Sudden Sea (5 page)

The Weather Bureau went through several configurations before Congress decided that a decentralized agency would respond more quickly to weather emergencies. In March 1935 the central office was replaced with forecasting stations strategically positioned in Washington, Jacksonville, New Orleans, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Jacksonville station was designated hurricane central, and Norton, a soft-spoken southerner from Choctaw County, Alabama, was transferred from New Orleans. He had been on the job for six months when the new system was tested for the first time. On Labor Day 1935, a Category 5 hurricane, the most intense tropical cyclone ever to strike the continental United States, hit the Florida Keys. Norton and his assistant, Gordon Dunn, saw it coming but misjudged its severity, and 428 people died.

Most of those killed were destitute World War I vets put to work by the New Deal building U.S. Highway 1. They died aboard the government train that was supposed to evacuate them. The rescue train did not reach the Keys until the height of the storm, and when it tried to return to the mainland, it was swept into the sea. In an article for
New Masses
magazine, Ernest Hemingway, one of the Keys’ most celebrated residents, demanded to know “Who Murdered the Vets?” Gruesome reports of metal roofs that flew off shacks, guillotining the hapless men, and sheets of sand that sheared off their clothes, leaving nothing but belt buckles, horrified the nation. In the heart of the Great Depression, donations for a hurricane memorial poured in and a congressional committee convened to investigate what had gone so horribly wrong. Although the main culprit had been a paucity of information, Norton vowed to himself that not one more life would be lost to a hurricane on his watch. Now, almost three years to the day later, another killer storm was blowing toward Florida and the same two-man team would track it.

A weather forecaster who does not own a raincoat, hat, or umbrella is either supremely optimistic or supremely confident. Gordon Dunn, Jacksonville’s assistant director of hurricane forecasting, was probably a bit of both. When his predictions were off, he would arrive at the station dripping wet and dry off as he worked. Cool and resourceful, Dunn had earned a reputation as one of the best mappers in the Bureau. He was about ten years younger than Norton, taller and broad-shouldered, with a craggy handsomeness. Both men were farm boys — Norton grew up on an Alabama dirt farm, Dunn on a Vermont dairy farm — and both had a dry humor. In most other ways, they were poles apart.

Norton was folksy, Dunn was reserved. Norton, intuitive; Dunn, analytical. Norton trusted empirical observations; Dunn was a stickler for mathematical precision. Dunn loved to squaredance; Norton had two left feet. Dunn would write the definitive book on Atlantic hurricanes. Norton avoided putting much in writing. He believed that you never track the same storm twice. Their different approaches reflected the changing state of meteorology in 1938. However individual their styles, though, on the Friday night of September 16, 1938, the two men were in accord. With another killer storm in their sights, they were not taking any chances.

In the thirties, without sophisticated tools to guide them, forecasters relied almost entirely on surface observations. Data came in to the Weather Bureau continuously from shortwave radio transmitters and a Teletype network linked to every major port in the Caribbean. As they received additional information, Norton and Dunn located the storm within the Caribbean and within the context of the prevailing atmospheric conditions. According to their best estimates, it was sauntering at twenty miles an hour due east, and within the system, cyclonic winds were whirling at 109 miles an hour.

Until Benjamin Franklin picked up a Boston newspaper one day in 1743, storms were assumed stationary, having no forward motion. Franklin read about a storm in Boston and realized that the same rains had visited Philadelphia the night before, spoiling his plans to observe a lunar eclipse. From this he deduced that storms could travel great distances. Nine hundred miles of warm open water — the nourishment that hurricanes thrive on — separated this storm from Miami. It was centered about 450 miles north of San Juan and east of the Bahamas. Barring any change in direction, it would hit the Bahamas Monday night and drive straight into Dade County sometime on Tuesday, September 20.

Saturday, September 17

On Saturday morning Floridians woke up to the sound of Grady Norton’s easy drawl: “A tropical disturbance of dangerous proportions is gathering in the Caribbean. Traveling at twenty miles per hour in an easterly direction, it should reach the Miami-Dade area sometime Tuesday morning. Every precaution should be taken in the face of this dangerous storm.”

