Hurricane Gilbert - 23 September 1988

If you can imagine yourself in an airplane flying from the tip of Cornwall to the very north of Scotland or, more accurately, from the toe of Italy up the 750 miles to Milan and seeing the greater part of the land that you flew over under water you’d have an idea of the monstrous scale of Hurricane Gilbert after it had done its frightful wrecking job on Jamaica, the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mexican towns on the Gulf Coast.

Most of central Texas and on through north, into western, Oklahoma had in 24 hours between 10 and 18 inches of rain – something like 32 inches is the annual quota of London and, by the way, of New York. The result of which we saw only 30- second glimpses of an endless landscape of little Venices with people wading or getting from here to there on improvised rafts.

The only good for the United States that blew in with this ill wind was a deluge of rain dumped on the farm states of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa – we are now fifteen hundred miles north of Yucatan – on the farm states whose immense crops have withered in this summer of unrelieved drought.

As for Mexico, the plight of hundreds of small towns and villages is hardly to be pictured. The heart-breaking item was the fact that the worst casualties there, now mounting 200, were of people who’d had the sense to flee from the coast and were already 180 miles inland, in Monterey, when their buses were overwhelmed by the roaring flood waters.

For a storm 1,000 miles in diameter when it crossed the Gulf of Mexico and packing winds of over 150 miles an hour it must appear that the casualties were, astonishingly, blessedly low and so they were compared with, for instance, the notorious hurricane that swooped on to the coastal city of Galveston, Texas in 1900 and took 6,000 lives in that small city alone, one-seventh of the population, leaving the official report said “not a single house undamaged”.

Well if even all the people had fled I suppose the physical, structure damage would have been the same but the death rate then was due to a simple failure, an incapacity of the time – the inability to see it coming. The weather forecast for 8 September 1900 in the Galveston papers read, “Sunny and hot” and so it was for all the great recorded hurricanes back from 1938 to 1848, the monster that destroyed much of Florida and did damage for the next thousand miles of its northward trek.

All that people knew for the hundred years or so that records had been kept was that these hurricanes arise in August and September in the West Indies and move north or north-west. The meteorologists could track them only when they hit land.

Not until the 1930s did the WPA, the New Deal agency for the unemployed, give some money to a radio station in Florida who employed a couple of unemployed engineers and they started a rudimentary hurricane research station whose job was to maintain short-wave radio communication with Puerto Rico.

Even then they were dependent on reports from the West Indies of what people had seen happening to them. The course and intensity of the storms, their behaviour once they get up into the Gulf were a mystery. Only in the past 30 years have we had a National Hurricane Centre in Florida, now on permanent duty a staff of hurricane experts equipped with high-tech devices and the really vital adjunct, a crew of coastguard pilots trained to fly over and then drop into the eye of a hurricane and to bring back the details of its forward speed, rotary speed and likely course.

Even then, even now, the head of the National Hurricane Centre remarked after Gilbert was buccaneering into Oklahoma that we can accurately predict the direction of a hurricane only for the next 24 hours. Beyond that, we still do not know if it’s going to turn and where and why.

So once the thing had torn through Jamaica and across the Yucatan Peninsula the hurricane centre could do no better than suggest the evacuation of the coastal populations round an arc of the Gulf from Northern Mexico along all the Texas and Louisiana Gulf coasts, a broken stretch of over 500 miles.

By Friday of last week more than half a million people were on the move. As Gilbert stubbornly maintained its west-north-west course the alarm was called off for New Orleans and the Louisiana coat.

By the way, last weekend I asked a young European who broadcasts to his native land if he had, at any point in his early reports, said what a hurricane is. He was startled. “Surely,” he said “everybody knows that?”, yet I’d noticed even amongst some of my friends – and you can guess how knowledgeable they must be – they imply anyway that a hurricane is a very high wind, high in the sense of speedy.

I was told by English meteorologists that the great storm which ravaged south-eastern England last autumn was not technically a hurricane, which I’m bound to say must be scant consolation to the curators of Kew Gardens. We have weathered six hurricanes on Long Island in the last 50 years and while they’ve detached shingle, broken windows, let the rain in in floods, it was not a hurricane but a simple, ferocious, north-east storm that five years ago ripped off the whole bay side porch of the house, crashed it through the roof and deposited much of it in the living room.

