HCI in the Media > 1943 Surprise Storm

May 31, 2003, 10:37PM

1943 surprise storm offers lessons

Hurricane caught Houston unaware, killed 19 in 1943

It sounds like the premise of a B-movie: A monster hurricane brews in the Gulf of Mexico while Houston residents soak up the sun, blissfully unaware of impending disaster.

But it really happened. Sixty years ago a surprise hurricane directly struck Houston, killing 19 people.

Such a scenario is implausible in this information age of satellites and media ubiquity. But with the beginning of hurricane season today, that past storm offers a good reminder that tropical weather patterns are nothing if not capricious.

(Allison, after all, was not even a tropical storm by some accounts, spinning up at the last minute and then lingering for days.)

In addition to a lack of modern technology, forecasters in 1943 were hampered by the realities of World War II.

That summer, the U.S. government still believed German U-boats were patrolling the Gulf. As a result, it imposed a blackout on ship-to-shore communications. Without satellite imagery, radar or an airborne hurricane hunter, land-based forecasters had little information about the storm's rapid development.

This allowed the storm to sneak ashore, not reaching peak winds above 100 mph until just before reaching land July 27.

That morning's reports advised of a minor tropical storm. The Houston Weather Bureau advised reporters not to use the word hurricane because it might "disturb" people.

By midday, when the hurricane hit Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula, phone lines were knocked out, further delaying word of the storm inland. Soon, all three of Houston's radio stations were knocked off the air. As the storm blew through, most people were in the dark, literally and figuratively.

"It totally caught everyone with their pants down," said Lew Fincher, vice president of Hurricane Consulting, who researched the 1943 storm with Bill Read, the meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service's Houston/Galveston office.

The same thing probably wouldn't happen today.

Precise satellite imagery allows forecasters to track a storm's direction minute by minute. Hurricane hunters fly into storms to measure wind speeds. And the National Hurricane Center releases public storm updates every three hours.

Yet all the new technology doesn't guarantee ample warning time. In 1983, Hurricane Alicia developed quickly and caught forecasters by surprise, Fincher said.

"It's an emergency manager's nightmare," he said. "You think it's going to be nothing, and all of a sudden it spins up into a major storm."

Moreover, with rapid growth along the upper Texas coast and south of Houston, longer evacuation times are needed. During the 1980 evacuation for Hurricane Allen, which would veer away from Houston, drive times from Galveston to Conroe along Interstate 45 were 18 hours, Fincher said. A similar exodus would almost certainly take longer now with more cars on the same highways.

The lesson to heed, he believes, is that when a storm is barreling toward the coast, people need to make quicker decisions about whether to evacuate.

Although the 2003 hurricane season begins today and ends Nov. 30, the Atlantic basin already has seen one storm, Ana, which popped up in the ocean and lingered for several days in April.

One prominent forecaster, William Gray of Colorado State University, earlier predicted an above-average year for hurricane activity based upon such factors as sea surface temperatures. Gray predicted 12 named storms, two more than occur during an average year. But just on Friday, Gray revised his estimate to 14, citing a threat of major hurricanes.

The historical average of tropical storms and hurricanes in a given year is 9.6.

Houston's Weather Research Center forecasts eight named storms. But that prediction comes with a catch, said center president Jill Hasling.

The research center uses a model based on the premise that orbital effects in the solar system influence circulation patterns on both the sun and Earth. The orbital effects are reflected on the sun by sunspot activity, which mirror a similar effect on Earth. Each year of the 10- to 13-year-long sunspot cycle represents a phase in the research center's model for earthbound storms.

The year 2003 happens to fall into the same phase as 1961 and 1983, when hurricanes Carla and Alicia, respectively, swept ashore.

"That's probably the most frightening thing about this year," Hasling said.

It may also be worth noting, without any desire to "disturb" the reader, that the upper Texas coast has gone without a hurricane since Jerry in 1989. That's the longest stretch for this coast without a hurricane making landfall since 1871.