Gone with the Wind

By Frank Trippett

Hurricane warnings are, no doubt about it, a lifesaving blessing. As alarms are meant to do, they usually nudge people into a state of alert caution. Naturally, they are often a bit scary. But the first early words on infamous Hurricane Gloria last week proved far more than attention getting. They were downright intimidating. Bringing accounts of fiendish 150-m.p.h. winds--and coming three weeks after capricious Elena had given the Gulf Coast states an ugly bashing--the National Hurricane Center warnings made plain that Gloria might whirl and dance up the heavily populated East Coast like some catastrophic dervish.

Urgently reiterated by television and radio, the prestrike soundings electrified several million people from South Carolina to New England into a fever of preparation. Samuel Speck Jr., associate director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was only summarizing the public apprehension when he said, "There's a roving mad dog out there."

By early Friday, when Gloria was lurching toward its landfall in the Carolinas, New York City was braced for what many meteorologists feared might be the worst storm of the century. The Eastern seaboard had evacuated its islands and lowlands, taped its windows, stocked up on batteries, candles and canned soup, brought in the porch furniture, stuck the garbage cans away and more or less ducked out of sight. By Friday morning it seemed that the Atlantic Coast of the U.S. had simply gone out of business. In Manhattan, the bosses of the Wall Street stock exchanges and most banks decided to close house, in Atlantic City the managers of sleepless gambling casinos shut down for the first time in their seven-year existence, in Norfolk the Navy got most of its ships out of the harbors to ride out the trouble, and all over the East the Air Force ordered its planes to the safety of inland air bases.

Happily, all of that furious and frantic preparation, from Edisto, S.C., to Eastport, Me., turned out to be a storm before a comparative lull. After G hour had come and gone, first on the barrier islands off North Carolina and last in upper New England, all of what the newspaper people call aftermath reports had a wonderful quality about them. They all more or less said whew! To be sure, Gloria's pummeling, up-the-coastline meander left a wake of damage and sorrow. Seven deaths could be traced to the storm. At least half a million people were forced to flee exposed homes for inland sanctuaries or public shelters in schools and armories. There were widespread power failures that left more than 2.75 million customers without electricity, some for several days. Long Island, N.Y., smack in the path of Gloria's worst, for the most part suffered little but toppled poles and trees and smashed windows. All along the storm's route there were phone lines down, steeples and trees felled, cars bashed by limbs, roadways flooded, some roofs dislodged, boardwalks buckled, beaches undermined and eroded, small boats sunk, windows smashed. Bad enough, perhaps, but when contrasted with what had been expected, whew! again. New York City Mayor Edward Koch found his typically unique words to express the relief felt by almost everybody: "We scared the hell out of the hurricane, and it went elsewhere."

More accurately, storm winds that had at times been clocked at a horrendous 150 m.p.h. dwindled to a still fierce 130 or so m.p.h. by the time of the first hit on land, subsequently slowed to gusts of 100 m.p.h., then dipped again to the lower levels of hurricane force (74 m.p.h. minimum). Even the lesser winds proved hazardous. Whipping gusts were enough to help send a truck flying off the Tappan Zee Bridge into the Hudson River near Nyack, N.Y. Amazingly, the driver and a passenger were rescued.

The stubborn and/or foolhardy people who refused to be evacuated from vulnerable terrain took conspicuous pleasure in declaring themselves fine and dandy after Gloria had come and gone. One of these, Elizabeth Howard, 75, a native of exposed Ocracoke Island (off the coast of North Carolina) who stayed put, said she had "felt the wind blow harder many times." She insisted she had not been frightened (even when the wind sounded like "people upstairs moving furniture") but said her daughter had been apprehensive enough to call her eleven times from the mainland. At Nags Head, N.C., 116 nursing-home residents refused evacuation but later changed their minds--too late to be taken to other shelter. Still, when the hurricane had passed, Nurse Consultant Juanita Harvey reported the patients "did beautifully."

In most places, Gloria left behind not only grateful relief but handsome weather. In the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, around Norfolk and Newport News, brilliant sunshine, blue skies and cotton-candy clouds were to be seen where the hurricane's whirling gray had recently been.

Finally, of course, the storm left behind one not-so-obvious danger: the possibility that some people might begin to regard the pre-Gloria warnings as a case of wolf crying. Not so. That Gloria did not remain what it at first appeared to be does not by any means suggest that the hurricane trackers were wrong in their assessments--or in their warnings. It proves only that weather forecasting, for all its glamorous technology, remains a speculative science. And when next the warnings come, the only sensible course of action will be to batten down once again.

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce/New York and John E. Yang/Norfolk