A Lifetime of Hurricanes
Hurricanes I have known and some I haven’t.
In years past, knowledge of and the wherewithal to survive a hurricane were passed down from generation to generation. Each generation had its memorable hurricane, the one that ‘broke the records.’ For my father, age 24 at the time, it was the “Hurricane of 1938,” the “Long Island Express,” which menacingly lingered off the south shore of Long Island long enough to garner category 5 status, then roared up the Connecticut River Valley, severing four New England states before breaking up somewhere south of Quebec City, Canada.
Hartford, Connecticut up river some sixty miles from Long Island Sound clocked 138 mph wind gusts. Amherst College in Massachusetts, two hundred miles from Long Island Sound lost its elms and ivy. Fortunately, the two century old bricks of College Hall held. Brattleboro, Vermont’s bridge over the Connecticut River — three hundred miles from Long Island Sound and sixty-five feet above water — nearly collapsed under the water weight which came within inches of the trestle work. A season’s tobacco harvest — Connecticut River Valley tobacco is cigar wrapper to the world — was wiped out.
I have shortened sail and sloshed through a category 1 hurricane. I have stood on shore during hurricanes, staring through binocs until my eyes ached, standing vigil, worried if our bow and stern lines held — you need several, two to anchor your bow, and a sea anchor astern to prevent your vessel from swinging into another boat. Boat fenders protect the hull from getting smashed into. I have ridden out a hurricane on an anchored 35 footer, trying to keep up with the water bailing.
At category 5 and landfall in pristine white clapboard faced New England, the Hurricane of 1938 arrived nameless. No Dora nor Dorian here. The ‘hurricane of 1938’ was so singular it commandeered a collective memory. School children don’t recall who was President in 1938 (it was FDR) but they remember the hurricane. New England in the two centuries of keeping weather records — we are going back to quill pens — had not recorded as destructive and costly a weather event as this tropical depression.
In generations since 1938, hurricanes have become so ubiquitous that conspiracy theories are invented solely for the perverse explaining of their origin, not to deny nor mitigate their existence. (1)
Hurricanes are there to see, and for the less fortunate, to flee.
Who reports on hurricanes? Not local meteorologist pundits nor a President armed with a Sharpie, but Federal agencies, who have an open line to State and local law enforcement, tasked with managing the evacuation. And to prevent the looting. And to ferry survivors with medical risk to operating ERs.
If one has the capability to monitor police chatter, one is ahead of the game. In Key West, Florida, with a one highway egress, tourists — those ‘who don’t have to be here’ — are asked to leave 48 hours before onset. Staying at a motel with an out-of-state license? Expect a knock on the door and a State Police or local officer greeting you with a dour expression. Time to leave.
Despite Trump’s convincing Sharpie moment, endemic of his total disregard of science, hurricanes are seemingly random events. Fools try to predict their path. In the end like much of nature’s dark side, the path of a hurricane is like a howling dog: heard everywhere and hard to pinpoint from where.
I have been to islands — Block in Rhode Island and Key West in Florida — that have so far eluded a direct “hurricane hit.” Around the bend — landside in Everglades City, Florida, and Point Judith, Rhode Island — however, I have witnessed the remains of a flattened burg, results of a hurricane arrival.
Making landfall for the human survivor is not where but how. There is a ‘wind side’ and a ‘wet side’ of a hurricane. What’s missed by trees and power lines down is made up for with flooding and power lines shorted. When we tried to slosh our way through one hurricane off Mattituck, New York, we were on the wind side: the wettest we got was of our own making.
The terror of ’38 came from below — the surge — and from above — the 130 mph plus wind gusts. Genteel, refreshing rainfall is not in the cards. In a cyclone, rain surpasses gravity, hitting one not on the head, but in the face.
A depression un-barrels gravity: the wider swath of destruction parallels the “storm surge.” Tidal flows matter. Hurricanes like to sally forth at fall equinox time when the moon’s drag accelerates the water flow and expands the volume’s shoreline. During one hurricane I tried playing the tide game — calculating when the flooding would come and recede — and I lost convincingly by about 3 hours. The cyclone stretched out the tidal effect.
