An Everglades Providence: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the American Environmental Century

21 Hurricanes

Douglas liked intense weather, the whirring and buffeting of a New England snow squall, the reverberation and darkened heaviness of a subtropical thunderstorm. These poetic natural dramas had an aesthetic in their motion, sound, and color that could move the senses in much the same way as a great work of art. Douglas found a spiritual quality in great natural forces that withered the cosmic relevance of human action. They reminded one that nature remained in control. Writing a book about the history of hurricanes, then, as she did in 1958, appealed to her on multiple levels. Living in the heart of hurricane country also lent a certain logic to such a project. She knew people who had experienced the worst of the great storms. She had been in some of them herself, and she knew and wrote about the man, Fred W. Gray, who made his living studying them and trying to help others deal with them. During their shared time in South Florida in the 1920s, the region was hit by two hurricanes pivotal in U.S. history. Chief of the Miami office of the U.S. Weather Bureau, Gray was a reserved man who approached his work like a pensive scholar. His slight constitution was appropriate to the small operation he ran, with a single assistant, at the Federal Building downtown. A bureau career man, he had been in Miami Hurricanes [ c h a p t e r t w e n t y - o n e 294 ] part two since the establishment of the weather station in 1911, sometime before his neatly trimmed beard turned gray. As the city boomed, he watched buildings rise up to tower over his modest station and distort the accuracy of his rooftop anemometers. They were among his few forecasting tools, which included maps, charts, barometers, and telegraphs. He also followed professional hunches, but they could be devastatingly wrong. Correct hunches and accurate science were most important during the July to November hurricane season; September had historically been the most dangerous month for Florida. Years after his tenure there ended, Gray completed a study showing that Miami had a one-in-twenty chance in a given year of being the target of hurricane-force winds; only Key West and Pensacola were at higher risk. Florida’s number came up in 1926. On the morning of September 14, the Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., received a radio transmission from a ship reporting a major storm trolling through the Atlantic two hundred miles north of St. Kitts in the British West Indies. Like most Atlantic storms at that time of year, this one had gathered its winds around the Cape Verde Islands, northwest of Senegal. It then moved westward at a speedy nineteen miles per hour. By the time it crossed the ocean and reached the Turks Islands, it had ratcheted its course to the northwest, with winds reportedly blowing up to 150 miles per hour. On Friday, September 17, it bore down on the Bahamas. Gray was tracking the storm through telegraphs he picked up from the Western Union depot a few blocks’ walk from his office. After receiving the messages, he scrupulously posted weather advisories with the local press. Still, Friday’s Miami Herald ran a front-page story that said Florida was safe from the storm’s path. Indeed, a soft breeze lingered beneath azure skies outside Gray’s office. That morning, Miamians had been treated to a spectacular sunrise projecting a bloodred and orange metallic light, a display of beauty that, unknown to most observers, almost certainly signaled a hurricane’s approach. Later on Friday, the thinking in Washington about danger to the mainland had begun to change. The Weather Bureau directed its stations in Southeast Florida to hoist storm-warning flags and to take precautions 21. hurricanes [ 295 for the arrival of “destructive winds” by Saturday morning. The word hurricane was not mentioned. Gray alerted local officials and the newspapers and then raised above his office and the municipal dock a single square flag with a black square center on a red background, the bureau’s silent tocsin. That afternoon, the Miami Daily News passed along the bureau’s information to its readers, also without using the word hurricane. Hurricanes were precisely the reason for Gray’s presence in Miami. His was one of scores of reporting stations the bureau planted in the Caribbean and...