As the hurricane developed, Norton issued so many weather updates, he became known across the state as Mr. Hurricane, his voice as familiar in Florida as Arthur Godfrey’s broadcasting from the pink mirage of Miami’s Roney Plaza. Norton’s report was the first statewide storm warning ever broadcast in Florida. Twenty-five stations carried the alert, and from the Keys to Miami’s Collins Avenue the response was immediate and intense.

Remembering Labor Day 1935, anxious residents began barricading their homes and businesses, drydocking their boats, clearing out of the path of the storm. The Red Cross called up extra relief workers, pulling them from New York and New England and dispatching them to Florida. The Coast Guard sent radio trucks to outlying areas of the state. WPA (Work Projects Administration) and CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) workers received immediate orders to begin evacuating camps in the Keys. Miami newspapers reprinted photographs of the ghastly devastation of ’35 under headlines that asked is it happening again?

Norton and Dunn were determined the answer would be no. During hurricane season, from June to November, they routinely alternated twenty-four-hour shifts and issued weather updates every six hours, seven days a week. Now, with a dangerous cyclone in their sights, they set up a surplus army cot in a corner of the station and remained on duty around the clock. They would monitor the approaching hurricane continuously for more than one hundred hours, from Friday evening, September 16, to the early-morning hours of Wednesday, September 21.

In 1686, before he had sighted the comet that bears his name, Edmond Halley drew and published the first weather map. But it was not until Marconi invented the wireless telegraph some two hundred years later that maps became an essential weather tool. Marconi’s invention revolutionized forecasting, transforming meteorology from an empirical art to a science.

With the invention of the telegraph, ships at sea could communicate directly with weather stations. The first ship-to-shore report was transmitted on December 3, 1905, and the first wireless hurricane communiqué came four years later, when the SS
Cartago
ran into a tropical cyclone off the coast of Yucatán.

Direct and immediate communication allowed forecasters to translate the observations they received into same-day, even same-hour, charts called synoptic maps. Often described as weather snapshots, synoptic maps give a picture, or a series of pictures, of atmospheric conditions — barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, precipitation, winds, and cloud cover — over a broad area at a specific point in time.

Whether hand-drawn as they were in the 1930s or computer-generated as they are today, synoptic maps are critical to forecasting, especially the map showing barometric pressure. Barometric pressure levels are the clearest measure of a hurricane’s strength. A precipitous drop means a storm is intensifying. Any rise indicates a weakening. On a barometric map, lines, called isobars, are drawn to link points of equal pressure. The density of isobars indicates the strength and location of a storm.

During their hurricane watch, Norton and Dunn continually drew new maps. By comparing successive charts, they could see how weather systems were moving and evolving over a broad area at a specific time. Maps drawn with speed and skill were the key to an accurate prediction, and Dunn was a master of synoptic mapping. According to his seven o’clock reckoning, on Saturday night the storm was thirty miles closer to Miami, moving at approximately the same speed and still on course. With low-pressure, tightly packed isobars spelling a serious hurricane, a statewide emergency was declared. Throughout the day and night, Jacksonville telegraphed constant updates to newspaper offices and radio stations nationwide. In spite of their urgency, few beyond the panhandle took note.

Disasters always seemed to happen in far-off places with romantic names, and in September, Florida was still a season away. In 1938 attention didn’t usually turn south until blizzards were blanketing New England.

Sunday, September 18

The storm intensified through the night. By two o’clock Sunday afternoon, winds were blowing at 150 miles per hour. Strong shifting squalls enveloped the Caribbean islands from Puerto Rico to the Bahamas. Coconut palms bent into the gale, rains blasted flimsy shelters, and winds shrieked like banshees over a tremendous, raging sea. The hurricane continued to deepen through the night. By two
A.M.
Monday, it was a Category 5 storm.

