and there was very little food not contaminated and
practically no drinking water. The water distillation plant had been
destroyed.
But soon one of the Air Force B-29 planes ordinarily used in typhoon
reconnaissance flew in from Kwajalein and brought three hundred gallons
of water in GI cans lashed to the bomb bays and two tons of rations for
distribution to the battered and hungry people of Wake Island. Before
long, the little island was back in business, serving the big planes on
the way from Hawaii to the Far East.
_13._ GUEST ON A HAIRY HOP
“_On the rushing of the wings of the wind. It is indeed a knowledge
which must be felt to be in its very essence full of the soul of the
beautiful._”
—Ruskin
A hurricane flight which proves to be rougher than usual is known among
the hunters as a “hairy hop.” It is an amazing fact that there are men
who want to come down to the airfield when a big storm is imminent and
“thumb a ride.” Mostly, they are newspaper reporters, magazine writers,
photographers, civilian weathermen, and radio and television people.
Usually they are accommodated, if they have made arrangements in
advance. Some of these rides have been quiet, like a sightseer’s trip
over a city, while others have been “hairy.”
One of the first newspapermen to take a ride into a full-fledged
hurricane was Milt Sosin of the Miami _Daily News_. In 1944, Milt read
about men of the Army and Navy who were just beginning to fly into
hurricanes and he became obsessed with the wish to go along. When he
asked for permission, the editor said “No” in a very positive tone. He
could see no point in having a good staff correspondent dropped in the
ocean during a wild ride in a hurricane. Sosin insisted and he was told
to see the managing editor. He did and there was another argument. Sosin
told him, “If I don’t, somebody else will and we’ll be scooped.”
Reluctantly, the managing editor gave permission. But when Sosin asked
the immigration authorities, they said “No. You have no passport, and
you don’t know what country you may fall in.” They refused. Sosin hung
around and argued. He pointed out that if the plane went down at sea, he
wouldn’t need any passport to the place he was going, and they finally
agreed.
Milt Sosin got his wish in full measure on September 13, 1944, in the
Great Atlantic Hurricane which had developed a fury seldom attained,
even in the worst of these tropical giants. It had crossed the northern
Bahamas and was headed northwestward on a broad arc that was to bring
its death-dealing winds to New Jersey, Long Island and New England.
Already we have told the story of Army and Navy planes probing this big
storm, including the pioneering trip by Colonel Wood and others of the
Washington weather staff. At the end of this trip, Sosin was glad to be
back on land and vowed, “Never again!” But, somehow, he still had the
urge to see these storms from the inside and afterward was a frequent
guest of the Navy and Air Force.
One of Sosin’s most interesting trips was on September 14, 1947, in a
B-17. They took off from Miami. Al Topel, also from the Miami _Daily
News_, went along to take pictures, and Fred Clampitt, news editor of
Radio Station WIOD, was the other guest. The big hurricane was roaring
toward the Bahamas with steadily increasing fury and the people of
Florida were worried—and for good reason, for three days later it raked
the state from east to west, killing more than fifty people and causing
destruction estimated in excess of one hundred million dollars. By many
observers it was eventually rated as the most violent hurricane between
1944 and 1949.
They ran into it east of the Bahamas. As the plane burrowed its way
through the seething blasts, Sosin wrote in his shaking notebook:
“This airplane feels as if it’s cracking up. Ominous crashes in the aft
compartment accompany every sickening lurch and dive as, buffeted by
140-mile-an-hour winds and sucked into powerful downdrafts, the huge
bomber bores through to the core of the storm.”
Sosin said that the pilot, Captain Vince Huegele, and the co-pilot,
Lieutenant Don Ketcham, were literally wrestling with the hurricane in
clothes sopping wet from perspiration and, as soon as they came into the
center, began to take off their wet garments. Ketcham had “pealed down
to his shorts before the plane plunged back into the mad vortex.”
At this point they were surprised to see another plane in the storm, a
B-29, flying in the eye at thirty-six thousand feet, trying to discover
the “steering level” where the main currents of the atmosphere control
the forward movement of tropical disturbances such as this one. The
radio man, Sergeant Jeff Thornton, was trying to contact the B-29, miles
overhead, but with no luck. Sosin wrote in his notebook:
“But here at this low level we have more to worry about than trying to
reach the other plane. We are getting an awful kicking around. Wow! That
was a beaut. Al Topel was foolish enough to unfasten his safety belt and
stand up for a better angle shot of the raging turbulent sea below. We
must have dropped one hundred feet and his head hit the aluminum ribbing
of the plane’s ceiling. Then, trying to protect his camera, he skinned
his elbows and knuckles. Now he’s given up and has even strapped a
safety belt around his camera.”
The crew was busy plotting positions and checking on the engines. To
them it was an old story, except that none could recall such violent
turbulence. The craft was low enough for them to get glimpses of the sea
but they wanted a better view and they began to descend cautiously.
Sosin wrote:
“The turbulence is getting worse. The sea is streaked with greenish-gray
lines which look like daubs made by a child who has stuck his fingers
into a can of paint. Now we are closed in. We are flying blind. Capt.
John C. Mays, the weather observer, starts giving the pilots readings
from his radar altimeter while Huegele sends the plane lower and lower
in an effort to establish visual contact with the sea.
“‘Five hundred feet,’ Mays calls into the plane’s intercom.
“‘OK,’ replies the skipper.
“‘Four hundred feet.’
“‘Roger.’
“‘Three-fifty.’
“‘Roger.’
“‘Two-fifty.’
“‘OK.’
“‘Two hundred feet,’ Mays’ voice is still even.
“‘OK,’ comes Huegele’s voice.
“It may be OK with him but it isn’t with me. I just found myself tugging
tentatively on the pull toggles which will inflate my ‘Mae West’ life
jacket if I yank hard enough. I checked a long time ago to make certain
the CO cartridges were where they should be.
“Fred Clampitt, WIOD news editor, is turning green.
“No, it’s not fear. He’s sweating so much that the colored chemical
shark repellent in a pocket of his life jacket is starting to run.
“Then we sight the sea again. From this low level the waves are
frightening. They are traveling in all directions, not in just one, and
they break against each other, dashing salt spray high into the air.
It’s all too close.
“Now the ceiling is lifting and we are climbing—250, 300, 500, 700 and
we level off. It grows less turbulent and Observer Mays looks up from
his deep concentration.
“‘I may be wrong,’ he says, ‘but it looks to me as if it’s made a little
curve toward the north.’
“Which is very interesting—but more interesting is the fact that the
day’s work is over and we’re on our way home.”
In 1947, the Air Forces were assigning B-29’s to their Kindley Base at
Bermuda, to replace the B-17’s. The big superforts had room for guests
and it soon became common to have somebody hanging around Kindley to get
a ride. When a big storm was spotted east of the Windward Islands on the
eleventh of September of that year, two newspaper reporters and a
photographer from _Life_ Magazine, Francis Miller, were waiting at
Bermuda for a hop. The big hurricane became even more violent as it
turned toward the southwest and swept across Florida. It was September
14th when Milt Sosin of the Miami _Daily News_ got his “hairy hop” in
this same blow. As it crossed the coast, winds of full hurricane force
stretched over a distance of 240 miles and the wind reached 155 miles an
hour at Hillsboro Light. By this time the hurricane hunters were fully
occupied and the riders were left on the ground. Miami communication
lines were wiped out and control of the hunters had been shifted to
Washington. In charge of a B-17 at Bermuda was Major Hawley. His
co-pilot was Captain Dunn, who had learned hurricane hunting in
“Kappler’s Hurricane” and other earlier storms. Late on the seventeenth,
as the storm roared across Florida with night closing in, Hawley had
heard nothing from Washington about his plane going into it, so he gave
up and told the riders to come back in the morning.
Early the next morning, one of the reporters, a staff writer for the
Bermuda _Royal Gazette_, was sitting around in his shorts and thinking
about breakfast when Lieutenant Cronin rushed in and said they were
ready to take off. The reporter started to get dressed, but Cronin said,
“Let’s go. Just as you are. You may drown but you won’t freeze.” They
stopped in Hamilton, got the other reporter and the photographer, and
found Hawley walking up and down, impatiently waiting for last
instructions. So the reporter took a trip of 3,350 miles in his shorts
and had a bird’s-eye view of the southern Seaboard, the Atlantic Ocean
and Gulf of Mexico and a bad-acting hurricane.
It was a “hairy hop.” They had orders to refuel at Mobile, so they put
down at the airfield there, all other planes having been evacuated the
day before. An Air Force man came out and asked, “Where you goin’?” They
told him and he turned around and shouted, “Some dang fools think they
have a kite and can fly through a hurricane.” More men came out and they
got gas in the plane. One big fellow said, “You can have your dern trip.
But keep the storm away from here.” In twenty minutes they were in the
storm. The crew members were bare to the waist, perspiration pouring
down, water coming through the panel joints, and everything was wet and
shaking. One of the reporters described it this way:
“Suddenly the plane keeled over on one side, the left wing tip dipped
down vertically, and for a moment I thought the end had come. I gulped
for breath as the plane dropped. The sea rushed up towards us; huge
waves reared up and mocked us, clawing up at the wing tip as if trying
to swallow us in one. A greater burst from the engines, a hovering
sensation for a second and then, with the whole plane shuddering under
the strain, our nose once again tilted upward. I felt weak and with
difficulty breathed again.”
The plane had no radar and the crew had a lot of trouble trying to
locate the center of the hurricane. The forecasters at Miami were
anxious for an accurate position of the center. At that time airborne
radars were being installed as standard equipment as rapidly as they
could get around to it but the B-17’s came last. Low pressure guided
them, and they were trying to get into the part of the hurricane where
they found the pressure falling rapidly. It was a big storm and they
were having little luck in the search. “Lashed by winds and rain, the
B-17 staggered across the sky,” one of the reporters said afterward. He
went on to tell his story:
“I was growing sick in the bomb aimer’s bay stretched over a pile of
parachutes and hanging onto the navigator’s chair for dear life. Some
baggage, roped down beforehand, now lay strewn across the gangway.
Parachutes, life jackets, water cans and camera cases were thrown about
into heaps. The photographer, trying in vain to take pictures out of the
window, was knocked down and sent flying across the fuselage. His arms
were bruised from repeated efforts. My stomach was everywhere but where
it should have been. Everything went black. The plane was thrown from
side to side and the floor under my feet dropped. We emerged from a big
cloud into an eerie and uncanny pink half-light. The photographer
clambered from the floor and tried to look out. He thought the reddish
light was an engine on fire.
“Before we touched down at Tampa, after four hours of flying around in
the hurricane, we reporters and the photographer were exhausted. And
even then they had failed to get into the calm center, although they had
sent back to Washington a lot of useful information on the storm’s
position.”
