Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [78]
Even when you know a hurricane is coming, even when its path has been accurately predicted and its wind speeds known, even then there are times when there is nothing you can do but hunker down and wait. The power of hurricanes is unmediated, unremitting, affected by neither hope nor belief nor artifice nor device.
Of course, humans being what we are, that hasn't stopped us from trying.
CHAPTER SIX
The Most Furious Gale
Ivan's story: On September 7, Hurricane Ivan briefly dropped down to a Category 2 storm, but as it pushed west past Grenada in the Lesser Antilles it intensified suddenly and dramatically. The central low pressure went down as far as g47 millibars and the winds in the eyewall were estimated at 135 miles an hour, making it a Category 4.
For the next two days there was a dissonance between the violent drama of what was actually happening on the ground and the dispassionate analyses of theforecasters' technical memos. In Grenada, twelve people died in the storm; students at a local school spent a night wrapped in mattresses under their beds as the roof and the windows peeled away with terrible shrieking sounds; the seventeenth-century jail, picturesque from the outside but crumbling and overcrowded on the inside, was demolished and the prisoners, including the former deputy prime minister, incarcerated for killings in an abortive ig83 coup, fled into the streets. The weather was so bad some of them took refuge in a public shelter in Grand Anse, just outside the capital of St. George's. Others took up machetes and went on a looting spree, perhaps intent on proving that their original sentences were just. Ninety percent of the island's homes were damaged; the prime minister, who took refuge on a British Navy frigate, had his own home completely fattened. Every major building in the capital suffered structural damage; even concrete structures became piles of rubble; wood and iron buildings often disappeared completely.
The same day Ivan had slammed into Barbados and St. Vincent, cutting power and demolishing buildings; in Tobago, a pregnant woman was killed when a forty-foot palm tree smashed through her window and landed on her bed. The storm brushed by the Netherlands Antilles islands of Bonaire, Curacao, and Aruba, flooded parts of the Venezuelan coast, and then headed off, at a leisurely 17 miles an hour, bearing northwest. It seemed to be heading for western Haiti. Or for Jamaica. Or maybe Cuba.
I was watching the technical discussions on the Web with intense interest. The meteorological context was complicated and difficult to predict. It was not just that it was coming hard on the heels of Hurricane Frances, which killed two people in the Bahamas and as many as fourteen in Florida and Georgia; the remnants of Frances were still causing flooding in the southeastern United States, those remnants separated from Ivan's track by that same stable ridge of a strong subtropical high, oriented southwest—northeast. The behavior of that ridge was crucial to understanding what would happen next. It could keep the storms separated. Or it could force Ivan into a radical turn to the right, steering it through Cuba and the Bahamas but thence harmlessly out to sea. Or, if the ridge lifted, Ivan could merge with Frances, with even more unpredictable consequences.
Still, the forecasters predicted possible passage over Jamaica and Cuba, and possible intensification. Any modification in intensity would come only through internal convective changes, entirely unpredictable, or through the tripping effect of a landmass. But the water ahead of Ivan was only forecast to get warmer—as warm as 300 Celsius south of Cuba and in the Florida Straits—and the storm needed warm water to keep going. After that, everything was the sheerest guesswork. But the track was unnervingly close to that of Charley, earlier in the season. Which meant Florida.
Again.
Early on September g, a fine summer day with an early-morning