into his teens as an active, good-looking boy with many diverse
interests. Quick to learn, he finished high school at fourteen. His
family moved to New Mexico, where he worked several years as a surveyor,
then took two degrees at the University of New Mexico. After that, he
had many activities--teacher, librarian, writer and director of plays.
He made a movie, composed music, wrote poetry, was in the Air Corps
reserve one year, taught meteorology and aeronautics at Boeing Aircraft
in Seattle for a year and a half. He learned to fly in Idaho and then
was a teacher in Junior College in Yakima, Washington.
It was 1950 when Gordon became excited about the work that was being
done in rainmaking in many parts of the country. By April of the next
year, he had moved to Plainview, Texas, and had begun to organize
airplane operations to prevent hail on the high plains of the State.
Having developed his own secret formula for the chemicals to be dropped
into thunderstorm clouds, he experimented in his car, in airplanes and
in the home freezer. Once he came home for dinner, carrying some denim
to be used in connection with an experiment, and his wife discovered
that he had taken all the food out of the freezer so he could drop
chemicals in it, to see what might happen in the atmosphere. When he
asked what they were having for dinner, she replied, "I guess it will be
frozen denim."
The year 1951 was not an easy one for Clouser. The thought of preventing
hail was new to most people and he had some difficulty in getting enough
money to finance the necessary plane operations. He asked farmers for
twenty to forty cents an acre for protection from hail and compared this
cost with the much higher rates for hail insurance. But, he argued, the
prevention of hail would lower the insurance rates, which are based on
the frequency of such storms in any area and the amount of damage done.
To prevent hail, Gordon and his pilots flew into and over thunderstorms,
to see if they contained hail in dangerous sizes and, if so, they
dropped his secret chemicals into the tops of the clouds. This is called
"seeding" by the rainmakers. Gordon was sure that he was preventing hail
damage from the clouds they seeded. By 1952 he had nine planes at his
command. In that year, from June 1 to October 1, they checked 421
thunderstorms and found ice in dangerous sizes in eighty-two of them,
which were seeded. He reported to the farmers that there was no
appreciable hail damage from any of them and there were no complaints on
that score.
During this time he was watching the reports of tornadoes and getting
the Weather Bureau's forecasts and warnings. On May 26, he heard a
prediction of tornadoes in an area which included the two counties where
he was working to prevent hail. Without regard for the danger of flying
among thunderheads in tornado weather, his planes were in the air for a
total of nearly ten hours that day, seeding clouds that looked
dangerous. That night, a half hour after the last of Gordon's planes
landed, the Weather Bureau issued an "all clear." There had been no
tornadoes in either county. Gordon said, "We can't prove that we
prevented a tornado--maybe none would have formed anyway--but we do know
that conditions were right for one, and we changed those conditions."
For a man of Clouser's adventurous spirit, this was just a side issue.
He occupied much of his spare time studying hurricanes and making plans
for the day when he would be operating a large company to kill these
storms before they reached the Coasts of the United States. He hoped to
have his main office in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with planes stationed
also at Pensacola, Florida, on the coast of Mexico, in Cuba, and at two
or three other strategic places. He would get the government reports,
talk to the weather men, and at the right time drop a mixture containing
his secret formula into the eye of the storm or some other vital spot
that he would find by flying above the storm clouds and studying the
wind circulation.
His wife, Olive, took this philosophically. With their three children,
she was living at Norman, near Oklahoma City. Like the wives of most
adventurous pilots, she knew that any one of these trips might be her
husband's last. She encouraged him in his hail prevention but worried
about tornadoes, and especially hurricanes. She knew that they form and
move over vast sea surfaces on which the winds impress violent motions,
a deadly place for a man to land when in trouble. After Gordon flew into
the tornado clouds in May, he came to Oklahoma City by bus and called
her on the phone to come and get him in the car. Instead of going home,
he asked her to drive him to the Weather Bureau Office at the airport,
where he checked on the reports to see if they knew what had happened to
the tornadoes. Then she found out what he had been doing and heard him
talking about hurricanes.
