Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [52]
Wind anomalies exist, in short, everywhere. Within a few hundred miles of where I live are three of the most interesting. All three are due in some ways to the accelerating effect of local landscape, or what the forecasters, without apparent irony, call channeling. This is nothing more mysterious than the garden hose effect—if you pinch a hose, the water emerging through the pinch will come out faster than that going in. The same thing happens with winds. A small-scale example are the winds that are killing my rhododendrons. A somewhat more dramatic example is along the Presidential Range of mountains in New England, where Mount Washington for years held the record of the fastest wind ever recorded. The mechanism is simple: The westerlies race across Vermont, slide into the Connecticut River Valley, and then roar up the west slopes of the Presidential Range, compressed by the valleys into less and less space. At the summit of Mount Washington these winds exceed hurricane strength four days out of ten; in 1934 a weatherman recorded a wind speed of 231 miles an hour, faster than even the most terrifying hurricane. For decades this survived as the record speed for wind, until an observatory in Guam recorded a mountain summit wind of 236 miles an hour in a typhoon in 1997.38 A wind-tunnel terrain study of Hawaii and Guam by NASA showed that wind funneled up a diminishing valley can eject peak velocities of about 250 percent of the flow coming in from the ocean.
The Canadian province of Newfoundland, a few hundred miles to my northeast, is one of the windiest places on the planet—it is surely destined, in the post-fossil-fuel era, to become to wind power what Saudi Arabia is to oil. E. Annie Proulx, in her novel The Shipping News, caught the unique flavors of the Newfoundland psyche when she described the wind scouring the bleak landscape:
By midnight the wind was straight out of the west and he heard the moan leap to bellowing, a terrible wind out of the catalog of winds. A wind related to the Blue Norther, the frigid Blaast and the Landlash. A cousin to the Bull's-eye squall that started in a small cloud with a ruddy center, mother-in-law to the Vinds-gnyr of the Norse sagas, the three-day Nor'easters of maritime New England. An uncle wind to the Alaskan Williwaw and Ireland's wild Doinion. Stepsister to the Koshava that assaults the Yugoslavian plains with Russian snow, the Steppenwind, and the violent Buran from the great open steppes of central Asia, the Crivetz, the frigid Viugas and Purgas of Siberia, and from the north of Russia the ferocious Myatel. A blood brother of the prairie Blizzard, the Canadian arctic screamer known simply as Northwind, and the Pittarak smoking down off Greenland's ice fields. This nameless wind scraping the Rock with an edge like steel.39
For most of its five hundred years of settlement, Newfoundland was populated only around the edges, in little villages called out-ports reachable only by boat. It wasn't until the coming of the railway in the late 1800s that people actually traveled over land. That had its drawbacks: Shortly after the Newfoundland Railway was completed, Passenger Train No. I was blown over during a winter storm and its mail car caught on fire.
The story is told by Mont Lingard, who wrote a number of books about the narrow-gauge "Newfie Bullet" trains, including one called Next Stop: Wreckhouse. Lingard, who had traveled the route many times himself, quoted the appalled engineer: "When we went down across Bennett's Siding [on the island's west coast, facing Labrador], we struck it. Just like running into a concrete wall. WHOMP! Mike had one of those big army parkas on. When he come out of the station, the wind picked him up and took him about twenty feet up in the air and slapped him down on the ground. He said, 'I nearly blew away' The caboose and five cars went overboard. The caboose