Three Category 5 storms, one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded, zero U.S. landfalls and a mystifying lull at the usual peak of activity: Together, these and other factors made for a “screwball” hurricane season this year. That “season” now approaches its end.
fewer hurricanes formed, but of the five that did — Erin, Gabrielle, Humberto, Imelda and Melissa — four were considered major.
three of those major storms were Category 5, the highest level of intensity. Courtesy NBC:
CBS:
Hurricane Melissa’s wind gusts reached a record-breaking speed shortly before the storm made landfall in the Caribbean last month, according to data recorded during the deadly event.
The data was collected when a NOAA Hurricane Hunter airplane dropped a fleet of weather instruments into the raging storm, according to a news release from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Center for Atmospheric Research. The devices, called dropsondes, have small parachutes attached and between two and four readings per second before falling into the ocean.
Dropsondes are the only devices that can record information on pressure, temperature, humidity and wind at once. The data is used in forecasts and weather warnings, including emergency alerts.
“When you’re looking at a category 4 or 5 hurricane, you’re not going to have an airplane flying that close to the surface – that would be totally unsafe – but you need to know what is happening near sea level because that’s where people and property are most affected,” said NSF NCAR engineer Terry Hock, who manages the Dropsonde program, in the news release. “The dropsonde gets you information you can’t get any other way and that’s why it’s been around for decades.”
One dropsonde used during Hurricane Melissa clocked a wind gust of 252 miles per hour shortly before falling into the ocean.
Great storms were coming in whatever direction the thermometer swerved but especially if more heat was pumped into the system.
No one knew the full story but besides the cycle lasting two to four decades and involving temperature, ocean currents, and stratospheric winds, there was also the distinct chance that the ancient cycle of hurricanes a magnitude higher than even the highest current category was kicking in. Was the Middle Ages, so similar to what was now going on, going to repeat itself in this regard also? Were we going to see the kinds of storms that had been seen in the medieval warming, and before that in the Bronze Age? If so it meant hurricanes the likes of which we can only imagine, and it wasn’t just a product of climate. The forces were more mysterious than that. They operated in a way that transcended science. And it was a true use of the word awesome. There were indications that in the past storms had hit with surges twice what was seen during Andrew, up to forty feet, inundating a vicinity near Naples, Florida. “From the historical record there’s evidence of some extreme hurricanes that hit this state from A.D. 800 to 1400 in the last global warming period,” I was told by Erle Peterson of the Dade County emergency office. “There’s a classic work where they found a Calusa Indian village on Marco Island in Collier County that was buried underneath a 20-foot sand dune. The thing that was unusual is that everything was intact like a Pompeii event. The sand was put there, as near as they can tell, all at one time. And the only thing that could put a twenty-foot sand dune there all at one time is a storm surge.”
Although some claimed the sand was an remnant of ancient Indian burial mounds, Peterson argued that burial mounds contained skulls (which were detached from the body) and broken pottery (which had been ritually shattered when no longer used), where these heaps were not layered and contained unbroken pottery and whole skeletons.
It was as if something huge and unexpected had come upon them. And Peterson believed that something had been a “hyper-hurricane” with sustained winds of 250 to 260 miles an hour.
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Were these the type of storms that Gilbert, that Andrew, had hinted at? Were they coming back?
Over the past twenty years at least ten percent more moisture had been pumped into the atmosphere, and this was octane. This was what fueled superstorms. Big storms fed off moisture. Moisture and turmoil. It wasn’t just heat. A sudden flux that caused an atmospheric “wave” in the tropics was enough to trigger it, and it didn’t even matter if it was a busy hurricane season or a quiet one: The big ones — the Gilberts, the Andrews — had come in calm times and so there was a constant risk that could only be discerned through prayer. It was certain, however, that storms would intensify because they were where all the water from drought-stricken areas gathered. There had been a substantial increase in precipitation and it was concentrating in the large events (half of the increase in rainfall was in the top ten percent of intense storms), which meant high-end storms were heading higher. There was going to be greater than the Labor Day Hurricane. While it wasn’t a prerequisite, the more hurricanes the more chance there was of one ballooning into an event that by meteorological standards was apocalyptical and some years, as in 1995, they were lining up like planes at an airport. Would they continue? Would they combine? Would they join moisture? Would a storm the size of Hugo, which had devastated the Carolina coast, or Typhoon Tip, which had that reach of a thousand kilometers — or larger — develop a level of intensity known previously only to smaller hurricanes like Camille, Labor Day, or Andrew?
