Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [46]
To Halsey, it was fine, brisk day to be at sea.
STRAITS OF FLORIDA
A Matter of Divination
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING the storm rumbled into the Straits of Florida just north of Cuba and promptly confounded the Weather Bureau’s forecasters. Willis Moore and his professors believed the storm would now move north. To them, the storm appeared to have begun a long turn or “recurve” that would take it first into Florida, then drive it northeast toward an eventual exit into the Atlantic. No real evidence supported this projection. It was merely what the latest iterations of the Law of Storms predicted and what the bureau’s scientists expected based on the little that was known about tropical cyclones. In the age of certainty, at the gateway to the twentieth century, the expected was as good as fact. To turn was every storm’s destiny.
Shortly after noon on Wednesday the Central Office telegraphed a report to New Orleans that the storm “probably will be felt as far north as Norfolk by Thursday night and is likely to extend over the middle Atlantic and South New England states by Friday.” So far, the report said, “the storm has been attended only by heavy rains and winds of moderate force.”
The report contained some excellent news—the storm would “terminate the period of high temperature which has prevailed east of the Mississippi.”
IN HAVANA, WEDNESDAY, Julio Jover sent an 8:00 A.M. dispatch—by mail—to La Lucha: “We are today near the center of the low pressure area of the hurricane.”
Again, that dreadful word.
When William Stockman read Jover’s report, he surely laughed. He cut the report from the newspaper and affixed it to a special form designed by the Weather Bureau to help station chiefs collect praiseful articles from the nation’s newspapers and forward them to Moore. Stockman saw Jover’s report as further justification for the telegraph ban—it was another example of alarmist forecasting by the Cubans, who seemed to care more about drama and passion than science. Stockman did not consider the storm worthy of much further attention.
THE STORM AND its expanding cyclonic system now influenced a territory covering a million square miles of ocean and began to shape the weather in the southern United States. In Tampa, telegraph wires whistled. Winds reached twenty-eight miles per hour. In Key West, the barometer fell to 29.42 inches, the lowest level yet reported. The wind came from the northeast and accelerated to forty miles an hour, a true Beaufort gale.
Wednesday evening, however, the wind in Key West abruptly weakened. Its velocity dropped to six miles an hour, barely a breeze. Later that night, it began accelerating again, this time from the south.
The bureau’s forecasters believed the sudden easing of the wind and the attendant change in direction meant the center of the storm had passed over or near Key West, and saw this as confirmation of their belief that the storm would soon be traveling up the Atlantic coastline. Once again, they tailored fact to suit their expectations. They knew just enough to believe they had nothing to fear.
But the storm did not go north.
The bureau had missed the true meaning of the wind shift at Key West. Here was an area of calm immediately adjacent to a zone of gale-force wind, in a storm that had just crossed the great mass of Cuba without losing any of its size or energy or its ability to produce biblical volumes of rain. No one knew it at the time, but the conditions at Key West provided the clearest evidence yet that the storm’s architecture was changing.
At the storm’s center, centrifugal force had come to play—the same force that flings children off the rims of playground carousels. The winds spiraling toward the storm’s center now traveled at such a high rate of speed, they began to generate centrifugal force that sought to push them back out again. Where the inrushing and outpushing forces balanced, the winds began to form a circle, a gigantic carousel over the ocean.
This storm was about