Luckily we weren’t there. We were sitting in a hotel room on the coast of California watching pictures of people in boats ferrying between houses and flooded shops. “Wonder where that can be?” we said. “Riverhead, Long Island”, the announcer obliged. “Poor old Riverhead,” we said. When we got back to New York and drove down the island we said “Poor old us”.

Well the main point about a hurricane is that is not a furious, fast and damaging wind moving like an army. It’s shaped like a doughnut, a doughnut whirling anti-or counter-clockwise at speeds above 73 miles an hour. Gilbert got up to 180 at one point.

The hole in the middle of the doughnut is the eye and the eerie thing about it is it is dead calm, so one of the great dangers of being in a hurricane is the storm seems to have passed, cumulus clouds come up, there’s a blue sky and you go out. Twenty minutes later the thing comes at you from the other side. The forward movement of the whole system is very much slower, usually not more than 20 miles an hour. The damage comes from the whirling motion and the worst damage comes to very tall trees which can be spun and plucked up by their roots.

It’s an odd coincidence that even if there’d been no Gilbert I’m pretty sure that this week I should have talked about hurricanes, about one hurricane, the memory of which made those of us who came through it shudder a little last Wednesday.

Just 50 years ago on that day, 21 September 1938, I was sailing to New York on the great French liner the Normandie. The sea was a little choppy and the sky was overcast and stayed so the next morning when we woke up to receive the breakfast tray and the ship’s newspaper.

Those of you who’ve ever taken a cruise or sailed the transatlantic ships in the old days will know what I mean when I say that a ship’s newspaper could be a source of much hilarity, scraps of international news picked up by radio overnight. Most of the copy was about fashions or sport, spelling mistakes abounded, pieces stopped in mid-paragraph, so when we saw a headline "Hurricane a New-York" we knew that the French had got their information badly fouled up – we did not have hurricanes "a New York".

But I read on and it talked about the devastation of towns on Le Fork du Nord, the North Fork, which is where we live, and the lifting of a cinema on the Fork du Sud, the south shore at West Hampton and sending it out to sea. They were right. Twenty-odd people at a matinee and the theatre, the projectionist and all landed two miles into the Atlantic and everybody drowned. “The flooding of Providence, Rhode Island,” it said, “huge destruction of the forests of New England” and so on.

Next morning we were practically jolted out of our beds and the PA system announced that nobody must try to go on deck. The hurricane blowing out across the Atlantic had hit us. What I most remember for an hour or more was that the Normandie the second, I believe, largest transatlantic liner afloat, simply got up out of the water, shook itself in the air like a drenched mastiff and plunged back into the deeps, on and on.

Five people out of close to 3,000 went down to dinner. Next morning, as always seems to happen, was a brilliant and beautiful day and we sailed up the bay and into the harbour and there my father-in-law was waiting for us, a ram-rod straight, austere old New Englander who scorned every to show emotion for any hurt done to him, told us briskly with a moist eye about his 90 wooded acres.

“A lifetime to plant”, he said, “a few years perhaps to clean up and plant again.” Well it wasn’t quite that bad, but it took about ten days before we could drive through the main street of our nearest village, Southold. The towering American elms had been whisked and plucked and brought up their roots and the sidewalk with them, so that the streets were trenches with tilted pavements as their walls.

The devastation through 500 miles of New England was indescribable, so I will not describe it, but a third of the American, the feather-duster, elms through Rhode Island and Massachusetts were destroyed, half the New Hampshire stand of white birch, more than 600 people were drowned. The New York Times forecast on the morning of 21 September 1938 said “Cloudy, chance of rain”.

My sharpest, most indelible, memory of a hurricane which to me dramatises the wind force more than a hundred panoramic shots of toppled trees and floating houses, was my recollection of a pencil-thin something that had pierced the bark of a tree and lodged deep in there, like a struck arrow. It was a straw.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.