More than anything else, the preliminaries unnerve the guest rider. They
tell him about the “ditching” procedures; that is, what to do if the
plane is on the verge of settling down on the raging sea. Two or three
hours before take-off they are likely to have a ditching drill, along
with the briefing on the storm and the check on the equipment. The guest
is told that if they bail out, he will go through a forward bomb bay
door. There is hollow laughter as someone makes it clear that there is
very little chance of survival. But they want the guest to have every
advantage.
Commander N. Brango of Navy reconnaissance says: “Yes, we get a good
many requests from men who want to go along. Would you like to go on an
eight- to ten-hour flight in a four-engine, thirty-ton, Navy patrol
plane? You will probably see some of the beautifully lush islands of the
Antilles chain, waters shading gradually from pale green to a deep clear
emerald, shining white coral beaches, native villages buried in tropical
jungles, and many other sights usually referred to in the travel
advertisements.
“Doesn’t that sound enticing? There is just one catch. You may have to
spend four to five hours of your flight-time shuddering and shaking
around in the aircraft like an ice cube in a cocktail shaker, with rain
driving into a hundred previously undiscovered leaks in the plane and
thence down the nearest neck. You may bump your head, or other more
padded portions of your anatomy, on various and sundry projecting pieces
of metal (of which there seem to be at least a million). You may not be
able to see much of anything, at times, since it will be raining so hard
that your horizontal visibility will be nil, or you may be able to catch
glimpses, straight down about 300 feet, of mountainous waves and an
ocean being torn apart by winds of 90 to 150 miles per hour. There’s one
thing I will guarantee you, you won’t be writing postcards to your
friends saying, ‘Having a wonderful time, wish you were here,’ because
you won’t be able to keep the pen on paper long enough to write much of
anything.”
You have guessed by now that the carefully phrased invitation was just a
trap to get you aboard one of the Navy’s “Hurricane Hunter” patrol
planes as it departs on a hurricane reconnaissance mission. According to
Brango, these flights have been described by visiting correspondents,
using “thrilling,” “awe-inspiring,” “terrifying,” and other equally
impressive adjectives. Actually, it is difficult to find words to
describe such a flight. That it is hazardous is obvious, but the feeling
that accomplishing the mission may mean the saving of many lives and
much property makes it seem worth doing—not to mention the lift received
from an occasional “well-done” from up the line.
Just to indicate to the prospective guest what it may be like, Brango
gives “Caribbean Charlie” of 1951 as an example.
Charlie was spawned several hundred miles east of the Windward Island of
Trinidad. The first notice the Navy had of its presence was a ship
reporting an area of bad weather, and almost immediately one of the
hurricane hunter planes from the advanced base in Puerto Rico was in the
air to get the first reports on Charlie. For the next nine days Charlie
led them a wild, if not a merry chase. He slipped by night through the
Windward Islands and into the Caribbean, loafed across this broad
expanse of water, then slammed into Kingston, Jamaica, dealing that city
one of its most devastating blows in history. Then Charlie headed across
the Yucatan Channel and over the Yucatan Peninsula, where he lost some
of his push. Some sixteen hours later he broke into the Gulf of Campeche
with renewed fury, stormed across the Gulf and into the Mexican coast at
Tampico, on August 22, again costing lives and millions in property
damage.
During his long rampage, he was being invaded almost daily by Navy
planes. On Tuesday, August 21, Brango had the fortune of being assigned
to the reconnaissance crew for that day.
They departed Miami at noon of a bright sunny day. For three hours they
flew over a calm ocean, flecked with sunlight. By then they could see
the looming mass of clouds ahead, which indicated Charlie’s whereabouts.
Dropping from seven thousand feet cruising altitude to six hundred feet,
they started getting into the eye. The sun had disappeared and the winds
jumped rapidly to seventy miles an hour. For almost an hour they swung
around to the west and south, feeling for the weaker side, as the winds
got up to one hundred miles per hour and the rain and turbulence became
terrific for about ten minutes before they broke through the inner wall
and into the eye.
According to Brango, “The eye is a pleasant place! Many of them have
blue sky, calm seas and air smooth enough to catch up on your reports
and even drink a cup of coffee. Charlie’s eye wasn’t too good—big, but
cloudy; still it was better than what we had just come through, so we
hung around for about thirty-five minutes, watching the birds. There are
usually hundreds of birds in the eye of a hurricane. Probably they get
blown in there and have enough sense not to try to fly out. But not us,
we want out.”
Soon the decision to start out was made, and the order went over the
inter-com: “Stand by to leave the eye—report when ready.” This always
brings the stock answer, which has become a standard joke in the
squadron: “Don’t worry about us mules, just load the wagon!”
The flight out was rough. Sunset was nearing, and in the storm area
night falls rapidly. For almost two hours they beat their way through
one hundred mile-per-hour winds toward the edge of the storm and in the
general direction of Corpus Christi, their destination. The turbulence
and rain on the way out were so severe that they were unable to send out
messages and position reports, so someone in the crew, catching a
glimpse of the waves beneath, came through with the scintillating remark
that “We’re still lost, but we are making excellent time.”
About nine hours after they had left Miami, they landed at the Naval Air
Station, Corpus Christi, Texas. An hour later they were out of their
dripping flight suits and “testing the quality of Texas draught beer.”
At dawn the next morning, another crew and another plane from the
squadron was into the hurricane, only a few hours before it struck
Tampico and then swirled inland, to dissipate itself on the mountain
range to the west of that coastal city.
Shortly before the middle of September, 1948, the Weather Bureau in
Washington had a long-distance call from the Baltimore _Sun_. A staff
correspondent, Geoffrey W. Fielding, wanted to fly into a hurricane. The
Weather Bureau arranged it through General Don Yates, in charge of the
Air Weather Service, and on September 20, Fielding was authorized and
invited to proceed to Bermuda at such time as necessary between that
date and November 30, to go with one of the crews on a reconnaissance
mission. The Air Force offered transportation to Bermuda and return at
the proper time.
On the day of Fielding’s call, a vicious hurricane was threatening
Bermuda and the B-29’s were exploring it, but it was too late to arrange
a trip. On the thirteenth it passed a short distance east of the
islands, with winds of 140 miles an hour. The next tropical disturbance
was found in the Caribbean west of Jamaica and became a fully developed
storm on September 19. As it raked its way across the western end of
Cuba on the twentieth, and southern Florida on the twenty-first and
twenty-second, Fielding flew to Bermuda. By the time they were ready to
take off, the storm was picking up force after crossing Florida and was
headed in his direction.
Not the worrying type, Fielding made notes of everything: the ditching
tactics, the lifesavers and parachutes, sandwiches for lunch, the
weather instruments, and the exact time of take-off, 12:03 P.M., Bermuda
time. Already, high, thin cirrus clouds were seen, spreading ahead of
the storm. Southward, the clouds lowered and thickened. And then the
aircraft commander, Captain Frank Thompson, saw a tanker wallowing in
the heavy swells a quarter of a mile below, and everybody had a look.
Big seas swept over the bows of the ship and crashed on deck. The crew
of the B-29 felt sorry for the men on the tanker.
“Watch that old ship roll down there,” said the pilot. “Those poor guys
may be in this a couple days. They make very little headway as the
hurricane drives toward them. I wouldn’t like to be in their place.” The
super fortress flew a straight course into the teeth of the hurricane
and low, ragged, rain-filled clouds soon hid the tanker from view.
Increasing winds buffeted the big aircraft, which now seemed like a
pigmy plane in this vast wind system. They were instructed to follow the
“boxing” procedure and were headed for sixty-knot winds in the northeast
sector.
Over the inter-communications suddenly came the excited voice of the
navigator, Lieutenant Chester Camp: “I’ve got them—there they
are—sixty-knot winds. Bring the plane around.” The plane banked in a
right turn as the pilot brought the winds on the tail and shot fuel into
the engines to force the plane through winds that would become more
violent. So they started the first leg of the box.
The weather officer, Lieutenant Chester Evans, was seated in the
bomb-aimer’s position in the glass nose of the plane, practically in the
teeth of the gale. In addition to keeping track of the weather, he
guided the pilots by reading the altimeters to get the height of the
plane above the sea. In spite of the jostling he was getting from the
bouncing plane, Fielding investigated these operations and wrote in his
notebook:
“In addition to the regular altimeter, Lieutenant Evans has a radar
altimeter, which works on the principle of the echo sounding machine
used by ships. A radar wave is transmitted from the small instrument to
the surface of the sea and bounces back again. The time elapsed between
transmission and reception is computed by the gadget in feet, giving an
accurate height reading. The information is passed back to the pilots
who adjust their pressure altimeters. In some cases the error of the
pressure altimeter measures up to three or four hundred feet in a
hurricane.
“The second leg of the box started at 3:05 P.M. and was quite short,
lasting only thirty minutes before the plane had run through the low
pressure and then to a place where it was six millibars higher. Low gray
ragged clouds increased in this sector and the ceiling lowered. On order
from the commander, called Sooky by the crew, the plane went down to two
hundred feet. Below, seen through a film of cloud, the water raged and
boiled. Huge streaks, many of them hundreds of feet long, etched white
lines on the beaten water, which was flatter than a pancake. The
roaring, tearing wind scooped up tons of water at a time which, as it
rose, was knocked flat again by the force of the wind. Sometimes the
wind would literally dig into the water, scooping it out. From this,
huge shell-shaped waves of spume would careen across the water.”
At this point, someone yelled, “Sooky, take a look at the water. You’ll
never see this again. Wind is ninety miles an hour now.” All the crew
peered through the windows. The sea was absolutely flat, except for huge
streaks, some of which the weather observer estimated to be at least
five feet below the surface of the water. The time was 3:45 P.M.,
according to Fielding, who kept precise notes on everything. Instead of
being thrown all over the place as he had expected, the plane was being
lifted up and flopped down again in a series of sickening jolts. To
stand upright called for an acrobat, not a newspaperman. He found it
useless to stand, anyway. It resulted only in a hard crack on the head
when the plane dropped.
At 3:55 P.M., the navigator screeched over the interphone: “It’s up to
one hundred miles an hour, now. Gee, is this some storm!” The rain came
in torrents. “Driven by a smashing, battering wind, it hammered on the
skin of the plane. The wind joined in the noise, howling and screeching
outside and the roar of the engines was drowned out by the mad symphony
of nature,” wrote Fielding. The plane bucked and yawed but it was
designed for high-altitude flying, with pressurized cabins for use when
needed, and no rain came in.
They were on the third leg now and it became hotter in the plane.
Everybody was sweating profusely. Fielding wrote that the “storm bucked
and tossed the heavy bomber through the skies like a leaf in autumn.” At
3:58 P.M., the wind was up to 120 knots. In the midst of all the noise,
Fielding heard a voice on the inter-com. “How are you feeling?” came a
question. “Not so good,” was the miserable reply. “I wish Sooky would
get the plane out of this. That blue cheese I ate in a sandwich for
lunch is turning over. All I can taste is that stinking stuff.” Others
admitted having fluttering stomachs.
