“Make it clear that I would veto the bill again and that instead of a hurricane patrol the safest and cheapest thing would be a study of hurricanes from all of the given points on land and around the Gulf of Mexico. This might involve sending special study groups to points in Mexico, such as Tampico, Valparaiso, Tehuantepec, Yucatan, Campeche, also to the west end of Cuba and possibly to some of the smaller islands in the region. What the Congressmen and others in Texas want is study and information and it is my thought that this can be done more cheaply and much more safely on land instead of sending a ship into the middle of a hurricane.”
The delegation gathered in an outer office at the White House. It happened that the Coast Guard had a new Commandant, Admiral Waesche, who had not been advised of the views of the White House, the Coast Guard, and the Weather Bureau. In the few minutes before the conference started, there was no opportunity to inform the Admiral, for he was engaged in conversation with a group of Senators and Congressmen. As soon as the conferees were assembled, James Roosevelt called on the Admiral to speak first. To the amazement of all present, he indorsed the idea in full and promised to send cutters out in the Gulf whenever a request was received from the Weather Bureau. Nobody knew what to do next, so James adjourned the conference, and after everybody had shaken hands and departed, he went back to his father to explain what had happened.
Thus began a brief period of hunting hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico with Coast Guard cutters. During the next two seasons, the Weather Bureau forecasters notified the Coast Guard when observations were needed. In each instance a cutter left port in accordance with the agreement, but as soon as the vessel was in the open Gulf the master was in supreme command and he would not deliberately put his ship and crew in jeopardy. Cutters went out in a few cases, but most of the disturbances to be reconnoitered were crossing the southern Gulf, out of range of merchantmen on routes to Gulf ports. In sailing directly toward the center under these conditions, the Coast Guard commander would have been traveling into the most dangerous sector, and the distance he could make good in a day in rough water could not have been much larger than the normal travel of a tropical storm, certainly not a safe margin.
Irate citizens complained to Washington, first, that the Weather Bureau refused to call on the Coast Guard for observations; and, second, that the Coast Guard refused to carry out the Weather Bureau’s instructions. After two or three years, no special information of any particular value was obtained and the scheme was forgotten.
In accordance with the ideas expressed by President Roosevelt, but without any support from Congress, some study groups and other special arrangements secured useful results on coasts and islands, but it was obvious after 1940 that automatic instruments for exploration of the upper atmosphere and reconnaissance by aircraft offered the best prospects for improvement in the service.
The most destructive hurricane during this period devastated large areas of Long Island and New England in September, 1938, taking six hundred lives and destroying property valued at about a third of a billion dollars. This event aroused general criticism of the storm hunters for two reasons. First, this disturbance, while it was in the West Indies and during its course as far as Hatteras, behaved like others of great intensity, but from that point northward its forward motion was without precedent. During the day when it passed into New England, its progressive motion exceeded fifty miles an hour, hence little time remained for the issue of warnings after its increased rapidity of motion was detected. Second, the people were absorbed in news of negotiations in Europe to prevent the outbreak of a world war, and storm news on the radio was largely suppressed to make way for reports of the European crisis.
Here it might be said that the storm hunters lost another battle, but it is probable that the loss of life in this hurricane would have exceeded that at Galveston in 1900 if there had been no real improvement in the warning service in the meantime.
6. THE EYE OF THE HURRICANE
“—the whirlwind’s heart of peace.” —Tennyson
After the White House conference in 1937 about sending ships into hurricanes, some of the Weather Bureau forecasters expressed the idea that the best method of tracking hurricanes would be by airplane. What they had in mind was flying around the edge of the storm and getting three or more bearings from which the location of the center could be accurately estimated. Nothing came of the idea at the time but after World War II broke out in Europe, the talk about use of planes increased. It was the Weather Bureau’s plan to contract with commercial flyers to go out and get the observations on request from the forecasters. But no one seriously considered sending planes into the centers of hurricanes. No one knew what would happen to the plane. There was no very definite information as to what the flyer would encounter in the upper layers in the region around the center.