Vicious Lady

U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologists spotted the glowering, doughnut-shaped lady far out at sea, east of the Bahamas, early last week. They nicknamed her "Bessie's Hurricane." Red and black hurricane flags went up along the Florida coast. Fishing smacks and yachts scudded for home ports. Floridians methodically, almost casually, shuttered their homes, secured everything that could move, filled bathtubs with drinking and cooking water, got out candles and kerosene lamps.

Bessie smashed with a fierce, unladylike scream at the Florida coast from Fort Lauderdale, 24 miles north of Miami, to the yacht-and villa-spangled shores of Palm Beach. Thundering winds (an anemometer at the Jupiter Inlet Light registered 162 before it was blown away) shattered plate glass, ripped roofs off buildings, filled city streets with flying debris. The blast battered coconuts from palm trees and bowled them about beaches and pavements. Power lines snapped with blinding blue flashes. A concrete and metal hangar at West Palm Beach was mashed and 40 airplanes wrecked.

For more than 24 hours, the hurricane winds flailed nearly a fourth of the Florida peninsula, from Fort Lauderdale north to Melbourne and inland to the deep Everglades, the rich mucklands of Lake Okeechobee. The damage was tremendous ($40 million, according to one estimate), but the only fatality was a boy who drowned off Miami trying to save his sailboat.*

The tempest, a spent and blowsy drunkard, reeled northward into Georgia and north along the eastern seaboard. Bessie, one of Florida's most ferocious hurricanes, at week's end had been demoted to a "disturbance" on Weather Bureau charts.

*Years of hurricane experience had taught the U.S. how to protect itself. The U.S. Weather Bureau's Hurricane Warning Service uses networks of sensitive seismographs and patrols of hurricane-hunting planes. Strict city building codes and the American Red Cross "hurricane shelter" program have also reduced the toll. Twenty years ago, U.S. hurricanes cost an average of 161 lives for every $10 million property damage.

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