The radar operator was unable to get the eye of the hurricane on the
scope. The co-pilot, Captain Hoffman, commented on the scene: “This is a
big storm. It has really picked up in size.” Hardly were the words out
of his mouth before he yelled, “Hey, look, it’s clear outside! The sun’s
coming through.” A shaft of sunlight probed through the clouds and
filled the cabin with a reassuring glow. They ran the fourth leg but
there was nothing new. Fielding thought that they had seen all that this
hurricane could produce in the way of violence. The radio operator got
Kindley Air Base on the 42-20 frequency and learned that all other
military planes in the area were warned to head for the nearest mainland
base. They asked for clearance to MacDill Field and got it at 6:25 P.M.
Stars appeared in a clearing sky and the plane leveled off and roared
through the darkness. It was good to be able to hear the engines again.
Tins of soup were opened and legs were stretched. Stomachs had settled
and there was light chatter over the inter-com. The plane touched down
at MacDill at 10:45 P.M. The men went to bed with aching bodies but they
slept. As Fielding said at the end of his notes, “We had been eleven
hours in the air, much of it in violent weather, and the constant strain
tells on you.”
Finally, in 1954, the so-called “hairy hop” was projected into the
living rooms of people all over the country. When Hurricane Edna was
headed up the coast toward New England, Edward R. Murrow and a camera
crew of the Columbia Broadcasting System flew to Bermuda, and the Air
Force succeeded in getting the entire group—Murrow, three assistants and
one thousand five hundred pounds of camera equipment—in the front of the
plane. While everybody on the crew held his breath and Murrow used up
all the matches aboard and wore out the flint on a lighter, the big
plane was skillfully piloted through the squall bands and pushed over
into the center. The cameras ground away and Murrow asked endless
questions. The eye was magnificent, called a storybook setup, clear blue
skies above, the center being twenty miles in diameter, with cloud walls
rising to about 30,000 feet on all sides. The return was as skillful as
the entrance, through the squall bands, out from under the storm clouds
and back home above blue waters and in the sunshine. The film brought to
television viewers some idea of the majesty and power of a great storm.
Murrow described their passage into the eye of the storm in these words:
“The navigator (Captain Ed Vrable) asked for a turn to the left, and in
a couple of minutes the B-29 began to shudder. The co-pilot said: ‘I
think we’re in it.’ The pilot said: ‘We’re going up,’ although every
control was set to take us down. Something lifted us about three hundred
feet, then the pilot said: ‘We’re going down,’ although he was doing
everything humanly possible to take us up. Edna was in control of the
aircraft. We were on an even keel but being staggered by short sharp
blows.
“Then we hit something with a bang that was audible above the roar of
the motors; a solid sheet of water. Seconds later brilliant sunshine hit
us like a hammer; someone shouted: ‘There she is,’ and we were in the
eye. Calm air, calm, flat sea below; a great amphitheater, round as a
dollar, with white clouds sloping up to twenty-five thousand or thirty
thousand feet. The water looked like a blue Alpine lake with snow-clad
mountains coming right down to the water’s edge. A great bowl of
sunshine.
“The eye of a hurricane is an excellent place to reflect upon the
puniness of man and his works. If an adequate definition of humility is
ever written, it’s likely to be done in the eye of a hurricane.”
The Air Force man who made the arrangements for this broadcast, Major
William C. Anderson, said that this relatively smooth flight was the
best possible testimonial to the progress the hurricane hunters had made
in flying these big storms, for Edna was no weakling. But he worried
about it day and night until the flight was finished, for many strange
things can happen. When Murrow and his crew were safely back in New
York, Anderson turned in for his first good night’s rest in two weeks,
duly thankful that it hadn’t turned out to be a “hairy hop.”
_14._ THE UNEXPECTED
“_There is not sufficient room for two airplanes in the eye of the
same hurricane._”
—Report to Joint Chiefs of Staff
Twenty-five years before men began flying into hurricanes, it was the
main purpose of the aviator to keep out of storms of all kinds. If he
ventured any distance out over the ocean in a “heavier-than-air”
machine, he expected to see ships guarding the route, to pick him up if
he fell in the water. In 1919, when the Navy had planes ready to fly
across the Atlantic, they had a “fleet” of ten destroyers and five
battleships stationed along the line of flight from Trepassey Bay,
Newfoundland, to Portugal via the Azores, to furnish weather reports
that would help the pilot to avoid headwinds, stormy weather and rough
seas, and to take part in rescue operations in case of accident.
Three airplanes, the NC-1, 3 and 4, used in this flight were designed
and built through the joint efforts of the Navy and the Curtiss
Aeroplane Company. These four-engined seaplanes, the largest built up to
that time, exceeded the present-day Douglas DC-3 airplane in size and
weight. Although sufficient fuel could be carried for a sixteen-hour
flight, cruising airspeed was but eighty miles an hour. During the
winter months of 1918 to 1919, plans were made by the Navy, in
co-operation with the Weather Bureau, for securing as complete and
widely distributed weather reports as possible for the Atlantic area
immediately prior to and during the flight. Through international
co-operation, observations were available from Iceland, Western Europe,
Canada, and Bermuda.
From this network of reports, it was possible to draw fairly complete
weather maps and to follow in detail the various weather changes which
might affect the flight. There were several special features that
required consideration. For example, because of the heavy gasoline loads
aboard the planes, it was necessary that the wind at Trepassey Bay be
within certain rather narrow limits, strong enough to enable them to get
off the water, but not so vigorous as to damage the hulls or cause them
to upset. Similarly, the planes would need the help of a moderate
westerly wind in order to reach the Azores on the first leg of the
flight, but an excessive wind would cause rough seas, making an
emergency landing extremely hazardous. Thus the problem was to select a
day on which reasonably favorable conditions would be encountered, and
to get the planes away as early as possible, to minimize the cost of
maintaining the fleet at their positions. After four days of careful
analysis and waiting, the Weather Bureau representative at Trepassey
issued the following weather outlook on the afternoon of May 16, 1919:
“Reports received indicate good conditions for flight over the western
part of the course as far as Destroyer No. 12 (about six hundred miles
out). Winds will be nearly parallel to the course and will yield actual
assistance of about twenty miles per hour at flying levels. Over the
course east of Destroyer No. 12 the winds, under the influence of the
Azores high, recently developed, will be light, but mostly from a
southwesterly direction. They will not yield any material assistance.
“Weather will be clear and fine from Trepassey to Destroyer No. 8 (about
four hundred miles out); partly cloudy thence to the Azores, with the
likelihood of occasional showers. Such showers, however, if they occur,
will be from clouds at low altitudes, and it should be possible to fly
above them.
“All in all, the conditions are as nearly favorable as they are likely
to be for some time.”
It is a strange fact that the Weather Bureau forecaster on this flight
was Willis Gregg, who became Chief of the Weather Bureau in 1934, and
the Navy forecaster for the same flight was Ensign Francis
Reichelderfer, who became the Chief of the Bureau in 1938 after Gregg’s
death.
In accordance with this advice, the three planes departed that evening
and flew the first leg of the flight almost uneventfully until the NC-1
and 3 attempted to land on the water near the Azores due to very low
clouds. Upon landing, although both crews were picked up by near-by
ships, heavy seas damaged the planes to the extent that they could not
continue the flight. Fortunately, however, the NC-4 was able to make a
safe landing in a sheltered bay, and after a week’s delay, awaiting
favorable weather, continued from the Azores alone, arriving at Lisbon,
Portugal, on May 27.
No one at that time would have believed it possible for this situation
to be reversed. Instead of waiting to be sure that the weather is
favorable, planes now assigned to hurricane hunting wait to be sure the
weather out there somewhere is decidedly unfavorable before they take
off in that direction. But even in hurricane hunting the unexpected
happens and, as in the old days, the crews are intensively trained and
all precautions are taken so that they are not likely to be caught by
surprise in an emergency. In a period of years there are hundreds of
missions into dozens of tropical storms and, unfortunately, a few have
met with disaster. So the intensive training goes on without
interruption.
It seems strange but it is a fact that some men fly into hurricanes and
typhoons without seeing much of what is going on outside the plane. They
are too busy with their jobs to spend time looking around. In the first
year some of them learn more about these big storms before and after
missions than they do while flying. There are lists of reading matter to
be consulted, including books and papers on tropical storms, and there
are hints, suggestions, advice and warnings based on the experiences of
other men. Also, they read the reports that usually are gathered from
the members of other crews after their flights are finished. At the end
of the season, all these pieces of information may be assembled in a
squadron report, with recommendations. New men are expected to study
this material. Before each flight, the crew gathers in front of a large
map for a “briefing.” Here an experienced weather officer shows them a
weather map, points out the location and movement of the storm center at
the last report, and indicates the route that seems most favorable for
an approach to the storm area and for the dash into its center.
Most of this training is aimed at the development of crews that will be
ready for any emergency—for the “unexpected,” so far as that can be
realized. Their performance in recent years shows that this special
training enables them to survive most of the frightening experiences
which probably would be disastrous to crews on less spectacular types of
missions.
Usually there has been separate training for the men most concerned with
each of several jobs—weather, hurricane reconnaissance, engineering,
communications, navigation, photography, radar and maintenance. Before
departure, the ground maintenance men see that the plane is in good
working order and that the equipment is operating properly. At the
beginning of each season, for example, some of the Navy maintenance men
get the city to turn the fire hose at high pressure into the front of
the plane, to see how it reacts. The effects of torrential rains in high
winds of the storm are simulated in this manner. After every flight, the
plane needs very thorough examination. One of the troubles is that salt
air at high speed causes rapid corrosion. Salt may accumulate around the
engines. Also, severe turbulence causes damage to the plane.
After the take-off, the pilot and co-pilot can see what is ahead most of
the time, but for considerable intervals they are on instruments, or, as
they say in the Navy, “on the gauges.” They see nothing or very little
of what is ahead of the plane in such cases and, the sea surface being
hidden from view, they are uncertain as to their altitude until the
weather officer, or aerologist, gives them a reading from the radar
altimeter. Sometimes in darkness a pilot has had the bright lights
turned on so that a flash of lightning will not leave him completely
blinded at a time when he must know what the instruments show because of
the violent turbulence that may be experienced when there is lightning.
Then, too, they always have in mind that there may suddenly be
torrential rain that will lower the cylinder head temperatures to a
dangerous level. They must accelerate and heat the engines without
traveling too fast. The landing gear is dropped to catch the wind. By
using a richer mixture to feed the engines, the cooling effect may be
lessened. It is always necessary to be on the alert. Altogether, it is
just as important, and oftentimes more so, for the men to see the gauges
than to see the weather.