Olive had something special on her mind. She wanted to paint the
kitchen-yellow, but he was against it. She tried to get a compromise. If
he was going to fly into tornadoes and other storms against her advice,
why not paint the kitchen yellow, even if he didn't like it very much?
He offered strong objections and she put it off for a while.
In the meantime, Gordon was in trouble. September of that
year--1952--was very dry in Texas. The farmers in Floyd and Hale
Counties in that state got the idea that his agitations against hail had
prevented rain. Anyway, he was out of work, for, as he said, "There is
no point in a hail-busting business when there are no clouds." A
delegation of farmers called on him to protest his activities. They said
that he and his men had deprived them of rain and they were going to
lose a lot of money.
Gordon convinced them that his work on the clouds earlier in the year
had nothing to do with the drought. He pointed out that only 82 out of
421 storms had been seeded; therefore, 339 of them had acted exactly as
nature had intended. Besides that, he showed them news reports that
nearly all of Texas was dry, some parts being much drier than the
counties he was working. They went home satisfied, but Gordon had time
on his hands, with no thunderheads or clouds to work on. So he gathered
data on hurricanes and spent a good deal of time at home, making
experiments in the freezer. He wanted to work on big storms. The little
ones in Floyd and Hale Counties gave him trouble. All rainmakers know
that it is possible to seed a cloud and have rain on the farm or ranch
of a man who refuses to pay for seeding, and have no rain on a farm next
to it, owned by a man who has paid for the service.
October came and it proved to be the driest month for the country as a
whole since weather records began. All the rainmakers were in trouble
and the "hail-busters" were out of work. Gordon sat at home, listening
to the radio and working on his formula. He and Olive talked about many
things but neither mentioned hurricanes or yellow kitchens. Then on
Tuesday, October 21, Gordon left for Plainview. The next day he heard a
news report from Lubbock that there was a hurricane in Cuba, moving
toward the United States. On Wednesday he left for Florida in a Luscombe
plane, saying nothing to anybody except Bill and Pauline Seirp. Bill was
not a pilot but Gordon had been teaching him to fly.
Knowing nothing about the trip to Miami, Olive was having the kitchen
painted yellow and wondering what Gordon would say when he came home
from Plainview. That was on Thursday. On Sunday, the twenty-sixth, she
and the children had a late breakfast but managed to get to Sunday
School and remained for church service. During the hymn at the beginning
of the service, there was a long-distance call for Olive from Plainview.
Gordon was lost at sea. Later in the day, she heard the story in full.
Gordon was not satisfied with the plane. When he reached Florida he
tried to get one better suited for storm work. He had plans for building
a special plane for the purpose but now he was anxious to get into the
hurricane. It might be the last one of the season, he thought. It had
done a great deal of damage in Cuba. He went to the Weather Bureau
Office in Miami and got the latest information on the position, strength
and movement of the storm. At 3:45 P.M. (October 25) the center of the
hurricane was about seventy-five or eighty miles east of Miami when
Gordon took off in his Luscombe plane. At 8:56 P.M., a radio station in
Miami picked up a message from him, saying that he was fifty or sixty
miles east-southeast of Miami, still in the edge of the storm. The radio
station talked with him for twenty-six minutes as he flew toward Miami,
making poor headway against the winds. The last message was, "Out of
fuel--descending--give my love to my wife and family."
The Civil Air Patrol and the ships and planes of the Coast Guard
searched the area for forty-eight hours without finding any trace of the
missing man. Olive went to Miami and did her best to keep the planes
looking for him. Whether or not he had any effect on the storm will
never be known for sure. The weather forecasters in Miami did not think
so. But the hurricane soon afterward took an erratic course. It was
destructive early on the twenty-sixth as it turned into the Bahamas,
then lost force, and turned northward. The official report of the
Weather Bureau said that "it moved northeastward thereafter as a
disturbance of no great violence."
