With restless fury drives the spirits on.
—Dante
During the first half of the present century there was a tremendous growth in population, industry, truck-farming, citrus-growing, boating, and aviation on the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts of the United States. This brought new worries to the hurricane hunters and forecasters.
By the beginning of the century, most of the older cities and port towns in this region had been hit repeatedly by tropical blasts. Insecure buildings had been eliminated. From bitter experience, the natives knew what to do when a storm threatened. They had built houses and other structures to withstand hurricane winds, placing nearly all of them above the highest storm tides within their memories. Down in the hurricane belt of Texas and Louisiana, a sixty-penny nail was known as a “Burrwood finishing nail.” The town of Burrwood, at the water’s edge on the southern tip of Louisiana, had no frame buildings that had survived its ravaging winds and overwhelming tides except those which were put together with spikes driven through heavy timbers.
Learning to deal with hurricanes takes a lot of time. Most places on these coasts have a really bad tropical storm about once in ten or twenty years. And so it happened that while the population was increasing rapidly in the years from 1920 to 1940, many thousands of flimsy buildings were constructed in the intervals between hurricanes. Too many were built near the sea, where they would be wrecked by the first big storm wave. To build near the water is tempting in a hot climate. And so it happened that after 1920, widespread destruction of property and great loss of life attended the first violent blow in many of these rapidly growing communities.
Newcomers—and there were many—didn’t know what to do to protect life and property. After the first calamity, they were alarmed by the winds which came with every local thundershower and they were likely to flee inland in great numbers whenever there was a rumor of a hurricane. Here they became refugees, to be fed and sheltered by the Red Cross and local welfare organizations. By the middle thirties, this had become a heavy burden on all concerned. To get things under control, local chapters of the Red Cross were formed and other civic leaders joined in seeing that precautions were taken when required, and panics were averted at times when no storm was known to exist. But when warnings were issued by the Weather Bureau, coastal towns were almost deserted. The greatest organized mass exodus from shore areas in advance of a tropical storm occurred in Texas, in 1942. On August 30, a big hurricane with a tremendous storm wave struck the coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston. It had been tracked across the Caribbean and Gulf, and ample warnings had been issued. More than fifty thousand persons were systematically evacuated from the threatened region and though every house was damaged in many towns, only eight lives were lost.
All of this brought heavy pressure on the hurricane hunters and forecasters to be more accurate in the warnings, to “pinpoint” the area to be seriously affected, and to defer the hoist of the black-centered red hurricane flags until those responsible were reasonably sure of the path the storm would take across the coast line. Thus, the warnings actually became more precise, but in some instances the time available for protective action was correspondingly reduced.
Precautionary measures must be carefully planned. The force of the wind on a surface placed squarely across the flow of air increases roughly with the square of the wind speed. For this reason, it is a good approximation to say that an eighty-mile wind is four times as destructive as a forty-mile wind. A 120-mile wind is nine times as destructive. In order to lessen property damage, residents of Florida and other states in the hurricane belt prepared wooden frames which could be quickly nailed over windows and other glassed openings. These devices proved to be very effective. In some cases it was a dramatic fact that, if two houses were located side by side, the one with protective covers on windows and other openings escaped serious damage while the other house soon lost a window pane and then the roof went off as powerful gusts built up strong pressures within the building. At the same time that this protection was applied on the windward side, openings on the leeward side (away from the wind) helped to reduce any pressures that built up in the interior.
As these experiences became common after 1930, wood and metal awnings were manufactured so that they could be lowered quickly into position to protect windows of residences. Business houses stocked wooden frames that could be fastened in place quickly to prevent wholesale damage to plate glass windows.
Many other measures were taken hastily when the emergency warnings were sent out. One, for example, was a check by home owners to make sure that they had tools and timbers ready to brace doors and windows from the inside if they began to give way under the terrific force of hurricane gusts. They had learned that with a wind averaging eighty miles an hour, say, the gusts are likely to go as high as 120 miles an hour and it is in these brief violent blasts, so characteristic of the hurricane, that the major part of the wind damage occurs.