Although the Air Force and Navy have different methods of flying into
tropical storms, there are certain dangers that are common to both
systems. Ahead of time, the pilots and others make a last-minute check
to see that the crew are prepared. They also check instruments, lights,
pitot and carbureter heat, safety belts, power settings, emergency
equipment, current for communications and radar, and other things. In
flight, the pilot does not use the throttle unnecessarily, but chiefly
to maintain air speed. Actually it may be said that there are three
pilots. The third one, sometimes known as “George,” is the auto-pilot,
which may do most of the flying, except in rough weather and in landing
and take-off. Keeping the plane on course on a long flight would be very
tiring otherwise. The limits of air speed vary. In the B-29’s, which
have been used generally for Air Force hunting, the limits are between
190 and 290 miles an hour, roughly. Air-speed readings may be affected
by heavy rain. Also, increased humidity of the air will result in an
increase in fuel consumption. There are numerous other items on the list
of things that may cause trouble. But the pilots are highly competent
and thoroughly trained and experienced before being put on the hurricane
detail.
The radio operator, of course, is fully occupied and seldom has much
time to see what is going on in the weather. He has two main troubles.
One is static. When it is bad, all he can do is send a message blind and
ask the ground station to wait. This may last for an hour or more.
Various devices are used to reduce static interference but without
complete success. As soon as the plane starts bouncing around, he has
difficulty keying the message, not only because his body is shaking and
swaying, but because it produces variations in the transmitter voltage
and, on very high frequency, a drop below a certain critical voltage is
likely to render the equipment inoperative.
To overcome a little of the trouble from turbulence, some radio
operators in the early days tried strapping one arm to the desk, but one
radio man, having just experienced a rough flight, said in his report
that his arm didn’t do a very good job unless he was there! Besides, he
needed the arm to hold on with. More recently, it has been necessary to
carry two radio men, and in fact this has become standard practice in
most areas in the last year or two. It is very seldom that
communications fail entirely but a plane on a storm-hunting mission that
was out of contact with the ground station for much over an hour usually
returned to base. Some aircraft on storm missions carry extra receivers
and transmitters.
One navigator interviewed said that he is as busy as a one-armed paper
hanger. He keeps track of the position of the plane by dead reckoning
and by loran, which is “long range navigation,” accomplished by
receiving pulsed signals from pairs of radio stations on coasts or
islands. It works well in the center of the storm, not so well
elsewhere; in some parts of the hurricane belt, loran coverage has been
poor. If it fails, the plane may go out to a point where the navigator
can get a good fix by loran and do the dead reckoning from the center to
this point.
Every few minutes, the navigator writes in his log a note about drift,
compass heading, indicated air speed and time, and when it is rough
bumps his head on the eye piece of the drift meter, the radar or
something else. He takes double drift readings to get the speed of the
strongest winds, figures the diameter of the eye and the exact location
of the aircraft while in the eye, and passes this information to the
weather officer or aerologist for his report. The duties are so numerous
that the Navy usually carries two navigators “to produce pinpoint
accuracy with limited celestial or electronic aids while being buffeted
by one hundred-knot winds.” Two are required largely because of frequent
changes in heading and the nature of the winds in the Navy low-level
style of reconnaissance. The Air Force uses two on daily weather
reconnaissance and sometimes on storm missions.
In many respects, the weather officer, or “flight aerologist” as they
call him in the Navy, is the key man on the mission. The plane is out
for a series of weather reports and it is up to him to decide which is
the best way to get what he wants. Within the limits of operational
safety, his decisions are accepted. It is his job to keep track of the
weather in every detail. He has a complicated form containing many
columns in which he enters figures taken from code tables to fit the
various elements—flying conditions, time, location, kinds of clouds,
heights of cloud bases and tops, direction and distance of unusual
phenomena, rain, turbulence, temperature, pressure, altitude, and every
other conceivable detail that might be of use to the forecaster on
shore. If he put this in plain language, the message would be as long as
a man’s arm and the radio operator might never get it off. There is an
international code in figures for this purpose which makes it possible
to put a very large amount of data in a brief message. And this is a
continuous operation. Hardly does the aerologist get one message into
the hands of the radio operator until he begins another one. It is his
job to keep the pilot informed of the correct altitude. The weatherman
is seated right out in front where the oncoming weather beats a terrific
hubbub against the Plexiglas.
The radar operator may be one of the navigators. He keeps his eye on the
scope. Many queer shapes come and go as the plane speeds along and the
radar man has to know how to interpret them. He keeps the weather
officer informed. Also, it may be his job to help the navigator guide
the pilot around places where turbulence is likely to be excessive. Now
and then, he or another crew member releases a dropsonde to get
temperature, pressure, and humidity in the air between the plane and the
sea.
The photographer has his troubles. Conditions are far from favorable and
oftentimes impossible for taking pictures. One of his important jobs,
and one that has been done exceedingly well by Navy photographers in the
squadron headquartered at Jacksonville, is to get photos of the sea
surface in winds of various forces from eight knots up to one hundred
thirty knots. These photos are extremely useful in estimating the force
of the wind by watching the effects on the sea.
In addition, there is an engineer. He looks after the overall operation
of the plane and watches the many instruments on the panel. Usually he
is a man of long experience who has worked up from crew chief. He
adjusts power to fit the fuel load. If an engine catches on fire, he
knows how to put it out. If a bail-out is imminent, he is the man on the
job. Sitting behind the second pilot, he has his restless eyes
concentrated on the mechanical equipment. All of these men on the plane
work as a team, any of them being ready to help somebody else in an
emergency, and alert and resourceful to take quick action when the
unexpected happens, and it often does.
The crews are usually organized as follows: The senior pilot is in
command—in the Navy he has the title of “Plane Commander” and the other
pilot is the “Co-Pilot.” In the Air Force the man in charge is the
“Aircraft Commander” and his assistant is “Pilot.” In any case, both of
these men are heavily engaged in keeping the aircraft under control when
the weather is rough. The pilots, together with two other men, the
engineer and the crew chief, keep the plane in the air, though these
latter two jobs may be combined, in which case the crew chief has an
assistant—a flight mechanic.
Under the crew chief, or crew captain, there is one exceedingly
important duty—watching the engines. On each side a man looks constantly
for signs of trouble—oil leaks, fire, or whatever. These two men are
sometimes called “scanners.” White smoke or black smoke, as the case may
be, on issuing from an engine signals a dire emergency. It may be only
one or two minutes from incipient fire to explosion, and action must be
immediate to put the fire out or correct other troubles. It is a very
definite strain on the scanners to be alert every instant on a long
flight, and various members of the crew may be rotated on these jobs. On
routine daily reconnaissance in non-hurricane weather, the Air Force
flights are long and some of the men feel decided relief on taking a
hurricane mission, which is rougher but usually much shorter.
With this training and organization of the crews, most of the
emergencies are met quickly and efficiently. Now and then, the
unexpected happens, however, as is evident in the following instances.
In September, 1947, a number of missions by the Navy and Air Force had
secured data in Hurricane George and the big storm was headed ominously
toward Florida. An Air Force crew was in it on September 16 and had been
in trouble. There were gasoline leaks, several fires, and engines acting
up. They decided it was an emergency and set course for MacDill Field.
Everything went well until they approached the field for a landing.
There, in the middle of the runway, sat a big turkey buzzard. In the
twinkling of an eye, when they were only fifty feet away, the great bird
took off and smashed into the leading edge of the right wing. The impact
made a sizable dent and the wing dipped. After six tries, the pilot
skillfully got the plane down without an accident but the crew was more
upset by this bird than by the average hurricane.
Sometimes the unexpected leads to disaster. One of the most unfortunate
of these incidents occurred at Bermuda in 1949. There was a report of a
disturbance in the western Caribbean on November 3. It was late in the
season, but a few very bad hurricanes have struck in this region in
November, so the forecasters at Miami asked for reconnaissance and the
request was passed to the Air Force at Kindley Field, in Bermuda. It was
afternoon when the message came. A B-29 with a crew of thirteen men was
cleared for a flight through the storm area and thence to Ramey Air
Force Base, in Puerto Rico, where they were to spend the night.
The plane took off at 6:17 P.M., Bermuda time, climbed to ten thousand
feet and leveled off. Almost immediately the crew saw an oil leak in the
No. 1 engine and it was feathered. The radio operator got in touch with
the tower and airways and the aircraft commander prepared to return to
the field. The pilot brought the plane over the island and reported at
four thousand feet, descending. But just at that time a Pan American
Stratocruiser was cleared to land. The B-29 circled and reported at one
thousand five hundred feet at a distance of seven miles west of the
island. Next the plane was four miles out, coming straight in at one
thousand feet and was cleared to land on Runway 12.
There was a gusty cross wind and there were scattered clouds at one
thousand feet. The plane then reported that it would pass over at one
thousand feet and get lined up, but almost immediately said to disregard
the last message. One-half mile away, the flaps were raised, the landing
gear was let down, and power was applied on the three remaining engines.
The plane made a left turn which became steeper and altitude was lost
rapidly until the left wing hit the water. This was a quarter of a mile
offshore. Fire broke out as the plane hit the water and rescue boats
rushed to the scene. Only three men escaped, two of them miraculously
through a hole in the fuselage, as was determined by a Bermuda diver who
went down sixty feet in the water to examine the wreckage. The other
man, captain of the aircraft, was pulled out but died later in the
hospital. It was the two radar men who were fortunately in a position to
get out through the hole in the fuselage and both survived.
In this incident at Bermuda the plane was not being affected by a storm.
It is an amazing fact, in consideration of the very large number of
weather missions flown by the Air Force after World War II, that their
first plane to be lost while on reconnaissance in a tropical storm was
in 1952. On November 1, a B-29 left Guam to fly into a typhoon called
Wilma. The crew of the superfort was instructed to penetrate the storm,
report by radio, land at Clark Field in the Philippines, and be prepared
to fly through the typhoon again on the following morning. The same day,
however, radio contact was lost. Seventeen rescue planes and numerous
surface vessels searched the typhoon-torn waters near Samar Island for
survivors without success. Natives on the island of Leyte reported that
a four-engined plane was seen flying low in that vicinity but the report
could not be verified.
The squadron to which this plane was assigned had made more than five
hundred reconnaissance flights into typhoons between June 1, 1947, and
the date on which it was lost.
Lieutenant A. N. Fowler, an experienced Navy pilot, was the man who said
that a hurricane flight was like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone
booth. Describing one of his most dangerous trips, he told a
newspaperman:
“I have seen the hurricane-swept sea on many occasions, but it never
fails to impress me in exactly the same way. It would be sheer turmoil,
like a furious blizzard. While experiencing the jarring turbulence, the
heat and drumming of torrential rain which seeps in by the gallon and
tastes salty, the inside of a hurricane can be like a bad dream. Like
having been swallowed by an epileptic whale, or going over Niagara Falls
in a telephone booth.”
On a less serious note but illustrative of the unexpected, there is the
tale of the Navy crew and the hot water. They took off in a Privateer to
fly into the center of a hurricane, each member of the crew having been
assigned certain specific duties, as is always the case on these
missions. The radar operator, among other jobs, was given the coffee
detail. After a considerable period of moderate to heavy turbulence,
with heavy rain leaking into the plane until everybody was thoroughly
soaked, they broke into the clear in the eye of the hurricane, about
twenty-five miles in diameter. The weather officer was busy with the
coding of his latest observation, the radio operator was sending two
messages that had accumulated, and the navigator was figuring the
position of the eye and computing a double drift for wind. The co-pilot
had the controls and was flying around the eye, preparatory to a descent
as soon as the coffee had gone around.
