Barkers at Pleasure Beach Side Shows - 17 September 1999

You may even hear the blustery tailwind of a natural disaster that threatened the lives and limbs of about 10m Americans.

But before I talk about that I feel I must say a word about a familiar disease that killed all of three people out of New York city's population of 7m and provoked a series of hysterical dispatches in the British papers from, I regret to say, their correspondents in New York.

And this so astonished the London Bureau of the New York Times that one of its several correspondents thought it was worth remarking on in a four-column dispatch published here on Wednesday.

The natural disaster we're going to talk about had three million people being evacuated from a coastline as long as the distance from London to Rome. The largest peace time evacuation in American history.

The familiar ailment is encephalitis - commonly known as sleeping sickness. There are 21 recognised forms of encephalitis each with a different cause.

The one that affected just two of New York city's five boroughs is a kind carried by a particular species of mosquito and was very quickly spotted as Saint Louis encephalitis - so-called because there was an epidemic of it in 1933 in Saint Louis, Missouri.

This summer, when an atrociously long period of great heat was followed by the aftermath of Hurricane Denis dumping six inches of rain on New York city in three hours, a flock or swarm or pest of mosquitoes appeared which is a novelty. We don't usually have mosquitoes so close to salt water.

Anyway 60 sick people were suspected of having been infected. With 49 of them it was a false alarm, 11 are coming through it, three have died. That's the story.

Yet the four-column piece in Wednesday's New York Times begins - "If you happened to be tracking New York city's encephalitis problems from Britain for the past week, you might be forgiven for recoiling in horror at the black death that is devastating New York."

The Black Death was a sort of pneumonia which killed millions of people in massive epidemics throughout the Middle Ages.

The London correspondent of the New York Times quotes headlines, not to be believed here, like - "Panic sweeps New York", "New York fights deadly brain bug". City residents are said to be either "rushing to railroad stations" or cowering indoors. Sick people keeling over everywhere. Mayor Giuliani has "finally met his match".

This rubbish is apparently not confined to the notorious tabloids but extends to at least one paper that used to be called authoritative but now is dubbed, "sometimes sober, sometimes sensational".

Well the only panic in this city is the panic of half a dozen foreign correspondents. I should add at once that by Tuesday of the past week the mayor had sprayed enough insecticide on the five boroughs (the stuff is invisible and not toxic to human beings) enough to kill more than 95% of all the mosquitoes and eggs. After the expected downpours from Hurricane Floyd there will be a second spraying. C'est tout!

What is the cause of this extraordinary outbreak of sensationalism and scandal mania?

I can only guess it's part of the inevitable legacy left, after a quarter century, by two great reporters - Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post - two careful, diligent reporters who smelt something fishy in a trivial burglary story, took a chance on pursuing it, discovered - did not invent - discovered trickery, fraud and high crimes right there in the White House, in the president's office.

Their two years of digging through 18-hour working days destroyed a president and was considered a public service.

Ever since that feat of Woodward and Bernstein thousands of young people in several countries, I'm told, decided to go into journalism as reporters when they ought to have gone into being barkers at pleasure beach side shows. They thought reporting meant looking for scandal and finding it and if you don't find it you invent it.

Well this dreadful habit of more or less inept imitation happens to most famous originals - original writers, composers, dictators, great comics.

A hundred and fifty years ago old Ralph Waldo Emerson bemoaned the dreadful price we had to pay for the glories of Shakespeare in ruinous imitations.

Three hundred years after Shakespeare died men were still writing plays about Elizabethan times and composing dialogue in what they fancied to be Shakespearean English - they're still at it in the movies.

The price, I think, that we've had to pay for the finest work of Woodward and Bernstein is two generations of morons who fancied themselves as reporters. Enough!

This, you may have heard, is the normal season for hurricanes that are brewed down in the Caribbean, do murderous damage to one or more of the islands there and then head north west towards the American mainland at the tip of the Florida peninsula.