Another bullet had been dodged in 1999 when Hurricane Floyd, a massive system, looked for a while like it might reach category-five status and hit the east coast of Florida, which would have been the first time in recent centuries. There had been panic. The President had cut short a trip. It was a storm larger than the state of Texas. Officials ordered the largest evacuation in American history.
That had been a close call, but the warnings were ending and soon there were going to be direct hits. As always, it was conditional (there was still time to convert, there was still time to pray), but the tremendous fortune we had seen with recent hurricanes was ready to give way and storms that were both larger and more powerful than Floyd were stored in all the energy flowing in huge ocean gyres. There were going to be hurricanes that combined force as Hazel had and there were going to be hurricanes that came one after another, that wandered where they had never gone, that stalled over areas like the one had in Nicaragua, that hit the same places more than once, or that battered different parts of the U.S. at the same time.
Some of them would be larger than any we had seen and at least one would be the most powerful on record. That was my take on it. It was in the milieu that would compose or usher in chastisement. And it was coming. The question was when, where.
While there was an increasing chance of a big storm heading north, all the way to New York or Cape Cod (where Dr. Liu was starting to see indications of major storms in ancient times), and while Pacific hurricanes were beginning to circle close to California (as had a monster named Linda), the key threat, the nail biting, remained on coastal land from Virginia to Texas.
Houston was three times likelier to get the big one than New York and Florida half-again likelier than Texas.
In the middle of that stretch, on the way to Texas, at the most vulnerable part of the coast, was New Orleans, and this was a truly special case; this was enough to raise goose bumps. We have to stop here a moment. This is worthy of special consideration. For New Orleans had a long history of violent hurricanes, had been escaping them for an inordinate length of time, was thus overdue (a word we will see used over and over), and was not only low to the water but below sea level.
Emergency managers in New Orleans and neighboring Jefferson Parish told me that all it would take would be a direct hit by category-three or four to put the entire city under water! There were parts of New Orleans that were below sea level by 12 feet, which meant that a hurricane with a 17-foot surge (far below what may have occurred in the Middle Ages) would put the entire City of New Orleans under more than twenty feet.
The whole area was like a bowl surrounded by levees that in normal times protected against river flooding but that in a hurricane would trap water that came from the Gulf or sloshed from Lake Pontchartrain. On Bourbon Street there would be water to the second story. Those who didn’t evacuate would head for their attics with axes (in case they had to chop their way to the roof), while others would get trapped on the sole interstate (which emergency planners said was totally inadequate).
There were 900,000 in the metro area. It would take a minimum of 48 hours to evacuate them. At that point forecasters still would not know within a hundred miles where the storm was going to hit. In the best of circumstances officials believed that at least 100,000 would be stranded. There were that many without personal transportation, and many who would choose to brave the storm — not knowing the kind of storms that once had hit, that had caused mayhem as recently as the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands coming from the lower parishes would likewise find themselves trapped. All in all Walter Maestri of emergency management in Jefferson estimated that a direct hit by a major hurricane — something that happened in this area before it had grown so populous — would cause between 25,000 and 75,000 dead.
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And as we have already seen, that was by no means the most powerful storm that could hit Florida. Where Andrew blustered with winds that may have gusted to 200 miles an hour, there were simple calculations that presented the ingredients for a much more terrifying storm. Scientists in England told me they expected a 25 percent increase in top winds with projected warming while at Princeton calculations called for an increase of up to 12 percent.