The pilot called for coffee. The radar man dragged out two jugs, both
still hot, and began to pour. He threw the first cupful under his seat
and poured one from the other jug. Then he saw that he had brought two
jugs of hot water and no coffee. “What the heck!” exclaimed the weather
officer. “Why, you poor ——!” The navigator’s words were scathing. He
said that, according to the Bible, Noah was tossed overboard for less
reason.
From the very beginning of reconnaissance, these missions have been
co-ordinated according to instructions issued by a trio who serve on the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and also on the Air Co-ordinating Committee. Today
the men are Brigadier General Thomas Moorman of the Air Force, Captain
J. C. S. McKillip of the Navy, and Dr. Francis W. Reichelderfer, Chief
of the Weather Bureau. There have been no serious accidents on the
Atlantic side when planes actually were in hurricanes and there was no
confusion in assigning planes until September, 1947. The men on the
Committee at that time were Brigadier General Donald Yates and Captain
H. T. Orville, in addition to Dr. Reichelderfer. They co-ordinated many
operations in addition to hurricane reconnaissance and all had had long
experience in aviation. Dr. Reichelderfer was formerly in charge of
weather operations in the Navy, after long experience at sea and in the
air. He was weather officer for Hindenberg on his flight around the
world in a dirigible.
On September 18, 1947, the committee was surprised and alarmed by a
report of reconnaissance. An Air Force plane out of Bermuda flew into a
big hurricane which was moving west-northwest to the south of Bermuda
and, after a rough time in the outer parts of the storm, finally found
its way into the eye. Immediately they saw a Navy Privateer flying
around in the center, also on reconnaissance, and they got right out of
the eye and returned to base. There they made an official protest that
there is not sufficient room for two planes in the center of the same
hurricane. New instructions for co-ordination were issued immediately to
all concerned. It is not surprising that this has happened on at least
two other occasions, once with two Air Force planes and on another
occasion with a commercial airliner.
In 1953 there was another bad accident, but not directly in a hurricane
area. It resulted from a moderate hurricane named Dolly, which came from
the vicinity of Puerto Rico on September 8 and moved toward Bermuda with
increasing intensity. On the tenth, aircraft in the center estimated the
highest winds at more than one hundred miles an hour, but on the
eleventh it weakened and passed directly over Bermuda. There were strong
gales at Bermuda, although the storm was diminishing in force so fast
that no serious damage resulted.
On the tenth an Air Force plane from Bermuda flew into the hurricane. A
Weather Bureau research man, Robert Simpson, went along to follow up on
some studies he was making of the circulation at high levels in tropical
storms. He reported:
“Dolly was an immature storm with most of the cloudiness concentrated in
the northern sector. On the south and west sides, clouds rose only to
around seven or eight thousand feet near the eye, except along the
spiral rain bands which encircled the eye. The plane first investigated
conditions at one thousand five hundred feet in the eye, where it was
observed that there was a huge mound of cloud near the center with a
moat or cloudless area which encircled this central cloud and separated
it from the walls of the eye.”
After this low-level exploration, the plane climbed to 29,500 feet,
completing a spiral sounding in the eye. At this elevation or slightly
lower, a complete navigation of the storm area was made, with dropsondes
being released in strategic quarters, pressure and temperature gradients
being measured along the track of the plane. There were two outstanding
things observed during this flight at high levels: first, the sheer
beauty of the storm itself, which could be viewed in excellent
perspective, insofar as the cloud forms were geared to the wind
circulations over hundreds of miles surrounding the eye. The only
obstructions to vision at this elevation were the tall cloud walls which
rose from the northern side of the eye. The second was a strong cyclonic
circulation near thirty thousand feet over the eye itself which was
surprising. Most theorists had figured that the cyclonic circulation
would cease at high altitudes and possibly at very high levels become
anticyclonic.
Simpson continued:
“By the time the plane had returned to Bermuda it was evident that Dolly
was bearing down upon the island itself and that everything had to be
evacuated. All of the planes were flown out to the mainland and the
buildings battened down for the big blow. I spent most of the time in
the weather station with my eyes glued to the radar scope. As the storm
approached, and the winds rose, one rain band after another passed over
the station, each with evidence of a little more curvature than the
preceding band.
“Finally, the scope indicated a circle with a five-mile area free of any
radar echoes. It was bearing down directly upon Kindley Field. Oddly
enough the pressure had not begun to fall and the wind was holding
steady. Another odd thing was that during the reconnaissance the eye had
been twenty-five miles in diameter. However, this eye was only four to
five miles in diameter. The eye arrived, the rain stopped and then
resumed as the eye passed over the station, yet the pressure only
leveled off briefly and the wind only subsided slightly without
shifting. We had been tricked! This was not the real McCoy, it was a
false eye. Subsequently, two other false eyes appeared on the radar
scope and we had about decided that the storm had no organized central
circulation left when the real thing finally showed up on the scope,
still twenty-five miles in diameter.”
In the reconnaissance of Hurricane Dolly, many feet of radar pictures
were made of the spiral bands of the storm. When it became clear that
all planes would have to be flown to the mainland because of the
approach of Dolly to Bermuda, the film pack used on the reconnaissance
was left in the plane so that additional pictures could be made on the
flight back to the mainland. Not only was this done, but also an
additional eye dropsonde was obtained during the trip to the mainland.
It was agreed that as soon as the plane returned to Bermuda after the
storm had passed, the film and additional records would be mailed to
Washington.
On its flight from the mainland while returning to Bermuda, the plane
exploded in mid-air 150 miles off the coast, near Savannah, Georgia. It
had the records, the radar film, the dropsondes taken in the eye, and
other data. In this case, the No. 4 engine had “run away,” throwing its
prop, which struck Engine No. 3, and the latter exploded. The plane fell
out of control. Eight of the crew were rescued but none of the records
or data of the reconnaissance was saved. This plane, however, was not on
a storm mission at the time.
The unexpected appearance of a small eye on the radar scope is not
uncommon. The Navy’s instruction to its crews says: “During the final
minutes of the run-in, radar may prove to be more of a hindrance than a
help. There can be a number of open spots close to the true eye which
might appear as eyes on the radar screen. You should not chase these
false eyes!”
Out in the Pacific, the typhoon chasers say: “False eyes are often found
in weak storms and care must be taken not to confuse them with the true
eye of the typhoon. On the radar scope they may present an appearance
much like the true eye but will not remain on the scope for any length
of time. By continually scanning the suspected eye with several sweeps,
the radar observer will see that the false eyes are surrounded by fuzzy
cloud formations rather than a heavy ring of cloud characteristic of the
eye.”
When Hurricane Carol of 1954 was approaching the New England Coast, the
last penetration was made by a Navy plane with Lieutenant Commander R.
W. Westover as pilot and Lieutenant C. W. Hines as co-pilot. On the way
into the storm circulation, Hines was telling Westover about his
family’s experience in the New England hurricane of 1938. The family
residence was on Cape God. It was blown into the water and drifted until
it lodged against a bridge, obstructing navigation. Finally, it was
necessary to dynamite the wrecked house to clear the channel. The Hines
family rebuilt their home and took out hurricane insurance. They carried
the insurance until June 1, 1954, and then let it lapse.
As the recco plane flew into the center of Carol on August 30, the crew
was watching a Moore-McCormack ship in the stormy seas below and
sympathizing with the people on board who were suffering such rotten
weather, but Hines was saving his sympathy for his family on Cape Cod.
He was sure that Carol was going to blow their home into the water
again, and afterward he learned that it did.
Although Carol of 1954 received a great deal of publicity because of
death and destruction in New England, Westover, who also flew into
Hurricane Carol of 1953, says that it was a much more violent hurricane
than the one in 1954. The first Carol was so bad that only one low-level
penetration was attempted. His crew recorded pressure 929 millibars in
the center—about 26.80 inches—and they recorded 87½° drift. But
fortunately the earlier Carol remained out at sea throughout its course.
Hurricane Hazel, later in 1954, gave another Navy pilot, Lieutenant
Maxey P. Watson, an experience of the same kind that Lieutenant Hines
had. The storm was approaching the coast of South Carolina when Watson
flew his plane into it and he saw the center passing inland not far from
the town of Conway, which was his home.
Hazel was responsible for other unexpected incidents here and there
during its ravages from the Caribbean to the northeastern part of the
United States. One case was on a Navy plane commanded by Lieutenant G.
J. Rehe. Watson was the pilot on this trip, also. They took off from
Puerto Rico and flew into the storm as it was turning northward and
passing out of the Caribbean.
Up to that time, Hazel was not much of a storm. Westover flew into it
after it passed Grenada and found that it was not a well-organized
cyclone. Rehe had gone into it on the first penetration and reported
winds of eighty-five knots. Westover found the area almost cloudless but
ninety-knot winds in one area. However, after its northward motion
began, it was a very dangerous wind system, which was responsible for
the only injury to a Navy crewman in their many flights into this
particular hurricane.
Because of the severe turbulence that had developed quickly in Hazel,
all the crew members on this flight were fastened in with safety belts,
as is usual in such cases, but the photographer wanted to get up and
take a picture. So he got out of his safety belt and had another crew
member unfasten himself and hold him while he took the picture. In the
sudden very violent turbulence, both were thrown against the overhead.
On his descent, the photographer caught his arm between the cables and
the fuselage and broke his shoulder blade. The other crewman was knocked
unconscious.
Out in the Pacific, an Air Force pilot, Captain Leo S. Bielinski, had an
experience which induced him to go to great lengths of experiment and
ingenuity in an effort to find an easier way to track typhoons and
hurricanes. It was in May, 1950, when a typhoon called Doris was growing
to maturity while near the island of Truk and showed signs of changing
its path, threatening the base at Guam. On May 8, an RB-29, under the
command of Captain Cunningham, was sent out to penetrate the storm.
Bielinski went along.
At that time Leo had a fine wrist watch in which he took much pride. A
man in uniform has few things that are different from the other men, but
Leo secured an expression of individuality through a wrist watch. He
bought a very special one for a hundred dollars and admits that he
frequently looked at it when he really didn’t care what time it was.
On this first trip into Doris, everything went smoothly. The crew
members were instructed to land at Iwo Jima, when another plane would
take over. But before landing they found that the hydraulic system
needed repairs. Cunningham brought the plane down skillfully and they
worked all night making repairs with parts salvaged from another plane
on the field. The plans were changed and they were assigned to the next
mission. The next morning they were airborne again for another
penetration. This confirmed the northwest movement of Doris, which would
take the most violent winds away from Guam, so they returned to Iwo
Jima, well worn-out by two successive flights and thinking about a
little rest, when Commander Cunningham received the following message:
“Unable to get relief; request you make afternoon fix.” So the same crew
turned around and started the third mission. The other two flights into
this storm had been uneventful, they were tired, and Leo didn’t bother
to fasten his safety belt.
