A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred Year History of America’s Hurricanes by Eric J. Dunn, sets out the history of American hurricanes and tracks the progress we’ve made in predicting them.
The author is noted for his “densely researched” books, as one reviewer said about Leviathan, Dolin’s book on the history of whaling. This is a dense book about everything you need to know about hurricanes/typhoons/cyclones, depending on where you are when the storm hits.
Hurricanes are violent, swirling storms with wind speeds of at least 74 MPH. They are fed by ocean heat, which feeds the energy of the storm, which typically generates enough wind to produce half of the world’s electrical generating capacity. Most hurricanes start around the Cape Verde Islands, 3,700 miles from Florida, where they often end up. We all know about the intensity scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being really serious.
Christopher Columbus, when he wasn’t exploiting and infecting the natives with European diseases, became a pretty good weather forecaster by his fourth voyage to the New World. Having been removed as governor of Hispaniola, he was stuck in port one day and sensed a hurricane was about to hit. He told his replacement governor to warn the five-ship fleet that was about to head off to Portugal about the impending storm. Columbus, having fallen out of favor with the governor, was ignored and the ships left, only to be whacked by the storm. One ship sank and three were damaged so badly that they had to return to port. Only one made it back home to Europe.
Hurricanes affected settlement of the hemisphere. In the late 1500’s, the French and Spanish were fighting over Florida when a French fleet of ships coming after the Spaniards was wiped out by a hurricane. That took care of France’s presence in the Florida peninsula. Benjamin Franklin led the first scientific approach to trying to figure out hurricanes. He figured out how the storm rotated and how that affected its intensity. Later John Winthrop of Harvard University, the great grandson of the first Massachusetts governor, bought a barometer and began to really figure out what low atmospheric pressure had to do with the strength of a hurricane. Thomas Jefferson was a gifted amateur meteorologist who kept meticulous weather records which helped others understand climate.
The French and British were fighting over the Caribbean in 1780 when a massive hurricane wiped out much of their fleets, with the French losing more ships. Historians believe that the losses incurred from the Great Hurricane of 1780 convinced the French to get away from hurricanes and head north to give the American rebels the critical naval support needed to defeat the British.
Dolin writes about various people who worked to understand hurricanes. James Espy and William Redfield, two meteorologists of the mid-1800s, had slightly different explanations for hurricanes and their rivalry was covered by the press and probably helped educate a lot of folks about these super storms.
One problem with weather forecasting in general back then was that there was no way to let people in one place know what the weather was doing in another place. In the mid 1830s, Samuel F. B. Morse of Charlestown, MA, invented the telegraph. By the mid 1840s, the telegraph had become functional and became a way to distribute weather news. Joseph Henry, the first president of the Smithsonian Institution, set up a weather forecasting station and hooked it into the telegraph network. By 1870 weather forecasting had become a federal government function with the military in charge. That didn’t go so well.
The new weather whizzes missed the storm of the century, the Great Blizzard of 1888 that wiped out New York City and dropped four feet of snow in New England. Besides getting the forecast wrong, the new weather service had some problematic employees. One guy pawned the forecasting equipment to feed his gambling habit. To save time, another weather ace made up forecasts without trying to figure out what was really likely to happen. He randomly sent out various forecasts and was usually wrong. One more problem with the new weather service was that a forecaster embezzled $250,000 from the Signal Corps. That led to weather forecasting being moved out of the military into the Department of Agriculture.
One problem back then was that, despite having a way to transmit weather forecasts, they weren’t very accurate. The best work was being done by a priest in Cuba, but the U. S. didn’t like Cuba so he was ignored.
Two big hurricanes hit the U. S. in 1893, one in September in New York City that did a lot of property damage. The other one a few weeks later wiped out the Carolinas and cost 1,500 to 6,000 lives depending on the source. The states and federal government were pretty helpless at clean-up, so the locals called in the newly formed Red Cross, led by Clara Barton, to help out. She did, especially in the hard-hit Black areas which had taken the brunt of the storm and were being ignored.
The worst hurricane in our nation’s history happened in September, 1900, and wiped out Galveston TX, which at that time was the fourth-largest city in Texas and ahead of Houston as a major port and commercial center. Before the storm, Galveston was considered the Wall Street of Texas and had more millionaires than Newport, RI. It also was below sea level and vulnerable to flooding and had a lot of people living near the gulf.
American forecasters totally missed the hurricane. The Cubans, that we didn’t like but still talked to, had developed a reputation for accurately forecasting hurricanes but weather bureau director Willis Moore was jealous so the month before the storm hit, he cut off communications with Cuba. Great timing.
Our forecasters saw the disturbance as a minor tropical storm that would skirt Florida and not be a big deal. As it turned out, the Cubans nailed the forecast and called for Galveston to be whacked.