The uncertainties and the tragedy in this case brought to mind the
Savannah storm of 1947, which Gordon may have studied. It began far to
the southward, near the Isthmus of Panama, early on the ninth of
October. On the eleventh, it crossed the extreme western end of Cuba,
and on the twelfth passed over southern Florida. From this time on, its
course was very unusual. Reconnaissance planes followed it going
northeastward over the Atlantic until the night of the thirteenth, when
it was east of Wilmington, North Carolina. Early on the fourteenth, a
plane got into the storm area and found it moving southwestward. With
considerable force it struck Savannah, Georgia, early on the fifteenth,
causing about two million dollars' worth of damage. Citizens of Savannah
and some of the city officials complained to the government for causing
the hurricane to strike the city.
At about the time, or just before the hurricane changed its course
abruptly to the southwest, military planes had carried out an experiment
in dropping dry ice into its upper levels. There was a great deal of
discussion in the press. At first it was said that the dry ice had
caused the storm to take a new course, but after the Savannah complaints
were heard, little more was said by the military about the experiment
and it remains something of a mystery. Few scientists believe that dry
ice could have such an effect on so large a storm. Actually, there were
few observations in the storm area during the night of the thirteenth to
fourteenth and precise information about the time and nature of the
change of course was not available for an investigation. It belongs in
the same class as the Clouser storm.
_16._ CAROL, EDNA, HAZEL OR SAXBY!
"_But I know ladies by the score
Whose hair, like seaweed, scents the storm;
Long, long before it starts to pour
Their locks assume a baneful form._"
--Hebert
At the end of August, 1954, when the hurricane named "Carol" devastated
Long Island and the southern coast of New England, it did a tremendous
amount of property damage, principally on the shores of Rhode Island and
southeastern Massachusetts. There was sharp criticism of the weathermen
and the hurricane hunters. People claimed that the warning came only a
few hours ahead of the big winds and the high storm tides. The
weathermen answered that there really was no delay on their part in
giving out the warning. They said that the hurricane hunters had been
tracking Carol for several days and everybody had been warned that it
was on the way. The hurricane simply started to move with great rapidity
during that final night and there was no way of getting the warning to
large numbers of people that early in the morning. It was after daylight
when they got out of bed and turned on radio and television.
Of all the criticism, the sharpest and most prolonged was about the name
of the hurricane. A newspaper in Massachusetts--the New Bedford
_Times_--ran an editorial saying that it was not appropriate to give a
nice name like Carol to a death-dealing and destructive monster of this
kind. Other newspapers and many citizens here and there around the
country joined in, partly in complaint and partly out of curiosity and
the wish to get into the argument. A New Orleans woman wrote to the
editor of the New Bedford _Times_ that she would rather a storm would
hit her house nameless than to run a chance of having it named after one
of her husband's old girl friends. Other women were incensed because
storms had been called by their given names. The weathermen had a good
explanation, but not many people seemed to sympathize with them. Persons
who suffered losses of property were the most critical, saying that the
name Carol gave the impression that the storm was not dangerous and that
its winds and tides would not be much out of the ordinary.
The hurricane hunters were amazed by this reaction. Use of names for
storms was not new. For a great many years the worst of the world's
storms have been given names, some before they struck with full force,
but mostly afterward. Many were named after cities, towns or islands
that were devastated. Others had gotten their names from some unusual
weather that came with them or from ships that were sunk or damaged. One
of them, as already has been related, was named "Kappler's Hurricane"
after a weather officer named Kappler who discovered it.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, a New Englander,
Sidney Perley, collected all the available records of storms and other
disasters, together with strange phenomena in New England, starting with
a big hurricane in 1635, when there were only a few settlers, and
continuing down to 1890. His book, _Historic Storms of New England_, was
published in Salem, in 1891. He listed floods, earthquakes, dark and
yellow days, big meteors, eclipses, avalanches, droughts, great gales,
tornadoes, hurricanes, and storms of hail and heavy snow. Prominent
among them were the "Long Storm" of 1798, the "September Gale" of 1815,
and the "Lighthouse Storm" of 1851.
The "Long Storm," as the name suggests, was of long duration. It began
on the seventeenth of November and continued with terrific gales and
heavy snow until late on the twenty-first. This violent weather was
unprecedented so early in the winter. From Perley's account it seems
that the center of the storm crossed Cape Cod. A great many vessels were
lost and there was much suffering among the people.
