This book by an acknowledged authority is an absorbing account of meteorology before the advent of weather satellites. “This is the lively account of the hair-raising experiences of the men who have probed by sea and air into the inner mysteries of the world’s most terrible storms…. Here is the first intimate revelation of what the human eye and the most modern radars see in the violent regions of the tropical vortex. The descriptions of the activities of these valiant scouts of the storms are taken from personal interviews with military flyers and weathermen who have risked their lives in the furious blasts in all parts of the hurricane. The author has made a special study of hurricanes for over forty years. He has served with the Weather Bureau as chief of the marine division, chief of all forecasting and reporting and assistant chief of the Bureau, in charge of its technical operations.”
By : Ivan Ray Tannehill (1890 - 1959)
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The hollow winds begin to blow,
The clouds look black, the glass is low.
—E. Darwin
A stiff breeze, now and then with a hard gust, swept rain across the Navy airfield. The place was gloomy and deserted, except for one Privateer standing behind the air station, all other planes having been evacuated the night before. A tall young airman came out of a building down at the other side of the field. He looked nervously at the blackening morning sky as another squall came by, hurried over to the plane and stood between it and the protecting station. In a few minutes, eight men followed him. They climbed aboard the craft. The tall airman was last, taking a final look at the sky over his shoulder as he crawled in. The roots of his hair felt electrified, his spine tingled and his knees turned to rubber. In a few moments the plane took off into the darkening sky.
In those anxious moments as he had glanced upward at the wind-torn clouds with driving rain in his face, many thoughts passed through his mind. In training for this job he had read about aircraft carriers having their flight decks torn up by typhoons, about battered destroyers sunk by hurricanes, big freight ships tossed out on dry land, upper stories of brick buildings sliced off, timbers driven endways through the tough trunks of palm trees. The idea of sending a plane into one of these monsters seemed fantastic. He could imagine the wings being torn off and see vividly in his mind the broken craft rocketing downward into the foam of gale-swept waters far below. He leaned over on the radio table and muttered a prayer, hoping that God could hear him above the tumult of winds, seas and engines. To most of the men this was “old stuff.” Flying into hurricanes had been going on for two years. To him it was a strange adventure.
He was the radio man and this was to be his first flight into a hurricane. And it would be no practice ride. This was a bad storm, getting too close to the coast to suit him. He had been told that after nightfall its center would strike inland and there would be widespread damage and some loss of life. He tried to remember other things they had told him in the briefing session and some of the instructions he had been reading for three days now. Well, such is life, he thought. His father had been the master of an oil tanker for the last fifteen years. He had told his growing son a lot about these big storms of the Caribbean. What would his father say now when he learned that his son was one of the men assigned to the job of flying into them? His thoughts were interrupted by violent agitation of the plane and the roar of the wind. The navigator said something about the turbulence.
He remembered asking one of the men what it would be like in the hurricane, and the fellow laughed and said, “Like going over Niagara Falls in a telephone booth.” He recalled the burly fellow who pointed to the map and told them where the center of the hurricane was located and how to get to it. In answer to his last question, one of the men had told him that all he had to do was hold on for dear life with both hands until the weather officer handed him a message for the forecast office and then he should send it as quickly as possible, without being thrown on his ear. Now the plane was bumping along in the overcast and the rain had become torrential. The wind was on the port quarter and water was coming through the nose and flooding the crawlway. It was pouring on him from above somewhere. Rivers were running down his back.
He asked the weather officer what he thought about it, and he replied, “Oh, this is the usual thing. Sometimes it gets a good deal worse.” Well, he thought it was getting a lot worse. Maybe the pilot and co-pilot could see but he could see nothing outside the plane. He hit his head on something, a hard crack, and he started to feel sick. Finally, he put his head down on the edge of the table and began to lose his breakfast.
Up and down the coast the Air Force bases were deserted. All planes but one had been flown inland and the last one, a B-17, was poised on Morrison Field for the final hop into the big winds, to return before nightfall.
In Miami, one of the senior men in the Weather Bureau office was called to the telephone. Somebody insisted on talking to him and nobody else. It was long distance. A woman said in a frightened voice that her son had gone out to look after a neighbor’s boat and she wanted to know whether she should try to go out to find him and bring him in. He was only twelve years old. “Yes, by all means,” was the answer. The forecaster didn’t know how she was going to reach the boy or how far she had to go, but he recalled that other men and boys had lost their lives doing the same thing. They were having hundreds of calls and they were unable to go into details. He paused just a moment, his mind running regretfully over this poor woman and her problem. Then he started a radio broadcast.