_Wham!_ Suddenly he found himself floating in the air around the
cockpit. Before he could get his bearings, he was thrown violently
against a bulkhead and slowly came to the realization that the bits of
junk dangling in his face were the remains of his hundred-dollar wrist
watch. This bothered Bielinski more than a broken arm or a twisted
vertebrae. He started studying typhoons with a determination to find a
better way to keep track of them. The results are described in Chapter
17.
In other ways the unexpected can be serious. One experience is cited by
Captain Ed Vrable, who was navigator on a flight into a hurricane in
1953. After a careful approach, the aircraft suddenly popped into the
eye, but it was only about eight miles in diameter. It was not easy to
circle a superfortress in this small eye. At one point, the turning arc
was a little too broad and the aircraft edged out into the winds on the
border. It was instantly tossed back into the eye, almost upside down,
and he had the worst fright of his career in the reconnaissance
business. But the pilots made a skillful descent until they managed to
get the plane into the correct attitude and finished the flight.
In Hurricane Edna, in 1954, a crew of hunters in a WB-29, in command of
Captain Charles C. Whitney, had an unexpected duty. They had spent part
of the morning and the afternoon of September 14 in the eye of the
hurricane. They flew in tight little circles, dodging the
wing-shuddering winds on the periphery. Because the Weather Bureau
forecasters were afraid of a repetition of a sudden speed-up like that
of Hurricane Carol two weeks before, they had asked for a continuous
watch. Captain Whitney and his crew were in there for nine hours.
And then, with gas getting low, they ran into the unexpected. Some
eleven hours after take-off from Bermuda, the aircraft picked up a radio
message that the Nantucket lightship, torn from her moorings by terrific
winds, was adrift and at Edna’s mercy. The WB-29 plunged into
145-mile-an-hour winds in search of the vessel.
Picking up the lightship by radar, the weather plane shepherded the
hopelessly lost ship, remaining overhead until a Coast Guard rescue
plane arrived.
Waves seventy feet high seemed to toss the stricken vessel into the air
to meet the low-flying aircraft pressed down by Edna’s raging winds. It
felt, the crew said later, as if the plane were dancing on her tail.
With the arrival of the relief plane, the WB-29 turned landward. After
sixteen hours in the air, and with the gas gauge hitting the low side of
the dial, the weather plane made a landing at Dover, Delaware.
According to the Air Force, “This flight was one of the most dramatic
missions in peacetime Air Force history.”
_15._ FIGHTING HAIL AND HURRICANES
“_I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under;
And then again I dissolve it in rain
And laugh as I pass in thunder._”
—Hebert
At first thought, most people would say that fighting hail has nothing
to do with hunting hurricanes, but in one instance it did. It is an
interesting story which shows how men will take risks in trying to
control the weather. The story ends with one man giving up his life in a
sensational adventure with a mysterious conclusion.
Destructive storms are not very frequent in any one place but most
people are under the impression that they are. They are apt to remember
bad weather and forget about the good. Losses of life and property and
failures of plans and business enterprises are caused by storms or the
wrong kind of weather and such things are impressed on their memories.
When rain is needed, it may fail altogether or come in such quantities
that fields and roads are washed out and there are floods in the rivers.
A thunderstorm brings rain but sometimes hail comes with it, destroying
crops and damaging property.
People have tried to overcome these bad effects of the weather in many
ways. Irrigation has long been practiced in regions with scanty
rainfall. Air conditioning affords relief from excessive heat. In many
other ways, some foolish and some dangerous, men have tried to influence
the weather. An interesting case of this kind which appealed to the
imagination of people in many countries started near the beginning of
the present century. It was an international battle against hail. Its
origin was in the vineyards of Italy. Hail had done great damage there
year after year, and finally an Italian got the idea that he might
destroy hailstorms by shooting into them when they were just beginning.
In those years, cannon were used in battle. Loaded with big charges of
gunpowder, these cannon hurled solid, heavy balls at enemy cities,
forts, fleets, and troops. In time of peace, there were many of these
old cannon around, serving no useful purpose, and the Italian had no
trouble in getting one to try on hailstorms. But he was not permitted to
use a cannon ball. It might have crashed into a neighbor’s house or
killed somebody in the vineyards. So he loaded it with gunpowder and
fired it at the storm cloud, hoping it would create a disturbance in the
atmosphere and weaken the hailstorm.
It is an amazing fact that the vineyard of this Italian was damaged far
less by hail than those of any of his neighbors, and the next year
others tried firing a cannon with similar success. They became expert at
it and learned how to load a cannon so that it cast a big, whirling
smoke ring into the thunderstorm cloud. The news spread to other
countries and in two or three years there was a lot of hail shooting in
different parts of the world. So they held an international
hail-shooting congress where they exchanged ideas and narrated their
experiences. By the time the second world congress on hail was held, a
great deal of uncertainty had developed. It seemed that the first hail
shooters had begun work at a time when it just happened that there was
much less than the usual amount of hail. Also, there were explosions and
people were hurt. One man was killed and another had an arm blown off.
After a few years, all the hail shooting ceased.
Even today, there is a good deal of mystery about the formation of hail
and many people think there are ways of preventing it or causing the
storm to make little hailstones instead of big ones and thus having much
less destruction. Hail causes many millions of dollars worth of damage
every year in the United States and almost any effort to reduce the
losses seems to be justified.
Scientists believe that hailstones are very small in the beginning but
grow in size as they go up and down several times in the thunderstorm
clouds. Even in hot weather, it is very cold in the top layers of one of
these great clouds. Raindrops freeze and in falling gather more water or
snow in these high regions. Soon they are caught in rising air currents
and carried up into freezing temperatures again. On each trip up and
down, another layer of water or snow gathers on the outside and is
frozen. At last the multi-layered stones become so heavy that they fall
to the ground, in spite of rising currents, and as they leave the cloud
they come down with great rapidity and may beat crops to the ground,
batter automobiles, break glass and bruise and sometimes kill livestock.
A hailstone the size of a baseball falling many thousands of feet is a
very dangerous thing.
For many years after the hail-shooting experiments, it was thought that
nothing could be done about it except to carry hail insurance. Then,
shortly after World War II, scientists of the General Electric Company
announced that they had conducted some successful experiments in
controlling the weather and this led to efforts to control rainfall,
prevent hail, and stop hurricanes.
The man who started this new effort at weather control was Vincent
Schaefer. He observed the weather on top of Mt. Washington, in New
Hampshire, a place where it is very cold and windy in winter. The
observatory is fastened to the solid rock of the mountain top by steel
cables, to keep it from being blown off. Vast quantities of ice
accumulate on the building. Snow comes down in great quantities at times
but is generally carried by high winds which have reached terrific
speed, on one occasion going up to 231 miles an hour. Conditions there
are in some respects like the weather in the top of a big thunderstorm.
One of the peculiar things that happens up there on Mt. Washington and
in the top of a thunderstorm is the formation of liquid water droplets,
which are colder than freezing but they do not turn to ice. These
droplets are said to be supercooled. Schaefer found in his experiments
at General Electric that a small pellet of dry ice, the size of a pea,
when dropped into air containing a cloud of supercooled water droplets
could produce untold billions of small ice nuclei. So he carried some
dry ice up in an airplane and dropped it into the top of a cloud with
supercooled water droplets, and a trail of snow was seen falling from
the bottom of the cloud. Many others tried the same experiment and some
had similar results. The snow turned to rain as it came down to warmer
levels, and the process was called “rainmaking.”
There is one disturbing fact. Before dry ice will work on a cloud, it
must be very near the point of making rain without any outside help. But
many of the rainmakers believe that dry ice makes more rain fall or
causes it to fall sooner than it would otherwise. Thus, as the cloud
moves along, the rainmaker may be able to cause a shower in a certain
place, whereas the cloud might have moved far away before it began to
rain. In this story the important point is that some of the
experimenters believe that dry ice or some other chemical will cause the
rain to fall but will make it much less likely that nature’s process
will develop to the point of producing hail.
The news of all this rainmaking in the West aroused intense interest on
the part of a young man named Gordon Clouser. He thought he might be
able to prevent hail, and if he succeeded, he might stop tornadoes. In
the Midwest there is an old story about a farmer who knocked the life
out of a tornado by hitting it with a two-by-four. On hearing this
story, many people have gotten the idea that the government might
destroy a tornado by gunfire. More recently there have been serious
proposals that these vicious local storms with funnel clouds and violent
winds be destroyed by guided missiles. There is no evidence that any of
the plans offered so far would be successful in breaking up hailstorms
or tornadoes, but they are extremely small when compared with
hurricanes, and the government has received thousands of proposals that
these great storms be wiped out or rendered harmless by gunfire.
Behind most of the suggestions for killing hurricanes is the idea that
they begin as small whirls in the atmosphere and go through early stages
of growth to the size of a tornado or a thunderstorm, and if they could
be hit with great force in a vital place while small, they might die
out. On this assumption, there have been a great many proposals that the
Navy send battleships into the hurricane area to search for incipient
hurricanes and fire broadsides into them. No test of this kind has been
made for two reasons. The hurricane region is so large that the entire
Navy would be insufficient for such a patrol. On the other hand, there
is not a shred of evidence that hurricanes begin as small storms like
tornadoes or thunderstorms. Actually, they seem to develop as mildly
disturbed weather over an area of thousands of square miles. The experts
say that shooting at the weather in such a large region would certainly
be futile. After the World War II, the atom bomb stimulated some new
ideas and thousands of letters were written to the government about
knocking a hurricane out with an atom bomb at the right time and place.
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.
“Pilot Eastburn punched me and pointed to the indicated airspeed gage.
It stood at 166. ‘At this elevation this plane stalls out at 163,’
Eastburn said, ‘and in this thin air there is no recovery from a stall.’
He continued, ‘We have got to get out of here fast!’ I nodded agreement,
feeling a bit sheepish about the whole thing. After all, hadn’t Vincent
Schaefer, of General Electric, just a few months earlier demonstrated in
the laboratory that water vapor could be cooled to a temperature of -39°
before freezing set in? But in the turbulent circulation of a
hurricane—this was fantastic! Unbelievable! But there certainly was no
guesswork about that six or eight inches of rime ice on the leading edge
of the wing!
“We got out of there all right, and fast, but we had to do it in a long
straight glide; the plane was simply too loaded with ice and too near
stall-out to risk the slightest banking action.”
After all, the atmosphere is a mixture of gases and it obeys the laws of
gases. If the scientists assume that the big storm has a certain
structure and a certain circulation of air in its colossal bulk, there
are definite conclusions to be drawn concerning the physics of this
giant process in the tropical atmosphere. But if it turns out that the
assumptions about the structure and circulation are wrong, the
conclusions of the physicists may be exactly opposite to the truth. The
results of years of study, calculation and discussion seem to be
overthrown in one moment as a superfortress plunges into a vital section
and the crew sees things that ought not to be there!