During a hurricane, human intervention falters. Pumps driven by electric power fail to protect and are easily overwhelmed. Backup generators running on gas “flood out.”. Fleeing automobiles queue up at gas stations only to find out that gas pumps are driven by electricity. So are ATMs. A full tank and $1000 in cash is de rigeur for taking off. A pet crate or two are handy too.
Hurricanes have changed over the past sixty-odd years. (2) So mammoth have they become that the moniker “hurricane” needs retiring. Like running out of alphabet letters, the U.S. Weather Service has run out of signifiers for ‘hurricane.’ So many occur annually compared to just five years ago, and so many marked by intensity and duration that the term, ‘hurricane,’ has become meaningless. Compared to a generation ago, the label demands reinvention.
In a recent New Yorker commentary (3) environment chronicler Bill McKibben writes about the effects of warming global seas, inspired by the occurrence of Idalia, the season’s second major U.S. land-side category 4:
Of all the astonishing facts about our blithe remaking of the world’s climate system, the most astonishing might be this: if oceans didn’t cover seventy per cent of our planet, we would have increased the average temperature to about a hundred and twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit. That’s because those oceans have absorbed something like ninety-three per cent of the extra heat trapped by the greenhouse effect and our burning of fossil fuels. In the past hundred and fifty years, we’ve made the ocean soak up, on average, the heat equivalent of a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb every second and a half; in recent years, that’s increased to five or six Hiroshimas a second.
The earth’s oceans are like a gigantic heat sink; so are her landed, hot air spewing inhabitants. Deny climate change and one denies the possibility of cohabiting with the new climate, which by extension means the possibility of cohabiting at all. We have failed our climate “date night,” relegated to a future of speed dating with yet to be identified cyclone terrorists.
Consider that one need not be convinced of increased fossil fuel consumption as correlating to the increased number of hurricane visitors. Simply hold both graphs side by side and one gets the general idea. They move together apace. But chart the differential and a different pattern emerges. Whereas fossil fuel consumption is creeping upwards, hurricane occurrence and intensity is exploding. Have we passed a “tipping point,” where incidence and existence are at odds? Exponential increases of activity of any kind are difficult to apprehend, let alone identify. So too, “history”: reducing current fossil fuel consumption doesn’t stop the trajectory, it slows it.
When hurricanes happen, human consumption of fossil fuels ironically drops off, leaving a taste of the choice humans couldn’t and didn’t make. No power, no gas pump, no ATM cash machine.
Denial not only begs the existential question; denial blinds. Deniers don’t miss existence — as defenders of willful ignorance — deniers miss ‘scale.’ (4) Better to couch ‘missing the forest for the trees’: the trees are falling down around us.
McKibben is asking his reader to comprehend scale and scope of the acceleration. ‘Scope’ — an unjust divider — and ‘scale’ — not when but how fast. We don’t know, because our historical records are just that: a glimpse, not a conviction. Before 1938 there were no recordings of the scale of destruction that the 1938 incident would demonstrate let alone the scope. No recorded category 5 landfall; no multiple state destruction.
Consider that when one looks at my generation and the one before, one surveys those who gave new life to fossil fuel evisceration of the climate. Indeed, future anthropologists may label us as the ‘last of the fossil fuel consumers.’
Perhaps the need for a replacement of the label ‘hurricane,’ reveals more than an ‘inconvenient truth:” a ‘hurricane’ is no longer an ‘event,’ a generation’s “one off.” It is an epoch, and correspondingly, another day.
The “Age of Hurricanes.”
September, 2023
Notes
2- “Hurricanes and Climate Change,” Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, https://www.c2es.org/content/hurricanes-and-climate-change/
3-”Hurricane Idalia’s Power Comes from Abnormally Hot Oceans,” Bill McKibben, https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/hurricane-idalias-explosive-power-comes-from-abnormally-hot-oceans
4-For a consummate analysis on the spread of disinformation about climate change, see Naomi Klein, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate,” 2014
ReplyForward