This was “conservative” data, numbers that erred on the low side because scientists did anything they could not to scare the public. Yet even figures like these were dramatic: Applied to top sustained winds, an increase of 12 percent would have given Labor Day sustained winds of up to 225 miles an hour, with gusts well over 250. There were those who claimed that the gusts at Islamorada already had been that high, so a 12 percent hike would have brought projections closer to 280. Moreover, according to the Hurricane Center, new technology now indicated that past wind speeds had been understated by as much as twenty percent. If we applied that to the increase in winds projected to occur with continued global warming, actual sustained winds would be at least 230 to 250 with gusts heading into the category of a major tornado.
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At the same time, the mega-storm would be massive. Where Andrew’s swath was only thirty miles, winds of hurricane force could extend more than a hundred miles from a major storm and possibly up to two or three times that. The eye alone could be larger than Andrew. There were hurricanes like Gilbert that had been just as powerful as Andrew but many times larger and Tip had the gale-force winds with a radius of 600 miles. As for barometric pressure, Dr. Gray believed the limit was the 870 recorded with Tip, but Peterson argued that if temperatures continued to increase, it could go much lower. “Gilbert was the most potent (at 888) we’ve measured in the Atlantic, but I feel absolutely confident that it’s not even close to the maximum that can be done,” he said.
Could a storm plunge to 860? To 850?
Anything was possible in a climate that was swerving. It wasn’t just a matter of heat; it was the flux. Energy was released when there was change. Even cooler periods had spawned major storms, and this indicated as much as anything the role of instability.
It depended on how volatile the air was and by all signs it was swerving. Everyone (save those buried in statistics) noticed it, the way it would be totally dry somewhere and then that area would see nothing but rain. In the Northeast it might be a cool wet summer while in the West (as during 2000) fires raged. The only consistency was that events were growing extreme. Scientists tried to explain it as variations within a larger curve but simple observation told the story of increasingly radical behavior. The weather was erratic. Things were plunging or rising. There were no more middle areas. Commuters knew it; farmers knew it. The sun was either in hiding or scorching. There were no longer the intermediates of just a few years before, and that meant instability, which meant energy — which was what caused hurricanes. Sudden storms in Africa would send a pressure wave that tumbled into pressure systems over the Atlantic and began an undulation which caused great drafts of moisture, the commotion only enhanced as yet more moisture rose with air that was sent up yet faster — nucleating, tossing everything into motion, feeding on its own frenzy.
In a climate that was unsteady there was no reason why such a storm would not balloon into larger than Gilbert, than Tip, with winds of destructive force for several hundred miles. That meant the possibility of trauma for Florida. A new up-cycle was in place, would last a minimum of 15 years, and few were prepared for it. Florida had been “extremely lucky,” said Gray, “just unbelievably spared,” but was now a “recipe for disaster.” At Cocoa Plum mansions were being erected on land that had been under whitecaps in 1965 during a hurricane called Betsy!
In Florida a lighthouse swayed so violently during a hurricane at Jupiter that mortar squeezed from it like toothpaste.
Then in 1926 came the Great Miami Hurricane. At category-four it was the potency of what had destroyed Galveston, and the debris was tremendous. Yachts were dumped in front of hotels, Miami Beach was washed over, and the building where the famous Miami Follies Girls frolicked was left looking in the words of one eyewitness like “the Rheims cathedral after the German bombardment.”
Not a single palm could be found in whole stretches of South Florida, pines also gone, casinos razed, bars ruined. Waves thrashed the bottom floors of apartment towers and if it wasn’t the action of water it was the whip of wind. Large doors were blasted open as the hurricane entered thousands of homes, crashing lights and exploding plaster. The eye moved directly over Miami and the force around it scattered furniture, clothes, and anything else it could lift for miles. Patrician neighborhoods, the hoi poloi, were devastated beyond knowing. So immense was the destruction that the very viability of Miami as a city, as a safe place to live, was called into question. “Six days ago this City of 200,000 people was one of the most prosperous, beautiful, and delightful communities in this country,” said a citizens committee in appealing for help from the rest of the country. “Today, as a result of a disastrous tropical hurricane, which devastated our coast last Saturday, it lies prostrate.”