Isaac Cline, the local forecaster, put up a mild storm warning flag on September 7. The next morning, the surf was rising and the wind was howling, so Isaac went out to warn people to evacuate. He painted himself a hero, sort of a Paul Revere, but the facts don’t quite back him up. He didn’t do a lot of running around to tell people to leave, at least according to Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larsen, the definitive work on the hurricane. In any event, since the weather service had blown the forecast, it was too late for people to leave.
In a matter of a few hours, the water had risen five to ten feet and was still coming in. Isaac and his family took refuge in his hurricane-proof house but it still collapsed, killing his wife and unborn child. Overall, at least 6,000 people died that day out of a population of 38,000. One particularly wrenching tragedy was the death of 91 children and 10 nuns from an orphanage. Only two teenagers survived.
Clara Barton showed up with the Red Cross, but the damage was overwhelming and it took years to recover. Galveston is a nice beach town now, very attractive to tourists, but it never became a major Texas city. As a result of the destruction, the city built a 17,593-foot long sea wall that is 16 feet wide at the base. So far it has worked to minimize hurricane damage.
In keeping with the reality that the truth is often the first casualty in disasters, the national weather service avoided any responsibility for blowing the forecast. “We did a great job!” was their mantra.
There were lots of other big storms. Miami, one of the fastest-growing cities, was wiped out in 1926. The city was hot for real estate and business in the Roaring 20s. The July 26, 1925, edition of the Miami Herald was 504 pages and weighed 7 ½ pounds. The September 1926 storm caused massive property damage in the city and wiped out a small town a few miles away. Fortunately, only 372 people died.
Two years later, a hurricane hit Lake Okeechobee and killed 2,500 to 3,000 people, mostly Blacks. The clean-up went along racial lines, which meant no coffins and mass graves for non-whites.
One consistent fact around each of these disasters was the lack of accurate, timely weather forecasting. In 1933, after five hurricanes hit the U. S. mainland, the federal weather bureau was upgraded and began to issue more timely forecasts. The forecasts still left a lot to be desired but things were moving in the right direction.
The major reason for bad forecasts was the lack of weather data that was good. World War II changed that. The military needed accurate forecasts to fly its planes, drop its bombs, and land its troops. In 1943, a hot-shot pilot made a bet – paying for drinks – with English pilots that he could fly in and out of a hurricane. He won the bet and created a new way to get weather information. The military fast-tracked using planes to gather weather information, and soon accurate information was coming in about wind speed, barometric pressure, rotation, track and such. In the early 1960s weather satellites provided distant views of weather systems, critical information that had been missing. Sophisticated statistical analysis and computer models helped create more accurate forecasts. While there will always be some unexplained variation in how weather systems behave, forecasts have gotten much better.
Other things have changed.
— We no longer name storms just for women, a practice that was criticized by feminists in the 1970s, and went away in 1979.
— Radio and later television became the instant conduits for weather updates. Dan Rather got noticed by CBS News for his coverage of Hurricane Carla in Houston in 1961.
— The Weather Station has hard-wired weather news to our cable box.
The Rogue’s Gallery The book looks at the major storms that have hit the country over the past 50 years. In 1954 and 1955, three major hurricanes hit the East Coast. Hurricane Carol hit New England in August of 1954 and did $500 million worth of damage. Edna hit Cape Cod and Maine and caused $43 million in losses. Normally this region has five to ten hurricanes a century; two in five weeks was a bit much. Finally, in early October, Hazel hit the Carolinas, Middle Atlantic states, and Pennsylvania and New York, causing $100 million in damage.
Right around the time of Woodstock in 1969, Camille hit Louisiana and Mississippi and moved up to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and gained strength due to some weird weather. It damaged rural areas, with 120 people dead but $150 million in damage – a lot in a non-urban area.
Hurricane Andrew I have a soft spot in my heart for Hurricane Andrew of late August 1992. Our family was heading back home after another one of our epic car treks to and from Houston via a lot of neat places along the way. Because of the storm, we changed our travel course and headed north, away from the southern Gulf Coast, our initial route. We missed the action, a good thing.
Andrew was a biggie. It did $250 million damage to the Bahamas before hitting our mainland as a Category 5 – 164 MPH – storm. Over 1.5 million Floridians lost power. The storm had a 16.9-foot storm surge, still a record. Over 135,000 homes were destroyed and 160,000 people were homeless. The Miami Zoo lost lots of its animals. The storm did $27 billion – with a “b” – damage but only 15 people died, kind of a miracle.
The storm presaged the uneven behavior of the federal government in responding to natural disasters. President George H. W. Bush and FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were criticized for their slow response to Andrew. The feds blamed the locals and vice versa. Ironically, the president’s son, George W. Bush, and FEMA would receive similar criticism for their response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005,
Hurricane Katrina This was the biggest storm in terms of damage ($125 billion) but not for deaths (1,800 compared to 6,000+ for Galveston in 1900), but it is probably the one hurricane we all remember. As the author writes, “It is arguably the most complicated and controversial natural and human-made disaster in American history.” He goes on, “Writ large, however, Katrina is an intricate tale of environmental degradation, intense human suffering, rapacious development, poor urban planning, faulty engineering, lawlessness and violence, and massive bureaucratic and political failures before, during, and after the storm.”
