“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.”
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“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 Vi?es, 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 61 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, 62 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.
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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 64 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. 65 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 66 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 67 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. 68 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 69 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 70 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 71 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 72 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 73 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.
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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.