Also, during these nervous hours, representatives of the Red Cross begin arriving on the scene. At the same time, crews assigned to duties of repairing telephone, telegraph, and power lines are sent to the threatened area by their respective companies. As soon as the storm has passed, these men will be ready to go to work.
At this juncture it is probable that strange things will happen. Against the stream of refugees moving away from the coast, there are always a few adventurers who come from more distant places to see the full fury of a great hurricane roaring inland from the sea. At first they thrill to the crash of tremendous waves breaking on the coast and hurling spray high into the screaming winds. But when the rain comes in torrents, striking with the force of pebbles, and beach structures begin to collapse and give up their components to wind and sea, the curious spectator has had enough. Hurriedly he seeks refuge and begins to wonder fearfully if it will get worse. It does. He soon realizes that what he has seen is only the beginning.
As the full force of the blast strikes a coastal city, the scene goes beyond the power of words to describe. Darkness envelops everything, with thick, low-flying clouds and heavy rain acting like a dense fog to cut down on visibility. The air fills with debris, and with the roar of the winds and the crash of falling buildings. Power lines go down, and until the current can be cut off, electric flashes throw a weird, diffuse light on the growing chaos. In the lulls, the shrieks of fire apparatus and ambulances are heard until the streets become impassable.
Most of these great storms move forward rather slowly—often only ten to twelve miles an hour. A boy on a bicycle could keep ahead of the whirling gales if the road took him in the right direction. Automobiles carrying news reporters and curious people travel the highways far enough in advance to avoid falling debris, listening to the radio broadcasts from the weather office to learn of the progress of the storm. Of all places, the most dangerous are on the immediate coast and on islands near the coast, where the combination of wind and wave is almost irresistible. But even here an occasional citizen chooses to remain, in spite of the warnings, and when he finally decides to leave it may be too late to get out and no one can reach him. There have been many instances of men being carried to sea, clinging to floating objects, and after describing a wide arc under the driving force of the rotary winds, being thrown ashore miles away from home. But in other cases, people are trapped and drowned in the rising waters. In 1919, at Corpus Christi, warnings were issued while many residents were at their noon meal, on a Sunday. Many delayed to finish eating while the only road to higher ground was being rapidly flooded. Of these 175 were drowned.
The native knows all of the preliminary signs well enough, and it is not necessary to urge him to take precautions after the moment when the ominous gusts of the first winds of the storm are felt. He has been in these situations before and has looked out to see palm trees bent far over and the rain beginning to blot out the view as the fingers of the gale seemed to begin searching his walls and roof for a weak spot. Many prefer not to stay and watch. They board up their windows and doors and go back to a safer place in the interior. And so this is the time when the sound of the hammer is heard and streams of refugees are seen on the highways.
In the early thirties, the increasing population in the hurricane states caused an annoying shortage of communications in storm emergencies. For many years the Washington forecasters had sent warnings by telegraph and the men in weather offices along Southern coasts had talked to each other by telephone, to exchange notes and opinions, but there were frequent delays and failures after 1930 because, when a hurricane approached the coast, the lines became congested with telephone calls and telegraph messages between relatives and friends worrying about the dangers, and by residents making arrangements for evacuation, in addition to emergency calls of many other kinds.
In 1935, the Weather Bureau found a very good answer to the communication shortage in emergencies. A teletypewriter line called the “hurricane circuit,” running around the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast of Florida, was leased on July 1, with machines in all weather offices. Another line was installed between Miami and Washington and eventually extended to New York and Boston. No matter how congested the public lines became, the weather offices were able to exchange messages and reports without any delay. At the same time, three hurricane forecast offices were established in the region—at Jacksonville, New Orleans, and San Juan. After that time, the Washington office issued forecasts and warnings of hurricanes only when they came northward to about 35° north latitude and from there to Block Island, where the Boston office took over.
The first violent tropical storm to strike the coast of the United States after the hurricane circuit was set up came across the Florida Keys on Labor Day, 1935. It was spotted in ship reports and by observations from Turks Island on August 31 as a small storm. It moved westward not far from the north coast of Cuba on September 1 and turned to the northwest on September 2, having developed tremendous violence.
This hurricane is worth noting, for its central pressure, 26.35 inches, was the lowest ever recorded in a tropical storm at sea level on land anywhere in the world. The average pressure at sea level is about 29.90 inches. The biggest tropical storms have central pressures below 28.00 inches, but very rarely as low as 27.00 inches.
The strongest winds around the center of the Labor Day hurricane probably exceeded two hundred miles an hour. About seven hundred veterans of World War I were in relief camps at the point where the center struck. A train was sent from Miami to the Keys to evacuate the veterans ahead of the storm, but it was delayed and was wrecked and thrown off the tracks as the veterans were being put aboard. The loss of life among veterans and natives on the Keys in the immediate area was nearly four hundred. There was much criticism in the press. In 1936, a committee in Congress carried on a long investigation of the circumstances which led to the establishment of the relief camps in such a vulnerable position, the failure of the camp authorities to act on warnings from the Weather Bureau, and the delay of the rescue train. There was much talk in the committee of increasing the Weather Bureau’s appropriations, to enable it to give earlier warnings, but nothing came of it.