A few years later, at Lake Okeechobee, nearly 2,000 died in another storm that sent water surging over dikes, where it carried one house for half a mile.
That too was a category-four. From 1910 to 1929 there were five storms at that level. Each increment up the scale — each new category — meant five to ten times the damage. The storms were hovering, down-blasting, and destroying huge swaths from Louisiana to Texas. Warm air was speeding upward, the barometer was dropping, and even Galveston had been hit again.
Back in the U.S., the horror of Lake Okeechobee and the Great Miami Hurricane were exceeded on September 2, 1935, when a monster, a category-five, hit the Florida Keys like a superstorm out of the Middle Ages.
Known as the Labor Day Storm, it started as a tropical depression near the Bahamas and wasn’t a hurricane until it approached Nassau and underwent violent deepening — its pressure plummeting to a mind-boggling, a record, 892 millibars (compared with 935 in the Miami hurricane). Where storms like Galveston had blown at 130 miles an hour, the Labor Day Hurricane had sustained winds of 150 to 200 and gusts that detonated at 250.
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Hysteria reigned. At Alligator Reef wind shattered the thick glass on the beacon at a lighthouse (carrying the lens ten miles) and titanic swells rushed ashore.
Once more Hurukan came in the dark of night, the fiercest winds blasting across Islamorada, a small island that was 65 miles southwest of Miami and saw water rip rails from thirty-foot bridges, the surge overtopping the entire island.
Hundreds drowned, flushed out of ravaged homes, unable to keep a grip on roofs, poles, and trees, the air whipping so savagely that corpses lost distinguishable facial characteristics. It was what one chronicler called a storm with “the most awesome storm effects imaginable.”
“I was a manager of structural engineering for Pan Am and many mechanics were in that storm because Pan Am was contracted to do cleanup and body recovery,” recalled Erle Peterson, now manager of recovery for the Dade County Division of Emergency Management. “There were a lot of stories of what they had to do down there and the big similarity was the business of bodies simply not having any skin on them. They were sandblasted. They were found in the trees and in the water and all over the place. I’ve talked to dozens of people who had to pick up after the 1935 hurricane and the procedure was if you went to work you punched in and then you put both your arms up to the shoulders in a barrel of mercurochrome and every hour or so you came back and dunked your arms.”
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It was an explosion of wind and it lifted sand with such force that it generated an electrical charge — looked like fireflies. That was accompanied by terrific lightning that scorched the horizon. There was no overstating this storm: barometric pressure, the most important gauge of a hurricane’s force, dropped a full degree over the span of just six miles — a plunge exceeded only in tornadoes. At Alligator Reef a huge cruise ship was carried four miles inland and at Islamorada a train sent to rescue veterans working in a relief program was swept from the tracks, the waiting veterans grasping onto the rails and blowing like laundry on a clothesline.
“I was almost nine at the time,” recalled Floyd Russell, whose large family ran a plantation. “During the storm most of the family stayed in their homes on the ocean, but my father and his immediate family and his brother and his family went to a little one-room packing house where they used to package and ship key limes up in the middle of the island, which was a little higher. But it didn’t matter a whole lot where you were. I remember the water was coming in under the door and my uncle reaching down and tasting it and saying, `It’s salt water.’ That meant that it wasn’t rainwater, that the ocean was coming in, and shortly after the building started going to pieces and the adults grabbed all the children and went out into the storm and the water was probably eight or ten feet over much of the island.
“It was pitch black, the middle of the night, and you couldn’t see anything. There was no way you could know what was happening. I was just a child but you can imagine what parents went through, trying to decide which child to hold onto. It had to be the worst experience. You couldn’t hold onto any child or anything. It was just impossible. It was the will of the Good Lord that I survived. As best that I can remember I was separated from my father and apparently tried to hold onto a piece of a house or something. But during the storm I had a head wound, a big gash in my head, and perhaps I was unconscious and maybe that’s one of the reasons I survived: I wasn’t struggling so hard but I remember I was old enough to pray and I was just praying that I might get through it and it was just the good Lord who got me through it. There wasn’t anything a nine-year-old boy could do to survive something like that. You were just out and you were at the mercy of the wind and the waves. It’s a miracle that anyone survived in this area. My uncle was severely injured. Something big hit him in the hip and knocked a hole in the meaty part. Another cousin was pinned up in a tree. There were 15 of us in that building and 11 died, including my mother, two sisters, and two brothers. Only my father, my uncle, my cousin Bernard, and I survived.”