Florida, on a map, looks like a pistol held at the head of the Caribbean. The handle is north and west and touches Alabama. The chamber forms the horizontal coastline that faces on the Gulf of Mexico. But what most people think of as Florida is the peninsula - the long barrel of the pistol pointing, mainly south, slightly east, into the Atlantic.

It is 400 miles long and in the past 70 years Florida has these linked streams of beaches along which it built towering hotels in white, motels, yacht harbours, trailer camps, fun fairs, night clubs, old folks' homes - and thoughtful funeral parlours - they've all been built on a coastline, literally, dredged up by real estate wizards from the ocean.

Florida is the likeliest state for the late summer/early fall hurricanes to hit and Miami is the place where the national hurricane centre was set up.

A hurricane is a whirling wind system - a severe cyclone - that is borne over tropical ocean water. It's like a whizzing doughnut with a hole in the middle or, liken it to a spinning top. The speed of the spin, to be called a hurricane, must be over 75 miles an hour and can, so long as it stays at sea, go as high as 150 or more.

In the northern hemisphere this whirling circle spins counter- or anti-clockwise. In the southern hemisphere clockwise, as you will know if you've ever taken a bath down there.

The hurricane centre has its own air force, pilots skilled in flying through or under 150 mile-an-hour winds to the dead calm centre where they report on the characteristics of the storm.

Down the past 40 years or so the centre has developed much skill in the precise forecasting of hurricanes, their severity, the speed of their forward movement - usually it is about 15 miles an hour - but they will never lay down absolutely the certain path to come.

A hurricane can go off track as easily as a spinning top if you nudge it and the nudging can be done by the jet stream, by other atmospheres, by sudden newly-developing high or low pressure systems advancing toward the hurricane or its designated path.

But this time the centre outdid itself, called the turn within many hours from one day to the next, predicted Floyd would find landfall at Cape Canaveral. No, then said it was edging more north to Jacksonville in northern Florida, then possibly the coast of Georgia.

By Wednesday afternoon it said, with fair certainty, land fall would be between Morehead City and Wilmington, North Carolina - which it was.

At some point on Tuesday Floyd was moving fast and straight at Charleston - the famous old colonial town in South Carolina, which, 10 years ago, had a monster - Hugo - that destroyed a great part of the town, strangely the new town as distinct from the 18th Century houses. But it did $6bn worth of damage.

So the Governor of South Carolina suddenly, perhaps a little late, called last week for a mass evacuation of the town, no exceptions.

Eight hundred thousand people grabbed a few belongings, got into their cars and started to drive way inland. Unfortunately there had been no master plan for such a mass migration and not many miles out of town the dear departing found themselves in a traffic jam, or gridlock - wait for it - 60 miles long.

So the only reported storm of indignation among the 3m who were commanded to leave between Southern Florida and North Carolina, that storm blew up, as you can imagine, among the Charlestonians.

Otherwise don't believe any headline which proclaims - "Panic sweeps the American East Coast". No panic - lots of anxiety. Also don't believe that Mayor Giuliani of New York has yet met his match.

Three days before the storm, downgraded after it hit land to a tropical storm, with high winds and prodigious flooding, Mayor Giuliani was revelling in his authority and his ability to direct emergency measures for all city transportation - the airports, the hospitals, the schools, the disabled - setting-up of shelters, instructions for living through the worst of the storm during Thursday night if electric power was more or less certain to fail. (That reminded me to fill bottles of drinking water and buckets for the toilets - the most appalling inconvenience of a long power failure - no flushing toilets.)

Mayor Giuliani like many another natural leader when the restraints of democracy are removed - like Churchill, like Roosevelt - is in his element ordering people about with tact, geniality and total assurance.

The verdict among New Yorkers was that he had done, unlike the Governor of South Carolina, a superb job of organising an emergency against screaming winds and 10 inches of flooding rain which has caused ruinous damage to about 1m homes from South Florida to the interior of New England.

But we came through this one and the East Coast residents and the pleasure seekers in the South can relax.

Not for long, we're told, they say maybe a week at most. Hard on the thrashing heels of Floyd is the next Caribbean menace heading now for Florida. Watch out for Gertrude!

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