The "September Gale" of 1815 became famous because of a poem written in
later years by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was six years old at the time
of the big gale. Holmes remembered and lamented the loss of his favorite
pair of breeches, in part as follows:
"It chanced to be our washing day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the sheets and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,--
I lost my Sunday breeches."
Holmes entitled the poem _The September Gale_ and so this became the
name of the storm. Actually, it was a hurricane quite like those that
struck New England in 1938, 1944 and 1954. Years afterward, a New Haven
man named Noyes Darling became interested in the storm of 1815 and
traced its course by a collection of newspaper accounts from many places
and by the logs of ships which had been in the western Atlantic when the
hurricane passed. In 1842, he plotted all this information on a map and
was able to figure its course. This was rather remarkable, for a study
since that time shows that the tracks of hurricanes which do great
damage in New England must adhere closely to one path--far enough
eastward to clear the land areas as they go northward and far enough
westward so that they do not go out into the ocean before they reach the
latitude of Nantucket. Those which strike shore to the southward may
reach New England but passage over land causes them to lose much of
their fury on the way. Darling's plotted path was correct according to
experiences since that time.
The "Lighthouse Storm" of 1851 commenced in the District of Columbia on
Sunday, April 13, reached New York on Monday morning, and during the day
struck New England. It came at the time of the full moon and so the
storm-driven waters joined with the high tides, and the sea, rising over
the wharves at Dorchester, Massachusetts, came into the streets to a
greater height than had ever been known before. All around the coasts of
Massachusetts and New Hampshire there was much property damage. The
event which gave the storm its name was the destruction of the
lighthouse on Minot's ledge, at Cohasset, Massachusetts. It was wrecked
and swept away. At four o'clock the morning after the storm some of the
wreckage was found strewn along the beach. Two young men, assistant
light keepers, were killed. Since this was a very dangerous rock and
many vessels had been lost there, a new lighthouse was erected at the
same point soon afterward.
One of the most noted storms of the nineteenth century was "Saxby's
Gale," which caused a great amount of destruction in New Brunswick on
October 4, 1869. The amazing fact was that this storm was predicted
nearly a year before by a Lieutenant Saxby of the British Navy. In
November, 1868, he wrote to the newspapers in London, predicting that
the earth would be visited by a storm of unusual violence attended by an
extraordinary rise of tide at seven o'clock on the morning of October 5,
1869.
Saxby wrote the following explanation of his forecast to the newspaper:
"I now beg to state with regard to 1869 at 7 A.M. October 5th, the Moon
will be at the part of her orbit which is nearest the Earth. Her
attraction will be therefore at its maximum force. At noon of the same
day the Moon will be on the Earth's equator, a circumstance which never
occurs without marked atmospheric disturbance, and at 2 P.M. of the same
day lines drawn from the Earth's centre would cut the Sun and Moon in
the same arc of right ascension (the Moon's attraction and the Sun's
attraction will therefore be acting in the same direction); in other
words, the new moon will be on the Earth's equator when in perigee, and
nothing more threatening can, I say, occur without miracle. The earth it
is true will not be in perihelion by some sixteen or seventeen seconds
of semidiameter.
"With your permission I will during September next (1869) for the safety
of mariners briefly remind your readers of this warning. In the meantime
there will be time for the repair of unsafe sea walls and for the
circulation of this notice throughout the world."
It seems that Saxby had made other similar forecasts. Commenting on one
of his predictions, a London newspaper, the _Standard_, said:
"Saxby claims to have been successful in some of his predictions, and he
may prove either lucky or clever on the present occasion. As the
astronomical effect will operate over the entire globe, it is
exceedingly likely there will be a gale of wind and a flood somewhere."
The extraordinary fact is that a citizen of Halifax, Nova Scotia,
disturbed by Saxby's prediction for October 5, 1869, wrote to the local
newspaper the week before:
"I believe that a heavy gale will be encountered here on Tuesday next
5th October beginning perhaps on Monday night or possibly deferred as
late as Tuesday night, but between these two periods it seems
inevitable. At its greatest force the direction of the wind should be
southwest, having commenced at or near south.