Most important in the 1947 storm was the fact that conditions at a
height just below forty thousand feet were such as to go with a
circulation against the hands of a clock at maybe 130 miles an hour. The
plane going in that direction had a tail wind of ninety miles an hour.
And yet, the students of hurricanes during the past century were sure
that at some height well below that level the winds blew outward in a
direction _with_ the hands of a clock. In agreement with this
conclusion, most of the scientists had made up their minds in recent
years that the circulation in the lower part of these storms usually
disappears at twenty to thirty thousand feet. And so, if we are to
account for the removal of air in this great space extending down to the
sea surface, it must have been done well above forty thousand feet in
this case. And up at this height the air is so thin that it is almost
inconceivable that it could blow hard enough to account for air removal
in the average hurricane. On the other hand, this was a mature storm and
it may be that at this stage no air was actually being removed from the
system and that the gigantic circulation of the full-grown monster is
self-contained.
While it would be extremely interesting to understand the magic by which
nature so slyly removes the air from the hurricane under our very noses,
the practical question is whether or not its escape at the top is geared
in any way to the forward motion of the main body of the storm. The
answer to the first question may give the answer to the second, and
possibly also to the third question: what causes a hurricane to increase
in intensity—to deepen, as the weatherman says, having reference to the
fall of pressure in the center? He thinks of it as a hole in the
atmosphere.
This 1947 hurricane illustrates the great difficulty of finding answers
to our questions. But in any case, this was just one storm and all of
them are different in one way or another.
But to go back to the story of the guest rider from the Weather Bureau,
Robert Simpson, the story is not complete without a brief account of the
flight into Typhoon Marge. It raised its ugly head in the Pacific in
August, 1951, and on the thirteenth had passed Guam, a storm not well
developed but of evil appearance, showing signs of growth. That evening
Simpson arrived from Honolulu, where he was in charge of the Weather
Bureau office. He accepted an invitation from the Air Force to visit
Marge and on August 14, six hours after he alighted from Honolulu, was
airborne in a B-29 and on the way.
In a few hours Marge had grown into a colossus. It was nearly one
thousand miles in diameter, with winds exceeding one hundred miles an
hour in an area more than two hundred fifty miles in diameter. When the
hurricane hunters entered the center and measured the pressure, it
proved to be one of the deepest on record—26.45 inches at the lowest
point. From plane level, the eye was perfectly clear above, forty miles
in diameter and circular. The massive cloud walls around the eye rose on
all sides to thirty-five thousand feet, like a giant coliseum. The west
wall was almost vertical, with corrugations that suggested the galleries
of a gigantic opera house.
In the center, below the plane, they saw a mound of clouds rising to
about eight thousand feet, an unusual feature, but one that has been
observed in other tropical storms. The crew spent fourteen and a half
hours in the central region of this huge typhoon, getting data at levels
from five hundred feet up to twenty thousand. Down in the lower levels,
they found a horizontal vortex roughly five thousand feet in diameter,
extending from the cloud wall of the eye like a tornado funnel, in which
they encountered very severe turbulence. Another collection of data was
added to the growing accumulation and with it the notes of unusual
phenomena observed. Since that time Simpson has flown several hurricanes
in the Atlantic.
Now it is abundantly clear that the hurricane hunters are looking for
many important facts aside from the location of the tropical storm and a
measure of its violence. There are many questions unanswered. Here in
the warm, moist winds that blow endlessly across deep tropical waters
there are mysteries that have challenged man for centuries. Turning to
their advantage every discovery that science has pointed in their
direction, the hurricane hunters have cheated the big storms of the West
Indies of a very large share of their toll of human life. In struggling
to solve the remainder of the problem, they have two virtues that will
ultimately bring success—ingenuity and persistence. They push on
tirelessly in several hopeful directions.
The Navy has taken advantage of the strange fact that when a tropical
storm comes along it literally shakes the earth. There are little
tremors like earthquakes but very much smaller. The Greek word for
earthquake is _seismos_ and by putting _micro_ in front, meaning very
small, we have the word _microseism_. And so, the storm-caused little
tremors are called microseisms or slight earthquakes. The instrument
which registers these tremors is called a seismograph. When the earth
moves, even a very little, a body on the earth tends to hold its
position and the earth moves under it. In a small earthquake, a chair
will move across the floor. This kind of motion can be registered by
instruments.
In 1944 the Navy installed seismographs and began keeping records of the
slight tremors caused by hurricanes and typhoons. These studies have
shown that a tropical storm at a distance produces a small tremor which
becomes stronger as the storm center gets nearer. No one knows exactly
how the storm shakes the earth and causes the tremors. There are some
strange things about this. It seems that these microseisms are carried
along in the earth until they come to the border of a great geological
block and then do not pass readily into the next block. So there are
places in the Caribbean where the tremors weaken as they come to a
different earth block and this interferes with the indications picked up
by the instruments. The fact is that microseisms give signs of the
existence of a tropical storm and sometimes serve to alert the storm
hunters, but they are by no means good enough to replace the use of
planes in tracking them. But the studies of microseisms are being
continued.
For many years static on the radio, better known as atmospherics or just
“sferics,” has been used in the endeavor to locate or keep track of
storms. At first the Navy tried it on West Indian hurricanes. The
instruments used will find the direction from which the sferics come
when they are received in a special tube. In more recent years, the Air
Force has used this scheme. It works to advantage in finding
thunderstorms, but tropical storms are so big and the sferics are not
found in any regular pattern around the central region. After years of
trial, it has been concluded that this scheme is not good enough to
replace other methods.
Of all the methods of this kind, radar is by far the best. But as the
radar stations on shore and the radar equipment on aircraft have
increased in numbers and have been improved to reach greater distances,
some new troubles have arisen. For many years the hurricane hunters took
it for granted that a hurricane has a clear-cut center which moves
smoothly along a path that is a straight line or a broad curve, but in a
few cases is a loop or a sharp turn. In other words, the center does not
change size and shape or wiggle around. In the past, when an observer on
a ship or on a plane reported a center of an odd shape or had it off the
smooth path the hunters were plotting, they said the observer had made
an error.
Now as the hunters have begun watching hurricane centers close by on the
radar, they see them changing shape and wiggling around. In fact, as
stated in a few cases in earlier chapters, they have seen false eyes and
have been confused by them until the true eye came into view on the
radar scope. If the true eye describes a wiggly path and changes size,
the hunters can draw the wrong conclusions about its direction of motion
unless they wait a while to see if it comes back to the old path. The
hurricane is a little like an eddy or whirl in water running out of the
bottom of a bowl. It is a violent boiling eddy that twists and changes
shape, and in a substance as thin as the atmosphere these motions are
not steady to such a degree that the observer can reach a quick
decision. At any rate, it is now apparent that the observers on ships
and aircraft did not make as many errors as was thought several years
ago.
There is another aspect that must be kept in mind. Radar shows areas
where rain is falling around the center of a hurricane and so the
center, having no rain, stands out as an open space on the radar scope.
This is very good if the storm has rain all around the center, but some
of them have very little rain on the southwest side, and in some cases
there is none to return an echo to the radar. In such a case, there is
only one side to the storm echo and the location of the center is not
revealed. Of course, these facts are known to the experienced radar men,
but they should be known to everybody interested in hurricane reports;
otherwise they are likely to expect too much accuracy from observations
of this kind.
For these and other reasons, the man on the aircraft has a very great
advantage in daylight, for he can see clouds of all kinds, measure the
winds and, by moving through the storm area at the speed of the modern
plane, he can see a large part of it in a short time. To find a
substitute for aircraft reconnaissance is going to be extremely
difficult. But at night the situation is quite different. The airman is
unable to see much without radar, except on a moonlight night and that
is not very good.
One suggestion that has been put forward by a number of different people
in recent years is that a balloon be flown in the calm center and
followed by radar or radio, thus keeping track of the storm’s motion. It
is possible, of course, to fix a small rubber balloon (perhaps eight to
ten feet in diameter) so that it will remain at the same height for a
fairly long time. By one method the rubber balloon is partly filled with
helium and covered loosely with nylon. The balloon expands as it rises,
becoming less dense as the atmosphere gets thinner. It continues to rise
until it fills the nylon cover and cannot expand further. After that,
its density becomes the same as the air at some level previously chosen,
and from there it drifts along without rising or descending.
It is the idea that the obliging balloon would drift here and there in
the vagrant breezes of the eye, but when it came to the edge of the
powerful wind currents around the outside of the eye it would be guided
back in. No experiment has been carried out to prove that this would
happen but such trials have been scheduled and will be made at the first
opportunity. There is one difficulty. The question is how to get an
inflated balloon into the center and release it under proper conditions.
One of the men who has worked on a scheme of this kind is Captain
Bielinski, the Air Force officer who broke his hundred-dollar watch in a
typhoon and solemnly swore he would find an easier way to do it. He
calls his device “Typhoon Homer.” He has worked on it for four years,
spending much of his own time and money.
There are reasons to believe that, after a few experiments, a height
could be found where the balloon would stay in the eye. So far as we
know, birds trapped in the center are held there. After battling
hurricane winds, they are so exhausted on getting into the center that
they could not remain there if the wind circulation tended to suck them
out into the surrounding gales.
Bielinski concluded that the balloon could not be thrown out from a
plane in even a partially inflated condition. The blast of air on
leaving the aircraft would destroy it or put it out of commission. So he
has an uninflated balloon and bottles of gas, a small radio transmitter,
and a float, all attached to a parachute.
The bottles and radio would be thrown out, the parachute would open, and
the gas would go through a tube from the bottles into the balloon. The
float, with a long line to the balloon, would rest on the water and
provide an anchor for the apparatus. The radio would send signals every
hour, the operators on shore would figure its location by direction
finding, and there would need to be no further aircraft flights into
that storm. The device, according to Bielinski, would continue to
operate for seven days.
Robert Simpson and others have had similar ideas, some favoring a device
that could be followed by radar, but Simpson prefers the radio
transmitter. To find out how the air circulation in the calm center
would affect the balloon, he planned experimental flights in hurricanes
to release a chaff made of a substance that could be followed by radar.
He tried it in 1953 and again in 1954, but something happened in each
case to prevent the experiment from being carried out. In one case, for
example, nearly everything was in readiness for an experimental flight
to take off when Edward Murrow of CBS arrived in Bermuda with his crew
and apparatus to put Hurricane Edna on television, and Simpson was moved
to the back of the plane. He and all others connected with it, including
Major Lloyd Starret, who had been brought in from Tinker Air Force Base
to work with Simpson, were glad to make way for a public service
program. But this shows one of the reasons why developments of this
kind, which depend on opportunities in only a few hurricanes a year,
take a discouragingly long time. There was no chance to test Bielinski’s
device, or any other, for that matter. There have been laboratory
experiments also on a device to deflect the air streams around the bomb
bay of the aircraft so that a partially inflated balloon could be safely
released in the eye of a storm.