A few years older at 17, Bernard remained conscious.
It was a horrifying ordeal.
The main part of the storm had let loose around 8:35 p.m., and wave after wave pounded the island, which like many of the keys had an elevation of just four to 12 feet above sea level.
It was all the more horrid because of the dark.
“You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, you couldn’t see anything,” I was told by Floyd’s cousin, Bernard. “You didn’t know what was going on around you. You didn’t have time even to scream. When we started going out of the building my dad said, `Everyone grab a hold and hold onto someone when we go out and then when you get out hang on,’ but when you got out of the house the wind and waves just separated you. There was no way you could hang on together. I was with my sister and her little boy, who I was holding onto, and we went out but the wind spun me around and I never saw either of them again.
“The good Lord was looking out for me because I was washed around in a pile of trash and coconut trees and lime trees and it was just a big boiling pot, along with all the houses and stuff floating like a tidal wave went over the island. Whatever you could grab hold of you did, but you still didn’t know what you were doing because you couldn’t see. You grabbed hold of anything you could. It might be a piece of a house. It might be a telephone pole. It might be a bed. You couldn’t tell. And you couldn’t hang on with the force against you. There was no way you could control it. The initial wave went across in a hurry. A piece of debris hit me in the back and pushed me down to the ground and I took a couple gulps and thought it was all over. Somehow I got back to the top but swimming didn’t help you. It was like a boiling pot, houses, trees, boats — everything all in one pile and everyone trying not to be washed off the island. A lot of people, that’s what happened: they grabbed on to something and it took them across the island and it put them out in the bay and of course that was the end of that.”
This went on for at least an hour, thrashing, going under, struggling back to the top. But even when the water settled, there was the entanglement of debris and the wind, which was still at terrific force.
Bernard came to rest on a mound of wreckage. Miraculously, his father also survived. “After I got down I heard a voice. It was my dad. I didn’t know it was him at the time. I kept telling him to yell, to yell, to yell and I would yell back, and I finally crawled on the ground not knowing where I was going or what I would run into because I couldn’t see until I told him to keep yelling and I got over to where he was and we just sat there and waited it out until daylight.”
The winds had raged until five a.m. and the sight in the light of morning was beyond anguish. There were 53 Russells before the storm and only 15 after.
“You knew that everything was gone and your whole family was gone with it,” Bernard recounted. “My dad survived but my mother and three sisters and little nephew passed, along with my grandmother and all my aunts and uncles. I had a first cousin who had a little baby and she was swept from the island to somewhere near a place called Flamingo on the mainland, near the Everglades, which was near Cape Sable — thirty miles away. When they found her she still had the baby, died there with the little child, but she apparently had been alive when she got on the other side on the beach on the bay side, because they could tell where she dragged herself up in the sand.”
And storms there were. From 1985 to 1988 the increase in temperatures took another jump and it was heating all over and it was getting strange, with huge unexplained fish kills as there had been fish kills before bubonic fever had hit and a miasma, a foul wind, blowing. In 1987 freak winds blasted down 18 million trees in England, the worst gale since the 1700s, the wind howling through the night, toppling trees that had been there for centuries, back to the famous kings, to the roundtable. Whole communities were barricaded with debris. There was no getting out of the house. Wave heights were swelling by a third in the Atlantic. Reports came of rogue waves that reached heights of up to 85 feet while in the south a truly massive hurricane called Gilbert spread itself over half of the Caribbean and at 888 millibars, below even the Labor Day Storm, set a record for lowest barometric pressure, its radius stretching from the Yucatan in Mexico to Louisiana.
