A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

While there were few scientific advances that promoted the detection of hurricanes during the first three and a half decades of the 20th century, the innovation of wireless technology in the early 1900s allowed meteorologists to obtain weather reports from ships at sea. Sailors were therefore able to give advanced warning of storms which had the potential to turn into hurricanes. One disadvantage of this was that sailors stayed away from stormy seas and so “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’” from sight (109). Thus, civilians continued to remain unaware of a hurricane until it came ashore.

Three of the worst early 20th-century hurricanes hit the state of Florida, which by the 1920s had become a resort for the rich and famous. The residents of Miami Beach, who were in many cases non-natives and unused to hurricanes, were unprepared and overwhelmed when the 1926 Miami Beach hurricane hit. Winds of 128 mph raced over the city, blanketing it in tides of water and sand. An estimated 372 people died, while approximately 40,000 were left homeless.

In 1928, a Category 4 hurricane hit the Lake Okeechobee community. While some privileged White people were forewarned about the hurricane, this was not the case for most of the community, especially the migrant Black workers who picked crops. The death toll for this hurricane stands between 2,500 and 3,000. Most of the victims were incinerated or buried in mass graves by the lake. While a few White victims were buried in coffins, most of the unidentified Black victims were buried anonymously in a trench. It was not until 2001 that the city of West Palm Beach honored those in the mass burial site with a memorial.

After the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal proposed to reform how the country dealt with hurricanes. In 1933, Roosevelt created the Science Advisory Board which would use long-range hurricane forecasting to better serve the public. Measures to frequently inform the public about the progress made by hurricanes were adopted. One measure was to take reports every four hours when a hurricane was about to make landfall. However, despite optimism, the inability to determine the progress of hurricanes while they were still in the ocean hampered forecasting capacity. One of the storms that hit the Florida Keys in late August 1935 affected the World War I army veterans who Roosevelt put to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). These impoverished men were tasked with building a highway to replace a defunct railroad. Due to an oversight by the Weather Bureau, the hurricane went undetected as it headed for collision with the Lower Matecumbe and Windley Keys. The army veterans packed in preparation for a train that was supposed to transport them to safety. By the time the train arrived, it was already too late. The train was broadsided, and while the passengers survived, those in the CCC camps did not.

The writer Ernest Hemingway, who had befriended the camp workers, was horrified at the destruction, and in a polemic article he characterized what happened to the veterans as murder. He blamed the federal authorities and the Weather Bureau equally. The chief of the Jacksonville Weather Bureau, Walter James Bennett, retaliated with the statement that the storm had been difficult to predict because “meteorology is not an exact science and it probably never will be. It is impossible to tell very far in advance just exactly where the storm center will reach land, and just how severe it will be” (153).

The hurricane of 1938 which affected America’s North East coast took everyone by surprise. This was in part because its approach was overshadowed by the news of Adolf Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy in Europe. Hitler’s expansion was granted 26 pages of coverage in The New York Times, whereas there was only a short article on the 27th page about a hurricane that originated in Africa a few weeks earlier.

Charles Mitchell, the chief forecaster at the Weather Bureau, judged that the hurricane would behave in a manner typical of Cape Verde hurricanes and “ultimately veer away from the mainland into the open ocean” (157). He also hypothesized that during the hurricane’s northward trajectory the colder waters would cause it to weaken. Charles H. Pierce, a junior forecaster, was the only one in the Bureau to disagree with Mitchell. He argued that given that the Bermuda High was “much farther north than usual, it would pull the hurricane in a more northerly direction, meaning that the storm would likely come ashore in the vicinity of New York and southern New England” (158). The Weather Bureau and the media trusted Mitchell’s seniority and downplayed their prediction of the hurricane’s effects.

On September 21, an exceptionally low barometer reading among other data from the RMS Carinthia, a British sea-liner, deeply concerned Pierce and made Mitchell change his forecast to a storm gale. However, Pierce’s prediction proved correct, and a Category 3 hurricane approached rapidly, coming ashore in Suffolk County, Long Island and then moving into southern New England. Due to lack of preparation, people were caught completely unaware. The hurricane resulted in 680 deaths with a cost of $300-400 million in damages.

While the event was traumatic, Northeastern survivors who thought of hurricanes as a Southeastern phenomenon treasured their anecdotes of a day when they thought the world was ending. There were even rumors that a man walked through Boston Common with a sandwich board around his neck that read, “For twenty-five cents, I’ll listen to your story of the hurricane” (176).