The official gauge of a hurricane’s destructive force is the Saffir-Simpson Damage Potential Scale. Storms are measured according to sustained wind speed, storm surge height, and barometric pressure and classified on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being “catastrophic.” Only one Category 5 storm had ever reached the continental United States — Labor Day 1935. The Labor Day hurricane had been a tightly coiled tropical cyclone — small, swift, and singularly nasty. The Hurricane of 1938 was shaping up to be a big, sprawling mother storm — some five hundred miles in diameter, as big as the state of Ohio.

Although Galileo proved long ago that man is not the center of the universe, we tend to take weather personally. If it rains, it is raining on our parade. If it shines, it is shining for our benefit. Most days we go along blithely unconcerned that directly over our heads is a vast, never static sea of gases that we can’t control and only partially understand. That gaseous ocean is immense and mysterious, yet we largely ignore it until weather as formidable as an extreme hurricane strikes and we face a force infinitely mightier and more savage than ourselves.

Monday, September 19

With a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane poised to strike Miami–Palm Beach, the rest of the country finally glanced south. The
New York Times
ran a front-page story, hurricane in atlantic heads toward florida, warning that the Weather Bureau was expecting “a storm of dangerous proportions.” Newspapers in New England printed the alarm as well.

At eight o’clock Monday morning, daylight saving time, the hurricane was about 650 miles east-southeast of Florida, centered at latitude 23° north, longitude 70° west, and moving at twenty miles an hour. If it maintained a constant speed and direction, it would pass through the Bahamas overnight, spreading gales and squalls over a wide area. Winds would pick up along the Florida coast, and Miami would wake up with the hurricane on its doorstep. At 10:30
A.M.
Jacksonville issued a clear warning:
Florida’s east coast is in the danger zone of this storm and all interests are urged to stand by for possible hurricane warnings during the day.

Though not the mangrove swamp it had been before the land rush of the 1920s, Miami in the thirties was a far cry from its later Gold Coast years. The heyday of Lincoln Road and Collins Avenue would not arrive until after the war, and the big push of luxury hotels and motel strips would not happen until the fifties. Except for the extravagant Roney Plaza, the sands north of the famous crossroads were mostly barren. Sportsmen went to the Keys for the deep-sea fishing, and gamblers and high rollers headed to Havana. The southern terminus of wealth was Palm Beach.

On a good day in 1938, Miami felt like a town frozen in time. The city had woken up from the grandiose dream of the winter playland pioneered by entrepreneur Carl Fisher and railroad tycoon Henry Morrison Flagler. In its place was the bleak reality of the Great Depression. Homes and office buildings begun before the crash stood unfinished. Streets laid out in the land grab of the twenties defined empty neighborhoods.

Miami had been on full alert throughout the weekend, and by Monday morning the city looked like a frontier film set on a Hollywood back lot. The pastel town was a drab fortress brown. Stucco and glass facades were wrapped in protective timber. Billboards had been taken down, dangling street signs removed. The Red Cross had turned police stations and schools into emergency shelters, bringing in cots and setting up first-aid stations. Drygoods stores were doing a land-office business. There was a run on candles, flashlights, batteries, and kerosene lamps. Grocery store shelves were suddenly bare. Floridians stocked up on food and ordered extra ice blocks for their iceboxes. At home they filled every spare receptacle with water — stockpots, pitchers, barrels, buckets, jugs, sinks, and bathtubs.

Waiting and watching as a hurricane approaches land is tantamount to playing the seventh game of the World Series. Everything is on the line. Except to wash and change their clothes, Grady Norton and Gordon Dunn had not left the weather station since Friday. Every detail, every decision, what they did and what they failed to do would be critical. The two men were at the breaking point. “By the time you wrestle with one of these big blows for a couple of days without letup, you’re about ready for a padded cell,” Norton would say.

Gordon Dunn would second that. He called the typical Cape Verde hurricane “a schizophrenic sort of creature.” Although it is a phenomenon of warm water, it always blows away from the tropics and at the first opportunity moves northward toward the colder water that will destroy it. Once it crosses the Caribbean, it usually recurves, veering north-northeast, and goes out to sea before reaching the continental United States. It is steered on this course by the currents of the Bermuda High, a mass of dense dry air that dominates the weather in the North Atlantic over many miles.