"Should Monday the 4th be a warm day for the season an additional
guarantee of the coming storm will be given. Roughly speaking the warmer
it may be on the 4th, the more violent will be the succeeding storm.
Apart from the theory of the Moon's attraction, as applied to
Meteorology--which is disbelieved by many, the experience of any careful
observer teaches him to look for a storm at next new moon, and the state
of the atmosphere, and consequent weather lately appears to be leading
directly not only to this blow next week, but to a succession of gales
during next month."
Actually the fourth began as a warm day in New Brunswick and later in
the day the storm became violent, as predicted by the Halifax citizen,
named Frederick Allison.
There were high tide and heavy rain at Halifax but the weather in
general was a disappointment, for the citizens, after seeing the warning
in the newspaper, had made many preparations about the wharves, moving
goods to higher floors in warehouses, and anchoring boats out in the
stream or securing them with lines in all directions.
Near by in New Brunswick, however, the storm on October 4 was severe.
The gale rose to hurricane strength between 8:00 and 9:00 P.M. The tide
at St. John was above any preceding mark. Vessels broke away from their
moorings and some were badly damaged. Buildings were flooded and in St.
John and other cities and towns in the area, buildings were demolished
or unroofed, tracts of forest trees were uprooted, and cattle were
drowned in great numbers.
All of this was rather remarkable as the storm reached its height at
about 9:00 P.M. on October 4th, which was actually after midnight by
London time and therefore on October 5th. Regardless of these
circumstances, this is an instance of a storm that had a name--"Saxby's
Gale"--long before it occurred and for years afterward. Some weathermen
thought that it was of tropical origin and had been a hurricane in lower
latitudes, but if so, it came overland in its final days, for it was
felt at Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and in parts of New England
on the third and early on the fourth, with heavy rains and gales in many
localities.
A few hurricanes have been named for the peculiar paths they followed.
One that was very unusual was the "Loop Hurricane" of October, 1910. It
was an intense storm that passed over western Cuba, after which its
center described a small loop over the waters between Cuba and Southern
Florida. When it finally crossed the coast of western Florida, it caused
tides so high that many people had to climb trees to keep from drowning.
The "Yankee Hurricane" was so named by the Mayor of Miami. It was first
observed to the east of Bermuda in late October, 1935, moving westward.
On approaching the coast of the Carolinas, it took an extraordinary
course, almost opposite to the normal track at that season, and went
southwestward to southern Florida, with its calm center over Miami on
the fourth of November. In the same year, another unusual storm known as
the "Hairpin Hurricane" started in the western Caribbean, moved
northeastward to Cuba, and then turned sharply southwestward to
Honduras, describing a track shaped like a hairpin. It caused one of the
worst disasters of that region. Loss of life exceeded two thousand.
Examples of storms named after ships are "Racer's Storm" in 1837, named
after a British sloop of war which was caught in its hurricane winds in
the Yucatan Channel. Another one of great violence was called "Antje's
Hurricane," because it dismasted a schooner of that name in the Atlantic
in 1842.
In Puerto Rico, a hurricane may be given the name of the saint whose
feast is celebrated on the day on which it strikes the island. The most
famous are: Santa Ana, July 26, 1825; Los Angeles, August 2, 1837; Santa
Elena, August 18, 1851; San Narcisco, October 29, 1867; San Felipe,
September 13, 1876; San Ciriaco, August 8, 1899; and the second San
Felipe, September 13, 1928.
Doubtless the worst hurricane during the twentieth century was the one
in 1928, "San Felipe." It caused damage estimated at fifty million
dollars in Puerto Rico, and later struck Florida, causing losses
estimated at twenty-five million dollars. Puerto Rico lost three hundred
lives, Florida nearly two thousand.
One of the well-known storms of the West Indies was the "Padre Ruiz
Hurricane," which was named after a priest whose funeral services were
being held in the church at Santa Barbara, Santo Domingo, on September
23, 1837, when the hurricane struck the island, causing an appalling
loss of life and property destruction.