The Ordeal of Hurricane Floyd - 24 September 1999

The last time I talked to you we'd just emerged overnight from the ordeal known as Floyd - Hurricane Floyd.

Note my use of the word "ordeal". A word capable of enormous extension, meaning getting drenched in the street with your umbrella turned upside down or drowning in your car, or in your bed on the second storey of your house in any one of a dozen surging rivers in North Carolina.

On the evening of the ordeal, here in New York, I was surfing the channels, switching between, I'd say, 30-odd stations, each of which had its own reporters out there on the sea front, up against a floating house and later showing the driveway which runs alongside the East River here a couple of feet deep in water.

And here was I on the 15th floor of an apartment building, cosy enough, following the path of the storm, hearing a brisk wind and a stair-rod rain bounce against my windows overlooking Central Park.

What we heard early on the Thursday evening was the enormous relief of the Floridians who'd escaped the fury.

They'd had a good rain and high winds but hundreds of thousands of happy people were shown driving their cars back to their houses along the coastline and hotels and motels taking down the rows of planks, boards, they'd nailed up against thousands of windows of shops and houses - an expensive precaution that everybody who's been through a hurricane begins to exercise automatically once the word comes up that the storm is heading your way.

Now here's why I talk about it again. A rare case. In spite of the splendid coverage of the storm by the television networks we missed the real story.

I should say first that even before it made landfall on the coast of North Carolina the centre of it had dissipated and lost the 100-odd mile force of its whirling wind.

Early on the meteorologists made a big point, in passing, that this storm was an unprecedented 600 miles in width. Once it struck land we forgot about width.

The networks kept following the blurred centre going up the coast and showed the windy damage and plunging tides always along the coast because, I decided later, a small tidal wave overturning a pier, or a motel collapsing on a beach, is a more dramatic picture than a wind bending trees and water gurgling over a river bank 50, 100 miles inland.

That difference in what was shown marked the difference between our perception of Floyd while it was moving north as a coastal storm and Floyd as an historic devastator of the interior.

To me, a resident New Yorker, the most interesting and human thing about the networks' coverage was this - they're all (90%) based in New York City and, of course, called on correspondents in the south, then in the mid south, then up here as the storm moved onward and upwards.

Just before 10pm the night the storm, very much weakened, had come through New York City and was no worse than a normal Nor'-Easter it had gone through and done little damage, no casualties, no power failures to speak of - New Yorkers were safe.

So when I tried a final flip through the whole 75 stations I have access to, every one of them had gone back to their regular programmes - to their world news or sit com, game show, drama, documentary, the news in Greek, in Russian, in Spanish whatever.

I was about to switch, for my own relief, to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers when I remembered the Weather Channel - one station network that carries weather reports from around the world 24 hours a day. And I think they wished they'd had a hundred reporters on call. As it was they did a brave job on a massive, appalling, untold story.

The dreadful curse of Floyd was not its damaging wind and coastal damage but the vast torrents of rain it dumped on the inland towns. It lifted the rivers - and North America is a land of a thousand rivers - across a band of storm now 300 miles wide, lifting them as much as 10 feet above their crest, the floodline.

So that lonely besieged weather channel was now showing us, first, towns practically submerged way down in inland North Carolina but then - huge surprise - a 900-mile leap up the coast, pictures of cars floating through the streets of Boston.

My telephone rang. It was my daughter whom I'd thought about earlier up there in the green mountains of Vermont - safe and sound - a good 200 miles inland.

Not so. The main street down in her valley was flooded. She'd lost power - no lights, no running water, no toilets. Three girls at home, no school tomorrow. A flood emergency proclaimed throughout most of the state.

She's about 60 miles short of the Canadian border and sure enough the next picture was up in the maritime provinces of Canada, showing pictures of sickening similarity to the pathetic sights we'd seen 1200 miles to the south down in North Carolina. It was the rains that had done all the appalling damage, flooding towns and houses along a stretch of land half the width of Europe.

Next morning I was ready to do my talk. I called my producer who usually comes in from New Jersey - she's about an hour and a half's drive from this city. She wasn't coming. The evening before I called her about 5.00 in the afternoon - how was she doing?

"Oh fine," she said, "they seem to be making an awful fuss. Yes, we had rain and heavy wind but where was Floyd?" (He was coming.)

I called her again three hours later. I said, "It's just reported on the tele that your town has had 13.9 inches of rain in under three hours?"

"That's right," she said, "and they're all in my basement."

In short, the true awful story about Floyd was not told on the day and night it moved up the coast from Virginia through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York but what happened next, to New England and maritime Canada, and what happened that week in wretched North Carolina - which has had more cataracts of rain since, lifting the rivers 15 feet above their floodline.

Half the state, the governor announced the other day, is more or less submerged. The president has declared parts of Florida and North Carolina, half of New Jersey and large stretches of New England, disaster areas entitled to federal aid.

And the worst of the news is about running water. The floods, notably in North Carolina and New Jersey, were so bad that they loosened and lifted up and set afloat local dumps - garbage piles - including animal and human wastes - a quarter of a million drowned pigs and their droppings - same with countless cattle.

In North Carolina on Tuesday - September 21, the equinox - it was announced that flood water in this state has become an ugly soup of sewage, animal carcasses and manure that is contaminating drinking water and threatening public health. Same story in New Jersey.

The governors and the mayors have put out official warnings not to drink any water and not to boil it, since it is certainly tainted. So people spend most of the day driving far and wide to find a store, a mini-market, that still has - what has vanished from the neighbourhood - bottled water.

So although Floyd does not rate high in the scale of damaging winds and human casualties - about 70 only, so far - it now reveals itself as the worst natural disaster to afflict New Jersey, New York state and the five states of New England since the infamous hurricane of 21 September 1938 - a day that was, as they say, something else again.

Since I was there let me tell you, briefly, about it.

By 1938 five generations of New Yorkers and New Englanders had never seen a hurricane. And in those days there was no hurricane centre, no government prophets.

That morning the New York Times printed its usual one-sentence weather forecast, up in the top corner of the front page. It said - "Grey, cool today, showers likely later."

By twilight the coastal towns of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were practically submerged. In our village on the northern tip of the island at the end a movie theatre with 20-odd people in it had been lifted two miles out to sea.

For 12 miles between two towns the streets were littered with boats and some sizeable yachts blown out of Peconic Bay a mile or two on to dry land.

All the noble American elms - the so-called feather duster elms - throughout the island and all through New England, were ripped up by the whirling winds, came prey to the Dutch elm disease and have vanished.

The street pavements came up with them, producing broken trenches, and between those two towns all you could walk through were, for about a fortnight, were broken trenches.

And by nightfall - 670 people killed, mostly drowned.

Well, while today we were all reporting the horrors of Floyd we couldn't help being overwhelmed, out-reported, by the news of massive earthquakes - first Turkey, Greece, Taiwan, a typhoon in Japan - San Franciscans began to shiver.

And now we're being subjected to prophets of the ancient kind.

My favourite was an old man who came on the tube two evenings ago. He was very large, sat upright - as all prophets should - had a cresting wave of white hair worthy of Charlton Heston as Moses. In a way the man was Moses.

He said - in a mellifluous, resonant voice - "There is no mystery about these cataclysms. They are ordained in the Old Testament and in the Book of Revelations.

"They will devastate the Earth for the seven years before the new millennium. There will be wars and rumours of wars and plagues and a judgement on the people.

"And it will end with the redemption of the godly and the perishing of the wicked. That is the whole ball of wax."

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