DESPATCHES A hurricane near you
Letter from New York: Alan McIntyre
Galveston, Texas, 1900
In early September 1900 the local newspaper in Galveston, Texas, ran an article mentioning a storm that had been reported by some local fishermen out in the Gulf of Mexico. When that 145mph hurricane slammed into Galveston two days later, it killed up to 8,000 people, flattened the town and became the deadliest natural disaster in US history.
With no planes to track it and no satellite images to predict its path, by the time the residents of Galveston figured out it was more than just another windy day on the Texas coast, there was no time to evacuate the exposed barrier island. Eye witnesses reported that the carnage was reminiscent of a civil war battlefield as the storm killed over 20% of the population. Rescue parties were issued with ‘generous rations of bourbon and strong cigars’ to counter the air of putrification that hung over the ruins of the town and the smell from the mass cremations of the bodies carried 50 miles out to sea.
Flash forward 115 years and we’ve gone from having little or no information about impending weather to periods this winter when the US media has talked about nothing else. From Punxsutawney, Phil the celebrity groundhog that saw his own shadow on 2 February and hence predicted another six weeks of winter, to the 24/7 Weather Channel, America is now well served with meteorological prognosticators. Granted this has been a particularly brutal winter, with record snowfalls in the north-east and the ‘polar vortex’ bringing historic low temperatures to pretty much everywhere east of the Rockies. But the perfect storm of 2015 has been less about the weather systems themselves and more about the intersection of the voracious 24-hour news cycle with the needs of publicity-hungry and risk-averse politicians.
For the media it’s clear that we’ve now moved definitively into the world of ‘weather as sports’. Atlantic hurricanes have traditionally been the Super Bowls of weather broadcasting. The pre-game build-up starts in the late summer when tropical depressions start forming off the coast of Africa and migrate west across the Atlantic. Most dissipate harmlessly, but some systems get themselves organised and draw energy from the warm waters of the Caribbean to become official tropical storms. At that point, the storms are named in alphabetical order by the US National Weather Service. Storms that continue to strengthen and reach sustained wind speeds of 74mph get upgraded to hurricanes, and that is when the media circus really pitches its tent.
At this point the Weather Channel switches to 24/7 hurricane coverage, and the usually lonely studio anchors find themselves surrounded by a rotating cast of pundits debating the likely path and strength of the storm. Red alerts begin scrolling across the bottom of the screen and bespoke swirly graphics appear in the corner bearing the storm’s name. As the storm traverses the Caribbean, trajectories solidify and the focus shifts to the predicted landfall.
Hurricane coverage typically climaxes when Jim Cantore, the ruggedly handsome rock star meteorologist of the Weather Channel, appears ‘reporting live’ from the end of a pier somewhere in the south-east of the US while being buffeted by 100 mph winds. For those in Scotland unfamiliar with Jim, he is a real meteorologist, but he is also the Pale Rider of American severe weather; a gortex-clad harbinger of doom whose arrival in your town is usually a sign that you should be heading somewhere else – and fast.
One reason for the transition to this ‘weather as sports’ model is that – unlike in Galveston – technology has now made most hurricanes spectator events akin to the demolition derbies beloved in Texas; catastrophic for property but with limited threat to life. Increasingly accurate predictive models, mandatory evacuations, and better building codes have now made the 1,800 deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina in 2006 the rare exception. Even a strong Atlantic hurricane has now become a somewhat leisurely week-long media event with a well-prescribed story arc from the naming of the storm to the aftermath and clean-up. In contrast, tornados are a lot more like Galveston and make for very poor weather television. Unpredictable, short-lived and often deadly, all the media typically gets to do is survey the grisly aftermath of ruined towns and decimated lives, making twisters a bad fit for ‘edutainment’ television.
One thing that has made this winter particularly interesting is the full application of the hurricane media model to a seemingly endless series of winter storms. After a couple of quiet hurricane seasons, the Weather Channel took it upon itself in the winter of 2012-2013 to start naming winter storms, with Athena the first to be christened in November 2012. This little piece of blatantly self-serving meteorological entrepreneurship greatly annoyed the official National Weather Service which refused to use the names, a stance initially supported by media stalwarts like the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. But it didn’t take long for that consensus to unravel when in February 2013 Mayor Bloomberg’s office in New York started to use the hashtag #nemo on Twitter to provide updates on an approaching blizzard.
A sign of how bad this winter has been is that we’ve already made it to Winter Storm Pandora, with Juno and Neptune the fiercest so far. With any luck spring will intervene before we make it to Winter Storm Thor, as I don’t think I can endure the carpet bombing of ‘hammer blows from the heavens’ metaphors that are sure to follow.
This year’s succession of winter storms has also been a minefield for municipal politicians. The Cassandra Award clearly goes to Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York for his role in talking up ‘the blizzard that never was’ in late January. When you stand in a New York City firehouse in a parka, announce what amounts to a city-wide curfew, and start using words like ‘crippling’, ‘historic’ and ‘potentially the largest snow storm ever to hit the city’ you should expect a fair bit of media attention.
As parodied in the satirical newspaper the Onion, de Blasio’s warning to the city was ‘to make peace with whatever higher power you call God, for all shall meet their death in the coming tempest’. However, when the approaching snowmageddon takes a sharp right and misses the city by 70 miles and drops a paltry eight inches rather than the forecast three feet, you should also expect to be wiping egg from your face for a long time to come. If God forbid we make it past Thor and all the way through to Winter Storm Wolf, the mayor should expect to see a lot of ‘the Mayor who cried…’ headlines in the NY papers.
While the mayor’s excessive caution and paternalism has been ridiculed, no one needs to be reminded of the horrible suffering that followed Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the PR disaster it became for the Bush administration; hence there is a natural tendency for politicians to now err on the side of caution. There is also a strong case to be made that being risk averse is now sound fiscal policy, as severe weather has increasingly become a drain on the public rather than the private purse. In 1955 when Hurricane Diane struck the New Jersey coast the public cost was only 6% of the total damages bill. Thirty-five years later for Hurricane Hugo in 1989 the various levels of government picked up 23% of the tab. For Hurricane Ike in 2008 it had jumped to 69%, and for 2012‚ Superstorm Sandy it is likely to be north of 75%.
As the winter storm season begins to wind down and Jim Cantore’s frozen body is exhumed from a block of ice somewhere outside of Boston, attention will turn to the next big game on the ‘weather as sports’ calendar. With a historic drought still parching most of the American West, armchair weather fans still have time to grab a cold beer and some pretzels before settling down to watch the pre-game for ‘Firestorm Phyllis’, an event that will surely be coming to a Weather Channel screen near you sometime in the summer of 2015.
By Alan McIntyre | March 2015