Down the street, a merchant was pacing up and down on the sidewalk, bossing three men who were nailing frames over his plate glass windows. He went into the store to his telephone and, after dialing for about ten minutes, finally got the forecaster on the line. “What’s the latest on the storm?” he asked in a strained voice. “Nothing new,” came the tired voice of the forecaster. “A Navy plane went out half an hour ago. We’ll have a report pretty soon now. But the hurricane’s going to hit us, that’s sure. Be a bad night.”
Three miles south of the city, two fishermen stood looking at a pole on the pier. Two red flags with black centers were flapping in the wind. “Aw, nuts,” growled the big man. “Guess I’ll go home and nail up the windows again. This is the third time this year.” The little man started off, pulling his raincoat up around his ears as a squall came over. “Well, we can’t complain, I guess. The other times the flags went up we got storms, didn’t we? Looks like this will be the worst of the lot.” By that time the big fellow was running in a dog-trot and disappearing around a building. His father had been drowned in the big storm at Key West in 1919.
Even on the other side of the State the people were worried, and for good reason, for it might be over there tomorrow. The forecaster was wanted again on the telephone. A man said in an anxious tone that he had one thousand five hundred unfenced cattle near the shore and what should he do? Without hesitation, the forecaster said, “Get them away from the water and behind a fence. This storm will go south of you. There will be strong offshore gales and the cattle will walk with the wind and go right out into the water and drown if there is no fence.”
Out in the Atlantic, a merchant ship was wallowing in heavy seas, with one hundred miles an hour winds raking her decks. The third mate struggled through the wind and sea and into the radio room. He handed a wet weather message to the radio operator. A hundred miles away, in the Bahamas, an old Negro was reading his weather instruments and looking at the sky. He was pushed around by furious winds but they had died down a little since early morning. The roof was off his house. Trees were uprooted all around him. He went into a small, low-slung radio hut and attempted to send a weather message to Nassau. He was badly crowded in the hut. His wife, daughter and two grandchildren were huddled in the corners. His son-in-law had been killed in the night by a big tree that fell on the porch. His daughter and her two children were sobbing. He raised the Nassau radio station and sent a message for the forecast office in Miami.
All up and down the Florida coast, many thousands had heard the radio warnings or had seen the flags flying and wanted to know more. The highways here and there were filling with people, leaving threatened places on the coast. By night the roads would be jammed. Out on the Privateer, the tall young radioman, sopping wet, raised himself in his chair, and took a soggy message from the weather officer. After the plane settled a little, he put on his head phones and listened to the loud, almost deafening static. He still felt a bit sick. But he began to pound out the weather message, with the hope that somebody would get it and pass it on to the forecaster.
In these and other ways, it has come about that a pair of red flags with black centers strikes fear into the hearts of seafaring men and terrifies people in towns and cities in the line of advance of the big winds. The warning brings to their minds raging seas and screaming gales, relatives and friends lost in other great storms that have roared out of the tropics, ships going down and buildings being torn apart.
Ahead of the storm, the sea becomes angry. Huge rollers break on the beaches with a booming sound. In the distance, a long, low, angry cloud appears on the horizon. If the cloud grows and puts out scud and squalls, spitting rain, the warning flags flutter in the gusts and the big winds will strike the coast with terrible destruction. If the distant cloud is seen to move along the horizon, the tumult of wind and sea on the beaches will subside. The local indications in the sky and the water tell a vital story to the initiated but the warning they give does not come soon enough. It is necessary to know what is going to happen while the hurricane is well out at sea. This depends on the hurricane hunters, and so the messages they send ashore while fighting their way by air into the vortices of these terrible whirlwinds are awaited anxiously by countless people.
Tracking and predicting hurricanes is an exciting job, often a dangerous one. But it is not a one-man job; it requires the co-operation of many people. A tropical storm of hurricane force covers such a vast area that all of it cannot be seen by one person. Its products—gales with clouds and rain—and its effects—destruction of life and property and big waves on the sea—are visible to people in different parts of the disturbance. But before we know much about it, the little that is seen by each of many people on islands and ships at sea must be put together, like clues in a murder case. The weather observers who get the clues and the experts who put them together are the hurricane hunters...
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