When humans and hurricanes collide

“A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes”
by Eric Jay Dolin. Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020; 432 pp. Hardcover $26.96.

 

Review by Sandy Marsters

I swear to God, I hadn’t gotten 10 words into this review when Richard Hawley began singing on the stereo:

There’s a storm a-comin’, you’d better run

There’s a storm coming, goodbye to the sun

There’s a storm a-comin’, you’d better run boy run

You’d better run

This is so much more apt than the opening sentence I was about to write for this review of Eric Jay Dolin’s recent and wonderful book, “A Furious Sky,” in which he recounts the 500-year history of hurricanes in America.

For every one of those tempests, the best advice would have been “You’d better run.” Fast.

What I was going to say was that most of us know that hurricanes are composed of great winds that, north of the equator, rotate in a counter-clockwise direction around a core called an eye; they feed on warm water; they wander unpredictably; they create terrifying seas and heavy rain; and they always have tragic consequences, sometimes on a grand scale, when they run into humans.

With a sociologist’s insight, Dolin explores some lesser-known elements of hurricanes by tracing the interaction between these monster storms and the human beings that get in their way.

Incompetence, for example. Hurricane history is riddled with human failures and missed opportunities to learn from experience.

Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900 dawned “Gloriously pink,” according to one witness in Galveston, Texas. Sure it was going to be a little windy and wet, forecasters at the U.S. Weather Bureau predicted.

But what Galveston got was a Category 4 hurricane that would wreak havoc on the city and kill at least 6,000.

Only nine years earlier, a Category 1 hurricane that made landfall 100 miles from Galveston had nevertheless caused extensive flooding in the city. At the local weather service office, a young forecaster, Isaac Monroe Cline, had been asked if Galveston was vulnerable to a future hurricane.

Nothing to be concerned about, Cline assured the city. Based on that advice, plans for a protective seawall were scrapped and the city was left unprotected when the 1900 hurricane blasted in.

Similar incompetence in September of 1935 led to the deaths of 257 war veterans camped in the Florida Keys, when a bureaucrat delayed sending a train to rescue them as the Labor Day Hurricane bore down on them. Ernest Hemingway, who lived nearby, helped in the recovery from that disaster.

Dolin does a masterful job exploring the intersection of human and hurricane behavior. His extensive research allows him to sort through the historical record to winnow fact from fiction.

In October 1947 a plane was sent out to seed a small hurricane with dry ice to see if cooling would weaken the storm.

The day after the seeding, the hurricane rearranged itself and headed toward the U.S. East Coast, striking Savannah, Georgia. The press claimed the seeding had caused the disaster. In fact, Dolin points out, the hurricane had initiated its turn to the west prior to the seeding.

The desire of man to manipulate nature led to other innovative but dubious experiments, like flying aircraft against the hurricane’s rotation to slow it down. Others wanted to tow icebergs into the hurricane belt to cool the waters.

But innovation would also help in the effort to understand and predict hurricane behavior. One early problem was that, Dolin points out, “For most of the history of humankind, messages could travel no faster than one could walk or ride.” That wasn’t fast enough to get ahead of a hurricane.

In 1844, Samuel F.B. Morse developed Morse Code and, with his associate, Alfred Vail, introduced the telegraph, allowing the message to travel far more quickly than any hurricane.

And, of course, innovation led to the development of the hurricane hunter aircraft, still an essential tool in determining the forces at work within a storm. But flying an aircraft into a hurricane and back out is no small thing. Six of the planes have crashed, killing the crews.

Dolin recounts a flight by the hurricane hunter Kermit into Hurricane Hugo in September of 1989. Dr. Jeff Masters, the flight director, described the trip in terrifying detail.

“Gear loosened by the previous turbulence flies about the inside (of) the aircraft, bouncing off walls, ceilings and crew members . . . a third terrific blow, almost six times the force of gravity, staggers the airplane . . . . Terrible thundering crashing sounds boom through the cabin; I hear crew members crying out . . . . We are going down . . . .”

They don’t go down, thanks to two other hurricane hunter aircraft that come to the rescue, probing the hurricane, finding safe air, and leading Kermit into a difficult but successful exit.

Heroism. Innovation. Incompetence. Suffering. Like wind and waves and rain, the extremes of human behavior play a key role in the history of hurricanes in America. With careful crafting and extensive research, Dolin successfully weaves it all together in this fascinating book.

 

Co-founder of Points East, along with Bernie Wideman, Sandy Marsters is also the magazine’s former editor.

The post When humans and hurricanes collide appeared first on Points East Magazine.