Meteorologists knew the big one — the really big one, greater than Andrew — was out there somewhere in the heat quotient of the ocean. A hurricane forecaster named William Gray told me there would be an increase in frequency for 15 to 20 years as the speed of ocean currents shifted according to salinity and there were also favorable conditions set by global temperature, rainfall in Africa (where storms like Andrew were spawned), and gyrations in the upper atmosphere. There was something called the North Atlantic Oscillation that was grinding into a favorable pattern and except for El Nino years an absence of the kind of winds that sheer the tops of hurricanes. All that and the increase in moisture formed a bundle of dynamite.
That was the short cycle. There was a long-term cycle, periods of intensification that lasted for a thousand years, and the question was whether this too, this greater cycle, last seen around 1000 A.D., was returning.
There were indications something was up, and officials were screaming about it, shouting at developers who were building close to the water. There had been a lull from the 1970s to the early 1990s but it was ending and now there would be turbulence for at least the next couple decades as there had been back during the Great Miami Hurricane and more: there was going to be turbulence, perhaps, as during ancient onslaughts. Nature moved in cycles; there were seasons of the year; there were long-term cycles. God worked through them. He enhanced aspects of them. He could swing them into especially dramatic mode. And it was time to prepare for it. Florida was what Gray described as a “sitting duck, a recipe for disaster.” Its population had grown to 15 times what it was during the previous up-cycle. Where there had been 200,000 residents in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale megalopolis in 1926, there were now more than three million. They had narrowly missed Andrew and that’s what Andrew was: just a warning. A shot over the bow. Monster hurricanes were brewing, and if it followed other trends, there would be quiet years followed by ones that were explosive. There would be Gilberts and larger than Gilbert. They may not have articulated storms the size of the ones that seemed to have occurred during the Bronze Age but meteorologists sensed this. I heard their pleas for people to build away from the shores. They saw what happened in Andrew and no matter how long they had worked in the field, no matter how many storms they had flown into, no matter how many radar images, the hurricane had left them scared.
“The weekend before Andrew actually came it was a tropical wave out there in the Atlantic and we were all watching it from a meteorological standpoint and it wasn’t any threat at that time,” recalled Jim Lushine, warning coordinator at the National Weather Service. “We lived in Dade County near the Metro Zoo and that weekend there was a birthday party for a friend of ours up in Broward County. We got to the party and before we left that night my friend said, `Let’s flip a coin and see which county is going to be hit, Broward or Dade.’ I flipped the coin and I lost. By Sunday everyone knew it was coming somewhere in southern Florida. I was called back in to work the midnight shift and had to work from 8 p.m. Sunday night until the next morning or whenever the storm was over. My wife and daughter, who was just graduating from high school, were in the house and they had some friends over, people who lived closer to the water and had come over to our house as refuge. So there was my wife, daughter, and seven other people and a dog at the time of the hurricane. When I’d left I’d done what I could, put the shutters up and prepared everything, but I didn’t realize even at that point how devastating the hurricane was going to be. I knew it was a major hurricane, a category-four hurricane, but having never actually lived through one, I wasn’t absolutely sure. In theory, as a meteorologist, I knew what hurricanes could do, but in actuality I wasn’t clear as to what would happen to my house.
“My wife sensed I was nervous when I left. I got to work and was watching the hurricane and writing statements letting the media know what the situation was — where the hurricane was and how strong the winds were — and every once in a while I’d call my wife to see how things were. She’d say, `Nothing much is happening here. It’s really not blowing much.’ I could see it on the radar and satellite but didn’t know the exact effects. It was close to a category-five. I was watching the anemometer and it got to be 165-mile-an-hour gusts on the roof of the Hurricane Center, which was 13 stories high but out of the maximum wind that’s in the donut-shaped area around an eyewall. The eyewall passed just south of our building.
“Then the anemometer broke, so the wind had to have been above 165 and that wasn’t even in the maximum area. There was a huge thud and everyone got real quiet at the Hurricane Center and the whole building had shaken. The radar had blown off along with the anemometer, which weighed a couple tons, a big white dome that rolled off and down the Dixie Highway.