These devices are mentioned here to show the trend of thought. Something
similar to this may eventually serve to replace a large share of the
hazardous aircraft flights, but even if the center is satisfactorily
located in such a manner, much useful information on the size of the
storm, the force of its winds, and other data will be determined in many
cases only by aerial reconnaissance. With this in mind, both the Air
Force and Navy are substituting bigger and better aircraft for this
purpose.
The old B-29 Superfortress is being “put out to pasture,” as they say in
the Air Force. The higher, faster, and farther flying Boeing B-50’s are
replacing them, not only in hurricane reconnaissance but in the daily
flying of weather routes to help fill in the blank spaces on the world’s
weather charts. The B-50’s will go ten thousand feet higher than the
B-29’s. Another advantage that appeals to the hurricane hunters who fly
on these missions is the electric oven, standard equipment on the B-50,
which will furnish hot meals at favorable times on the route, instead of
sandwiches and thermos coffee. The Navy, not to be outdone, is coming
out with the Super Constellation, which is being modified for hurricane
reconnaissance to replace the P2V Lockheed Neptune recently used.
As each new season comes, the hunters are wiser and better equipped. The
battle with the hurricane is joined. It is something to worry about,
like war and the H-bomb. At the end of the 1954 season, the executives
of the big insurance companies were in conference with grave faces.
Property damage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mounted upward to around
a billion dollars. Reports had been circulated to the effect that the
slow warming of the earth in the present century is bringing more
hurricanes with greater violence and paths shifting northward to
devastate areas with greater populations. There was speculation about
the effects of A-bombs and H-bombs on hurricanes.
All this trouble comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. Without it,
the earth would be a beautiful place but useless to man. Even over the
tropical oceans it rarely exceeds five per cent of the bulk of the air.
In other regions, it is much less. But it is this vapor, constantly
moving from the oceans into the air and spreading around the world, that
builds the stormy lower layer of our atmosphere—the troposphere—where
clouds and storms, snow and ice and torrential rain, thunderstorms,
hurricanes and tornadoes thrive in season. Such tremendous energy is
needed to carry billions of tons of moisture from the oceans to the
thirsty land that all of these rain and storm processes are maintained
on the borderline of violence.
Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbs the heat radiated
from the sun. There is a swift drop in temperature as we go aloft. Moist
air pushed upward becomes cooled and ice crystals, water droplets,
snowflakes, are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset,
gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstorm shows on
the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzard takes command of the plains
and valleys. Here is water vapor coming to the end of a long journey
from the surfaces of distant seas. From here it goes to the land and
begins another long journey, in the rivers and back to the oceans. But
on the way to us, violence may be one of the principal ingredients. We
can’t live without it and we have trouble living with it.
When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropical ocean to the
atmosphere becomes geared in some special manner to swiftly-moving air
from other regions, the process seems to get out of nature’s hands.
Upward motion begins on a grand scale. Converging streams of air are
twisted by the spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men begin
to see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensation of water
vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence grows with startling
swiftness. The water vapor that drew the curtain now releases energy
alongside of which the A-bomb shrinks to insignificance.
Far below the sea surface, the solid earth trembles. Avalanches of water
are torn from the ocean and hurled down the slopes of the gale. A
colossal darkening storm begins to move across the ocean. It sucks
inward the hot, moist lower atmosphere and brings it along with it,
using the vapor to feed its monstrous, seething caldron. Down here at
the surface of the earth, its winds are warm and humid. Its
tentacles—octopus-like arms—reach out with gale-driven torrents of rain
and begin picking everything to pieces. After hours that seem like days,
the central fury of the earth-blasting storm begins its devastation of
man’s possessions.
And as it has proved to be unquestionably true that no two hurricanes
are exactly alike, so it is evident now that the same hurricane is
subject to massive changes from day to day. It has a life history. Like
the caterpillar that is transformed into the cocoon and then into the
butterfly, the tropical storm goes through definite stages. The problems
involved for the hurricane hunters in each of these distinct stages
demand separate solutions. Like a living thing, the monster has infancy,
youth, middle age and decline.
In infancy, its malevolent forces are directed vigorously toward the
mysterious removal of large quantities of air from above its gale-swept
domain. The excessive heat and moisture of its birthplace yield far more
energy than is needed to keep its mighty low-level winds in motion.
In youth, it is extremely violent and the removal of air brings
exceedingly low pressure into its center. Its outer parts become
ominously visible through the condensation of moisture on a grand scale,
cloaking its internal mechanism. Its destructive forces spread. In this
stage, the removal of air in upper regions continues in excess of the
inflow at the bottom in proportion to the horizontal expansion of the
system.
In middle age, its violent forces are directed toward maintenance of the
colossal wind system. The total energy it can derive from heat and
moisture no longer produces an outflow above in excess of the inflow of
air at the bottom. It expands in the vertical and its visible parts push
against the stratosphere. As it moves farther away from its birthplace
and the available energy begins to decline, it dies. For a few days
nature’s processes for the transport of moisture from the oceans to the
thirsty continents have run amuck. Life and property suffered while
torrential rains fell.
So it is clear that in life the monster thrives on heat and water vapor.
Down at sea level it is a warm phenomenon. Only the heated air of the
tropical regions can hold enough moisture to feed the giant.
But up above, the full-grown hurricane is not a warm storm. Hunters
perspire at low levels but not in the top of the storm. There are icy
corridors through currents of air robbed of their heat by the monster
below. Pillars of supercooled water push upward into the thin
atmosphere. Snow flies with the shuddering winds at the top of the
troposphere. It is colder up here above the tropics than it is above the
poles. The fingers of the gale tremble with the cold and seem to make
gestures in defiance of the sun shining through the stratosphere. Water
vapor in great quantities has been carried high in the atmosphere and
nature seems powerless to bring equilibrium until land or cold water at
the earth’s surface below shuts off the abundant supply of energy. And
when it does, the monster dies as it was born, hidden behind a veil
produced by lingering cloud masses derived from the vapor that gave it
life.
In the last few years, men have had the courage to fly into these
monsters. Some day, when other methods are used, people will look back
in amazement at these brave events. Here they can see how it happened,
how it was done, and feel admiration for the men who did it—the
hurricane hunters.
[Illustration: _IVAN RAY TANNEHILL_]
was born in Ohio, where he obtained both his degrees in science at
Denison University. While a boy in his early teens, he became intensely
interested in birds, stars and the weather. After finishing college, he
joined the Weather Bureau in Texas and a year later went through a
vicious hurricane at Galveston.
This experience led Dr. Tannehill to study hurricanes for the next forty
years. Twenty years ago he became chief of the marine division of the U.
S. Weather Bureau, then he was chief of all the Bureau’s forecasting and
reporting and finally was assistant chief of the Bureau, in charge of
all its technical operations.
Dr. Tannehill is the author of several authoritative books on the
weather, including a world-recognized classic, HURRICANES; THEIR NATURE
AND HISTORY, now in its eighth edition. He has represented the United
States at many world conferences on weather and served several years as
president of the international commission on weather information.
Citations, medals, awards and commendations have come to him for his
work on weather, including the honorary degree of Doctor of Science,
granted in recognition of his leadership in the study of hurricanes.
His hobbies continue the same as in his boyhood—watching the birds, the
stars and the weather.
_THE HURRICANE HUNTERS_
By
Ivan Ray Tannehill
Author of “Hurricanes: Their Nature and History,” Etc.
_Illustrated with Photographs_
This is the lively account of the hair-raising experiences of the men
who have probed by sea and air into the inner mysteries of the world’s
most terrible storms. Here a world authority writes a vivid story of the
hurricane hunters and the warnings going out to terrified people in the
path of these tropical giants of the storm world—warnings which have
brought comfort and safety in the midst of the terror, because the
threat is no longer unknown and unchartered and defenses may be built up
against it, thanks to our Weather Bureau.
Ivan Tannehill tells how thousands of lives have been saved and why
enormous property losses, running into hundreds of millions of dollars,
continue as a direful challenge to the hunters. Here is the first
intimate revelation of what the human eye and the most modern radars see
in the violent regions of the tropical vortex. The descriptions of the
activities of these valiant scouts of the storms are taken from personal
interviews with military flyers and weathermen who have risked their
lives in the furious blasts in all parts of the hurricane.
The author has made a special study of hurricanes for over forty years.
He has served with the Weather Bureau as chief of the marine division,
chief of all forecasting and reporting and assistant chief of the
Bureau, in charge of its technical operations.
JACKET DRAWING BY JAMES MacDONALD
_Books by Ivan Ray Tannehill_
HURRICANES; THEIR NATURE AND HISTORY
PREPARATION AND USE OF WEATHER MAPS AT SEA
WEATHER AROUND THE WORLD
DROUGHT; ITS CAUSES AND EFFECTS
ALL ABOUT THE WEATHER
THE HURRICANE HUNTERS
SUMMITS OF ADVENTURE
_The Story of Famous Mountains and Mountain Climbers_
_By_ JOHN SCOTT DOUGLAS
Author of “_The Secret of the Undersea Bell_,” “Fate of the Clipper
Westwind,” Etc.
Illustrated with sixteen pages of stunning photographs
$3.00
Through the pages of this stirring book move ever upward the colorful
figures who have conquered the world’s great mountain peaks; and in it
are graphically described the most celebrated ascents of nearly two
centuries, from the Alps to the Andes and from the Himalayas to the
Rockies. No other sport has attracted such notable figures, for the
great mountain climbers include justices, members of Parliament, princes
and many renowned scientists. Nor has any other sport proved so useful.
Mountain climbers have contributed to many sciences; also to aviation by
their pioneer study of oxygen deficiency, and thrillingly to our
literature. In addition, mountaineers were among the first to explore
the remote Alpine valleys, the Caucasus, East Africa, the Alaska
wilderness, the Andes and the Himalayas.
John Scott Douglas makes us share in the very feelings of the intrepid
men who have had that unquenchable urge to conquer the seemingly
unconquerable, no matter what the hazards or physical hardships. His
story ranges from the early days of the first ascent to the summit of
Mont Blanc, when the climbing equipment consisted of alpenstocks and
meat cleavers and an ordinary bed blanket was the only protection
against the icy blasts during the nights spent aloft on the
mountainside, to the up-to-the-minute scientific equipment, including
oxygen feeders and insulated suits, used in the recent ascent of Mount
Everest.
The author is an enthusiastic mountaineer himself. He has enjoyed
“scrambles” in the Alps, the Andes, the Central American Cordilleras,
Alaska, the Catskills and the Colorado Rockies, the Olympics, Cascades
and High Sierras. He writes on a favorite subject with zest and
informative accuracy. His book provides “high” adventure in more than
one way!
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Transcriber’s Notes
--Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.
--Silently corrected a few palpable typos.
--In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.
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