Although the Weather Bureau could be blamed for dismissing Pierce’s insight and downplaying the unusually low barometer reading of the Carinthia, Dolin argues that the error in judgement was due to the unreliability of the data. He writes how “there was virtually no data about the hurricane for the seven hours before it came ashore, while it was zooming up the coast from Cape Hatteras to Long Island. Exactly what it was doing at that time was anyone’s guess” (177). Until a means of securing better data came along in the later 20th century, the Weather Bureau could not be fully blamed for their inability to chart the progress of hurricanes.

Since the 1930s when the Weather Bureau deployed balloons, forecasters looked to the skies to monitor the progress of hurricanes. While the balloons were destroyed in the hurricanes’ winds, during World War II meteorology and hurricane science benefitted from advances in aviation technology. Pilots began to be able to fly through hurricanes and gather valuable data about them. In 1943, pilots Joseph B. Duckworth and Ralph O’Hair were the first to fly through a Category 1 hurricane. Instruments aboard the planes, such as the radar and dropsonde, enabled pilots to gather new data about hurricane structure and temperature changes. However, the efficacy of planes was limited, as they could be ripped apart by powerful winds and risk pilots’ lives.

Following the 1960 invention of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, satellites that were used in Cold War monitoring were applied by the Weather Bureau. These satellites could transmit photographs that tracked the progress of hurricanes “from their inception to their dissolution,” minimizing the chance that a hurricane would take forecasters by surprise (192).

Computer modeling has also been used in hurricane tracking since the 1950s. These models enable forecasters to predict how a hurricane is developing and how it is likely to behave when it lands ashore. Meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center rely on multiple models to wipe out the biases potentially present in individual models. Still, Dolin argues that despite the sophistication of this approach, “forecasting hurricanes remains a rather tricky endeavor” and meteorologists have to rely upon “a cone of uncertainty which brackets the probable track of the center of the hurricane from its last recorded position out into the future” (194). There is thus a two-thirds chance of correctly predicting the hurricane’s course and a one-third chance that the center of the hurricane will “stray outside of the cone’s boundaries” (194). Mathematician Edward N. Lorenz’s work on the butterfly effect showed that however technology advanced, the cone of uncertainty would never disappear when it came to hurricanes. In 1961, he showed through mathematical modeling that “small changes in initial conditions can result in dramatic changes or outcomes over time,” which meant that weather predictions of the distant future were “impossible by any method, unless present conditions are known exactly” (196).

In addition to forecasting hurricanes, meteorologists seek to control them. There were two attempts to do so in the postwar years, the first being Project Cirrus in 1947 via the seeding of clouds with dry ice to induce precipitation. The pioneering scientists Bernard Vonnegut and Vincent J. Schaefer hoped that this would cause snow or ice crystals to form, reducing the heat that gave the hurricane its strength. However, the hurricanes’ paths and strengths proved too unpredictable for the measure to be successful. Project Stormfury, which surfaced in 1962, used silver iodide instead of dry ice. On some of Project Stormfury’s missions, the winds decreased by 10% to 30%, but on most attempts the hurricanes proved too unpredictable for the plan the have any effect. Dolin argues that hurricanes are too mighty for human efforts to subdue them, and hurling nuclear weapons at them is futile.

The habit of giving hurricanes human names began in 1902 with Clement Lindley Wragge of Queensland, Australia. Wragge was the originator of the trend for comparing hurricanes to the seductresses of male fantasies. In his 1941 novel Storm, the American novelist George Rippey Stewart boosted this tendency by naming storms after female movie stars and other women who took his fancy, in order to show how “each storm is ‘an individual,’ with its own personality and characteristics” (207). The American military and Weather Bureau latched onto the book’s success by giving storms female names and describing their misbehavior in terms that applied to promiscuous women. Feminists in the 1960s denounced the trend as degrading to women. By 1979, a court ruling mandated that Atlantic storms and hurricanes should alternate between male and female names, with the names of particularly destructive storms being retired for fear of re-traumatizing afflicted civilians.

The shorthand for identifying the risk posed by hurricanes, the Saffir-Simpson scale, was inaugurated in the early 1970s. This categorized hurricanes from 1-5 according to the speed of their sustained winds and their types of damage. Whereas a Category 1 could cause roof damage and power outages, a Category 5 signaled “catastrophic damage” that caused affected areas to become “uninhabitable” (214).

Since the spread of television in the 1950s, hurricane reporting “exploded,” as increasingly advanced satellites in subsequent decades permitted dramatic coverage that provided entertainment for American audiences (215). Reporter Jim Cantore on the Weather Channel was especially famous for combining information and entertainment. In the 21st century, the dissemination of weather forecasting has shifted to the Internet. Critics worry that media coverage can be inaccurate and sensationalist, causing panic as well as informing people.