“I had one more phone conversation with my wife around 4 a.m. The phones were still working but the winds were really going and then the phones went down and that was the last I heard from her until I got home later the next morning, which was about ten a.m., after the winds had died down, drove down the South Dixie Highway, and saw the beginnings of this destruction. As I got farther south it got worse and worse and I started getting more nervous about my home and didn’t know exactly what I was going to find when I got there. When I did get home the family was out in the yard and all the people were there and the house itself didn’t look all that bad but when I got closer I could see that the entire roof had been ripped off and everything inside ruined. The storm had trashed the entire inside of the house. There was nothing salvageable except a few pictures from our albums. Everything else — all our clothes, the furniture — was ruined. During the height of the storm my wife was in the bedroom, which had shutters on it, but a tree came down and punched a hole in the roof in the bedroom. So at four or five in the morning she had run out of the bedroom with my daughter and they went into the dining room and got underneath the table and were there for a while but then the china cabinet collapsed onto the table, so they ran from under the dining room table and went down with the others into the bathroom and bedroom closet, which I had told them were the best refuge if the worst was realized. There were five in the closet and another four in the bathtub, along with the dog. They held on to the door during those tremendous forces all night long and managed to keep the door closed. Those were the only rooms in the house — the closet and the bathroom — where the roof stayed on. The rest was totally wiped out. When they opened the door the house looked like a bomb had gone off. It was just trashed. I have no doubt that it was gusting at close to 200 miles per hour and the best proof I could see was a billboard on South Dixie Highway not too far from my house. Its I-beams, which were about a foot thick, had actually bent from the force. In the morning my wife had gone out to a phone that was working two blocks down the street and when she got down there she was lost. She couldn’t figure out how to get back. Everything was gone, even the trees. It was totally amazing. Unbelievable. There was nothing.”
“I’ve told people I would never write this because it wouldn’t be believed, but I’m going to anyhow,” said another whose home, save for his library, was trashed, Howard Kleinberg, former editor of The Miami News. “Only one book was ruined by Andrew. It was in the front bedroom and it had been flung to the floor from a desk top to be soaked when the roof came apart over it. It was the Holy Scriptures. And to make it more unbelievable, it was open to that part of Genesis dealing with Noah and the Great Flood: `And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth.'”
It was getting intense and, hard as it was to believe, Andrew was followed by a “storm of the century” in Hawaii. The Pacific too was rising. The great storms were growing fiercer. Because the pressure of the Pacific was generally below that of the Atlantic, the lowest storm readings were now dipping below even that of Gilbert and some set records. There had been a typhoon named Tip with gale-force winds that extended for a radius of 680 miles!
That was not just daunting but terrifying; at 876 it was 16 millibars below the Labor Day Storm. Something was transpiring in the oceans and it was resembling what had happened between 2500 B.C. and the medieval warming when hurricanes had hurled gigantic storm surges, the evidence of which was found in cores that showed sand deposits indicating that at one time category-five hurricanes — storms a magnitude greater than Andrew — had hit Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and as far north as Virginia Beach, possibly to New England, with catastrophic regularity.
In other words there had been a time when the strongest hurricanes known to man — considered in recent centuries to be a threat only in the western Pacific or down in the Caribbean — had meandered up the Atlantic. Meantime areas like the Caribbean were threatened by storms bigger than anything modern meteorology had witnessed. And the threat was not just from cyclones. In Peru was evidence of major El Ninos during the run of Mesopotamian disasters and these looked like they were on their way back as parts of the Pacific heated to 86 degrees and El Ninos now came so often it was beginning to look like one huge ongoing El Nino. As the planet heated, molecules of water expanded and, added to glacial melt, caused a rise in sea level that in some years increased storm surge. This terrified residents of islands such as Tuvalo, Kiribati, and the Marshalls. Ancient graveyards were washing out and palms, undermined by an expanding tide, were toppling. Great was the fear that sea levels would increase by as much as 37 inches by 2100, which (if it kept up; it varied) meant something close to doom for islands several feet above sea level. “These aren’t storms, they’re surges,” remarked a newsman in the Marshalls. “It’s nice weather, and all of a sudden water is pouring into your living room.”
