Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [53]
It happened again, a few decades later. As Lingard wrote: "Here was one of those big trailers, she was on the full length of the 40-foot flat car. She lifted up just the same as you lifted her up with a crane and moved her out about 15 feet clear of the track and brought her down. Never turned over or nothing, just lifted her up the same as you did it with a crane. It was unbelievable. They had tied her down and everything but that didn't matter. A good squall of wind took her and broke all that like nothing."40
The company that built the railways petitioned the government for money to build a new line elsewhere, but was refused. Since the company couldn't afford it, and could not afford to continue losing the occasional train to the nearby ditch, as was happening, it reached an ingenious solution: It hired a man called Lauchie McDougall as a human wind gauge.
Bruce Whiffen, who works for Environment Canada in its Newfoundland office, has written an engaging account of the Lauchie story. The McDougall family had settled in the area in the 1870s. Lauchie was born in 1896 and lived his entire life at what was already called, for fairly obvious reasons, Wreckhouse. He developed an intuitive and almost uncanny knack for figuring out the signs that indicated an approaching storm, especially the deadly south-easterlies. The railway company signed him on, paying him the then-substantial fee of twenty dollars a month, and over the years, Lauchie was credited with delaying hundreds of trains because of treacherous conditions. At least once, a train conductor spurned his advice and twenty-two cars blew over into the ditch. Lauchie died in 1965. You can still see a bronze plaque at the Marine Atlantic Terminal in Port aux Basques that says, in part: "This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Lauchie McDougall (1896-1965). McDougall had extraordinary skills in determining wind velocities . . . through this area. Often called the human wind gauge, McDougall provided this service to the railway for over 30 years."
These appalling Wreckhouse winds were themselves caused by the garden hose effect. When an intense storm approaches Newfoundland from the south, gusty winds converge along the south coast and extend inland several miles from shore. When they encounter the Table Mountains a few miles north of Port aux Basques, the winds channel through the valleys and gulches between the mountains. The wind that then passes over and through the Table Mountains is far stronger than the original wind, sometimes devastatingly so.
The railroad no longer exists, but the Trans-Canada Highway was pushed through the same area, and in stormy weather truckers and car drivers are forced to delay their passage. Sometimes the more stubborn among them refuse; and the local police are resigned to pulling the shaken motorists from the ditch afterward.
The other local wind effect that I know well is even closer, no more than a four-hour drive away, on the western side of Cape Breton, the northerly portion of the province of Nova Scotia. Cape Breton is a lovely place, but its weather can be awful (it is a standing joke around here that a forecast will say "windy today, with gales in Cape Breton"). Les Suites, an Acadian corruption of the French words sud-est, or south-east, are also channeled winds, but here the effect is more complicated. Les Suites are so-called mountain waves, which happen when stable air flows over mountains or hills and combines with other effects such as drainage winds. In Cape Breton, southeasterly winds often blow ahead of an approaching warm front. Above the surface and ahead of the front, the air is very stable and causes a frontal inversion (warm air over cold air), which pinches the approaching air stream between the inversion and the surface. This has the by-now-familiar accelerating effect, creating very strong surface winds along the coastal plains on the lee side of the hills. If there are strong gale-force southeasterlies inland