Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [42]
For the last week, Young had been keeping close track of the weather. Nothing in the official reports from the Weather Bureau’s Central Office indicated that a tropical cyclone might be forming in the Caribbean, but Young believed the signs were there.
He stood quietly beside the mapmaker. There was something soothing about the tap-tap-tap of the chalk, as the mapmaker deftly noted wind speed in Chicago, temperature in New York, pressure over the Rockies. An R meant rain, S snow. An M stood for missing.
Under Moore, only disaster or downed telegraph lines made an M acceptable.
Tiny circles with arrows, like the symbols for male and female, soon covered the map. An open circle meant clear skies. A cross meant cloudy. The arrow showed the direction of the wind.
The mapmaker drew his isobars with assurance and grace, the chalk making a sound like skates on ice. He applied the dotted isotherms with special gusto, in Gatling bursts that turned his knuckles white.
Typewriters cackled. A telephone rang. Motes of chalk dust drifted in the gray light, like virga from a cloud.
Dr. Young paid special attention to the notations the mapmaker applied along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. “When the observations at Key West were recorded,” Young wrote, “I saw that the barometer was low, that the wind was from the northeast and that the map as a whole showed pretty plainly cyclonic disturbances to the south or southeast of Key West.”
There was no specific symbol on the map that indicated a tropical cyclone. Young deduced its presence from the unusual pattern of pressure and wind. He noted also the high-pressure zones that still lingered over the Midwest and Northeast. To him, the play of isobars and wind suggested a cyclone might be churning in the sea somewhere south of Florida, perhaps Cuba, and he said as much to the mapmaker.
“He agreed with me,” Young wrote, “but said his office had received no notice of anything of the kind.”
CUBA
Suspicion
THERE WAS BAD weather in Cuba—mal tiempo. There was also bad blood. Willis Moore’s passion for control had gouged a deep chasm between Cuban and U.S. meteorologists.
Moore and officials of the bureau’s West Indies hurricane service had long been openly disdainful of the Cubans. It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba’s own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau. In August, Moore moved to hobble the competition once and for all. The War Department was then still in charge of Cuba, as it had been ever since the end of the Spanish-American War. Moore’s chief liaison on the island was H. H. C. Dunwoody (now Colonel Dunwoody), the bureaucratic intriguer who had helped undermine Moore’s predecessor, Mark Harrington. Through Dunwoody, Moore persuaded the War Department to ban from Cuba’s government-owned telegraph lines all cables about the weather, no matter how innocent, except those from officials of the U.S. Weather Bureau—this at the peak of hurricane season.
It was an absurd action. Cuba’s meteorologists had pioneered the art of hurricane prediction; its best weathermen were revered by the Cuban public. Over the centuries, storm after storm had come to Cuba utterly by surprise, until 1870 when Father Benito Vines took over as director of the Belen Observatory in Havana and dedicated his life to finding the meteorological signals that warned of a hurricane’s approach. It was he who discovered that high veils of cirrus clouds—rabos de gallo, or “cock’s tails”—often foretold the arrival of a hurricane. He set up a network of hundreds of observers, runners, and mounted messengers to watch for changes in the weather and spread the alarm. After Vines’s death in July 1893, Father Lorenzo Gangoite took his place at Belen and likewise devoted his life to storm.
But the Weather Bureau under Willis Moore wanted hurricanes all to itself.