One problem was that New Orleans was below sea level and surrounded by water on three sides. Another problem was that rapid development of the coast had eroded the wetlands that had been buffers to major flooding.
On September 28, 2005, the governor and mayor ordered evacuations, and a lot of people did leave. New Orleans missed a direct hit, and the Monday morning newspapers declared that the city had dodged a bullet. Then the levees broke and flooded 80% of the city with up to 10 feet of water.
We all know the stories of the crowded Superdome, the inconsistent police response, and the thousands of people stranded on their roofs. It took a week for some people to get rescued, and the levees weren’t fixed until over a week after the storm. The city didn’t dry out until mid-October.
Every level of government failed, with President Bush not realizing how serious the destruction was and how inept FEMA was in responding. Early in his term, Bush downgraded FEMA to sub-cabinet status and appointed a lot of cronies with no emergency response experience to major agency positions.
Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco were perhaps even more responsible for the poor local response to the hurricane. They didn’t act expeditiously after the levees broke, and a lot of rescue equipment was never used. The mayor ended up in prison for basically stealing during the crisis. Nagin was convicted in 2014 on a raft of corruption charges, ranging from wire fraud to bribery and tax evasion. Nagin caught a break with the COVID-19 outbreak. He was released this past April, three years early, due to concerns about prisoners being exposed to the virus.
Over 70% of the city’s housing was destroyed, with a lot of people ending up in Houston and some being resettled on Cape Cod. The city still has not totally recovered. Two friends and I ran the New Orleans Half Marathon in February of 2011, and we hired a cab to show us the areas that were still damaged. There were a lot.
You can’t talk about Katrina without thinking about race since most of the people most negatively affected were African Americans. Race is a factor in everything we do as a country, but Barack Obama, giving a speech in the Black and hard-hit Ninth Ward, aptly summed things up,” What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster – a failure of government to look out for its citizens.”
Sandy hit New York and New Jersey as an “extratropical cyclone”, not a hurricane. The storm hit a low-pressure area and moved out of hurricane mode as it stalled and caused rampant destruction. We had plenty of warning about Sandy, people were evacuated, and the subway in the city was shut down.Superstorm Sandy, as it was called since it wasn't a hurricane, wiped out power to 8.5 million people, some not getting electricity back for weeks or months. It did $65 billion worth of damage, with 700,000 homes being destroyed in the two states. As a sidebar, parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and North Carolina got three feet of snow.
That’s a lot of damage for a non-hurricane.
We probably remember Harvey, Irma, and Maria, hurricanes that hit Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico. The good news is that the forecasts accurately predicted what each storm would do. The bad news was that they did $340 billion worth of damage and thousands of people died in Puerto Rico. They were the three costliest storms in history and they happened only three years ago.
Stormy Weather Ahead is the last chapter in which the author prognosticates about hurricanes to come. He makes the point that the past ten to fifteen years have seen some of the worst hurricanes in history.
— Dolin talks about climate change as a factor, but the exact role of climate on storms is still being studied.
— We do know that the sea level has risen, a condition that makes for larger storm surges that destroy buildings and kill people.
— We also know that the sea temperature has risen and that heat increases the intensity of hurricanes.
— Dolin notes that one real challenge is that every year we build more and more houses and buildings in places that are likely to get hit by a hurricane. He suggests that state, local and federal policy act to discourage such building but he’s not optimistic that anything will change.
— Finally, he argues that, even if the world suddenly gets serious about climate change, we are unlikely to see either a decrease in the number of serious hurricanes or a reduction of the number of people and businesses at risk for hurricane damage. He recommends that FEMA be given more resources and tools to respond to damage.
Bob’s Take This is a very detailed book, with lots of research supporting the text. It is about 300 pages, not bad for a Bob in the Basement book. I knew nothing about the early history of hurricanes, but these storms have been with us forever, unless you were in Europe where there are no hurricanes. Columbus and other early explorers must have been amazed when they hit their first hurricane.
I also had little appreciation for the incredible damage these storms do – 700,000 homes damaged/destroyed by Sandy and 70% of New Orleans housing wiped out by Katrina. I hadn’t realized that death tolls often run into the thousands when you tally the overall destruction as the storm hits different countries on its way to the U. S.
Another interesting point relates to last week’s book on the Pandemic of 1918. In this country weather forecasting was just as in the dark as treating viral infections for most of our history. Doctors were pretty clueless about what was going on with the 1918 influenza, with researchers having little understanding of viruses until the 1930s and later. That was also true of meteorology; we didn't have accurate weather data until after World War II, and we only refined our predictive models relatively recently.