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The landscape was changing — washing away — and the sun’s rays were stronger than ever. By 1992 average global temperature was half a degree warmer than during the rise in 1933 and a full degree warmer than the initial peak around the time of LaSalette, by some reckonings even higher. The pot was boiling over. In Australia a storm had caused a 42-foot surge, and on Reunion Island a cyclone set a record with 18 feet of rainfall.
The ancient storms, the hurricanes thought by some to have caused ancient Aztecs to flee shorelines, that had once ravaged Peru, were coming back. On September 11, 1992, Hurricane Iniki swept across the island of Kau’ai in Hawaii. It was just 18 days after Hurricane Andrew; 10,000 homes were damaged. “All morning the air had been dead calm and the sky overcast,” one resident reported. “The high humidity and the absence of breeze made it seem particularly oppressive. As the countdown continued into late morning it appeared that all our neighbors were outside checking each other’s preparations. The sky was getting darker, and it was no longer still. The first gusts from the east had begun. Apparently, our uninvited guest was arriving early. Very quickly the wind increased to gale force, and we retreated inside the house. The phones and electricity were already dead. It was definitely showtime. Our children dutifully picked out their `emergency toys’ and took their places in the hall. Suddenly, a violent gust slammed into the house and I saw shingles fly into a guava grove in our backyard. They were off of our house and decision time was near, stay or leave. A few minutes later another gust rocked the whole structure on its pier beams. It was time to run, the house was already coming apart. We took our emergency stores and got in the car to make a run for safety. I suspected that the nearby country club would be empty. I also knew that it had thick concrete walls and was likely to withstand everything. We were completely soaked, but we made it. The clubhouse is an impressive structure featuring a lobby full of windows that ordinarily afford a spectacular view. These windows are made of hurricane-proof glass, and this would be a relatively safe place to see what was going on outside. At about three p.m. the doors at the main entrance blew in with a crash. The hurricane was inside now. It sounded like a wind tunnel. Trees were coming down everywhere, large metal conduits weighing a ton were blowing around the golf course like paper cups, and every power pole in sight was on the ground. The noise was unbelievable, shattering glass, twisting metal, flying debris impacting, and of course the piercing howl of the wind. At times the gusts would reach frenzied crescendos where it felt like the whole building would explode. On the east wing of the building there was a large banquet room set up for a wedding reception. The suction in the room was so great that the doors which open out were immovable. All twenty or so large hurricane windows were bowing dangerously inward. The low pressure in that room was lethal. Finally, during a peak gust, the entire room imploded. Every window, wall, and door, inside and out, disintegrated at once.”
While overall the warmth would pump more moisture into the air, there would be pockets — sometimes huge pockets — of drought. It was starting. There had been great dryness throughout the United States. In 1999 the longest drought on the East Coast of the U.S. in decades was followed by drought in 2000 that set off wildfires in California, Colorado, Washington, New Mexico, Montana, and Arizona. This hearkened to ancient droughts that used to stretch from Minnesota to Mexico, from the Great Plains to California. At one point Texas sought declaration of three-fourths of its counties as disaster areas. It was that dry. It was that hot. It took soldiers to fight the flames in the Sierra Nevadas. Curious was how several of the fires directly threatened federal nuclear facilities in New Mexico, Idaho, and the state of Washington — at one point causing the evacuation of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was constructed. It had been a century since the Mid-Atlantic was as dry, and then came more rain than anyone wanted. There was no overriding trend except the trend of excess. There was a general unraveling. That was the trend. And much more was on the way. There would be huge monsoons. There would be cyclones that took two or three times the toll of the one in 1970. There could be a surge that killed more than a few hundred thousand. We were approaching disasters that could cost the lives of millions. Winds would hurtle trees in India and Bangladesh, would blast thatched homes out of existence.
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