Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane

5. Storm Warnings

CHAPTER 5 Storm Warnings On August 5, 1969, the National Hurricane Center in Miami received a stack of fuzzy weather satellite photographs from the national headquarters of its parent, the Weather Service in Washington , and they landed on the desk of Dr. Robert H. Simpson, the NHC’s new director. A few years later, Simpson would collaborate with Herbert Saf‹r to create what is of‹cially known as the “Saf‹rSimpson Hurricane Potential Damage Scale,” with its now familiar Category 1 through Category 5 hurricane ratings. But in 1969, there were no “categories” for hurricanes and the technology for monitoring the world’s weather from space was still in its infancy. Nobody quite knew what to do with the images. Simpson sifted through the photographs and noticed an inverted “V” cloud pattern off the coast of West Africa—a pattern that drifted westward during the next few days. Although this tropical wave initially showed no sign of circulation, Simpson alerted his staff to keep an eye on it. If there was one sure bene‹t of this new satellite technology, it was that never again would a hurricane be “lost.” That had always been embarrassingly dif‹cult for meteorologists to explain to journalists and public of‹cials, because it sounded as if the weathermen either had been grossly negligent or else had a short attention span. However , it was not uncommon for the ‹rst report of a tropical storm to scare all shipping out of a region, after which no further information would arrive because the storm no longer had any ‹rsthand observers. Indeed, time and again, the consequences of such information gaps had been catastrophic. In the great Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the storm was “found” again only after it was too late 52 to evacuate the Florida Keys, and more than four hundred died there. Even more unnerving was the September 1938 hurricane that struck—of all places—New England, causing widespread devastation and killing about six hundred. In that case, there were no of‹cial warnings at all. That hurricane had been “lost” more than a day earlier , and in the interim it had taken an abrupt turn to the north and accelerated. And then, of course, there had been the devastating Hurricane Audrey in 1957, which, although never actually “lost,” chose to misbehave egregiously during her ‹nal surge toward the coast after the last of‹cial update. The ‹rst experimental weather satellite, Tiros-1, was launched on April 1, 1960, and it delighted its project scientists and engineers by returning 22,952 images before it malfunctioned seventy-two days later. The reliability of the instruments soon improved, and weather satellites launched after 1962 had lifetimes of two to four years. Soon every part of the planet was being photographed at least a couple of times every day. By 1969, eighteen weather satellites had been launched into orbit and ‹ve were still functioning. Camille would become the ‹rst hurricane they photographed continuously from birth through death. Even those early satellites carried equipment that responded to infrared as well as visible light, so cloud tops could be photographed both day and night. The photographs were radioed to ground stations , where they were retransmitted to the Pentagon and the National Weather Service, which eventually passed them on to the NHC. Unfortunately, those images weren’t very good by today’s standards. Their resolution, low to begin with, was further corrupted by the analog scanning used to convert them to radio signals, yielding results that looked like they were copied from a slightly out of focus 1950s-era black-and-white television screen. An even more serious shortcoming was that the photographs lacked accurate reference points to identify the longitude and latitude, leaving this to be done manually at the receiving end. The result could be a large error (sometimes ‹fty miles or more) in pinpointing the center of a hurricane —information that was needed to calculate how far, how fast, and in what direction a storm moved during the time interval between a pair of photographs. The most serious shortcoming, however , was that the photos from space showed only the tops of the 53 Storm Warnings clouds, which were around eight miles above the vulnerable towns and cities. Although satellite imagery would lead to a deeper understanding of the nature of tropical storms as time went on, in 1969 it still didn’t supply the...