Readercon

The last Eric Jay Dolin installment in my Year of Erics was A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes. The continent of North America has of course been dealing with hurricanes for a hell of a lot longer than that, but there appears to be little written history about hurricanes before the arrival of the Spanish, so the stories about individual storms start there.

Dolin takes us through the advancement of our understanding of what hurricanes are and how to survive them, starting with Native knowledge of the signs of impending hurricanes, and moving through the alternating periods of advancement and stagnation in meteorology over the past few centuries. We learn about which of the Founding Fathers were into meteorology (mainly Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) and what features of hurricanes they noticed. We learn about an absolutely epic ego fight between two meteorologists with different theories of the shape and direction of hurricane winds, which was very funny to read about as the guy with the losing theory got increasingly unhinged about it (we now know that they were each right about different things, but one guy was still obviously right-er than the other about the shape the winds made). We get to learn about how the development of communications technology helped move meteorology along, as weather observers could share notes from different locations in real-time, and the establishment of the earliest version of the National Weather Service–which began its tenure somewhat ignominiously as the Signal Service within the Department of War, on the faulty reasoning that military people would just always do stuff better and sharper, before it got moved to Agriculture as the civilian Weather Bureau.

From there we trace the further establishment of hurricane forecasting infrastructure, from computer models to Hurricane Hunter planes. It’s all very cool, except for that period when American meteorologists were too stuck-up to listen to the Cuban weather forecasters, even though Cuba was way ahead of the US on that kind of thing, and were punished for their racist hubris in ways that actually mostly just punished a bunch of regular people living in the path of the next big hurricane. But the advancements, when people deigned to make use of them, were pretty interesting.

When we get into the modern era we get a lot more info on each individual hurricane, like their exact paths and strength, how much damage they caused, how many people they killed directly and indirectly, and the disaster response afterwards. We learn about the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, the big hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas in 1900. We also learn about the most expensive hurricane in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina. We also learn about the rather bizarre process by which we stopped naming hurricanes things like “The Great Hurricane of [Year]” and started naming them shit like “Andrew.” The final chapter of the book is the “Rogue’s Gallery,” which is basically just a highlight reel of all the worst hurricanes that have hit the U.S. since we started giving them people names.

If this sounds like a real grab bag of stuff… it actually holds together fairly well, I think! It’s pretty chronological so you really get to see how the forecasting and disaster response capabilities build over time. I recommend reading it when it’s raining out (but not too stormy).