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It’s Hurricane
Season
By Susan Olling
We’ve been listening, or muting, a bunch of excited weather
guessers. Yes, a hurricane’s moving up the coast. Welcome,
Hurricane Hermine.
Ever since humans started living along the southeastern coast of this
continent, hurricanes have been a part of the weather. The Carib
tribe coined a word for these storms, huracan, that the Spanish
borrowed.
European ran into hurricanes in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. A nine-ship expedition left England in 1609 for
Jamestown and encountered a hurricane in the Caribbean. One
vessel sank. Seven ships finally got to Jamestown.
The ninth ship became lodged on a reef just off Bermuda. The
marooned survivors were able to build two ships and sailed for
Jamestown in May 1610. They arrived eleven days later.
There is evidence that the accounts of two of these survivors were
familiar to William Shakespeare. Is there a connection to their
stories and Mr. Shakespeare’s The Tempest?
European colonists found ways to designate the most terrible
hurricanes. They were linked to a person or event, the
Independence Hurricane of 1775, for example, or named for the saint’s
day when the storm struck. More commonly, these storms were
described plainly but vividly: the Great Gust of 1724 or the Dreadful
Hurry Cane of 1667. That storm almost destroyed Jamestown.
Hurricanes in the Atlantic weren’t given official names until the early
1950s. Names are “retired” if the hurricane has a severe impact
on an area. In 2005, National Weather Service ran out of
names. The National Hurricane Center had to name storms using
letters from the Greek alphabet.
Here in the D.C. environs, we get the tropical storm portion of
hurricanes; but that experience over the years has been enough.
My mother-in-law was attending an Elderhostel program at Colonial
Williamsburg in 1999 when Hurricane Floyd visited. The storm
brought down power lines down there. My mother-in-law was most
definitely not having a good time and couldn’t wait to leave. It
sounded to us like she was living like someone in the eighteenth
century. She didn’t want to hear it.
Hurricane Isabel, in 2003, had very impressive tropical storm
winds. I didn’t get to sleep until after 2:00 a.m. while
the festivities were going on because I was thinking about the large,
old oak trees in our backyard. Did I want to be awake when one
came crashing through the roof and squished us, or did I want to sleep
though it? Fortunately, all the trees stayed in their upright
positions. The backyard looked deceptively easy to clean up, just
use a rake. Not so. Beneath all those oak leaf clusters
were sticks and twigs. It took several hours to get the yard
cleaned up. Mr. History filled twenty lawn and leaf bags which I
carried to the street. The power flickered occasionally
during all that wind but didn’t go off. There were many power
outages, and some of us got unscheduled vacations. I felt sorry
for the police officers who had to direct traffic in some of the large
intersections.
We were in New Brunswick in 2004 when Hurricane Bonnie was moving up
the coast. The tropical storm force rains that fell were quite a
sight. We were driving back when Hurricane Charley was due to
hit. The Boston weather guessers were practically
hyperventilating. It was a tropical storm, but could become a
Category 1 hurricane as it moved over open water. We met the rain
from Charley in Augusta, Maine and drove right through.
It was quiet around here until 2011 when Hurricane Irene visited.
I remember how leaden the sky looked. Rather than going downtown
to volunteer, I stayed home and waited for the rain.
Can’t forget Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The European weather models
tracked this storm correctly. Not so the U.S. weather
models. We went to New Castle, Delaware in December that
year. There was still debris along the Delaware River and minor
damage to some of the buildings along the river. We talked to a
gentleman, a World War Two veteran, who said he and his wife left New
Castle and stayed with their son during that awful storm. If a
veteran has the sense to leave when a hurricane’s coming, the rest of
us should pay attention.
Hurricane season started 01 Jun and ends 01 Nov.
Then we can anticipate snow.
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