Hurricane Elena and the legal drinking age - 6 September 1985

Although about four-fifths of this country is still blazing away in the 90s the calendar says that Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is the end of summer and time to close the summer cottages, desert the mountains and the lakes and the seashore and get back to work, to school, to writing the cheque for the third quarter of your income tax and seeing that it’s in the grasp of the internal revenue service by the end of next week.

So the last weekend in August is a happy, sad festival time for most Americans. It is, however, for the inhabitants of Florida and the people who live along the adjoining coast on the Gulf of Mexico, always an anxious time, for the end of August tends to coincide with the first of the big hurricanes that are born in the Caribbean.

With any luck – for North Americans, that is – they assault Haiti or crash into Cuba but as often as not the Caribbean is the spawning ground. They grow up down there and expand into the shape of a huge doughnut, the whole in the middle being the eye, or dead centre, of the storm. They whirl around that centre and then set course for the north and it’s a toss up then, with any given hurricane, whether it’s headed for the Florida peninsula which drops like the barrel of a pistol into the sea or turns north-west towards the cities of the Gulf coast – Tallahassee at the trigger of the pistol or west along the handle to Mobile and New Orleans and even farther west still to Houston.

Well this year, as you probably heard for the Floridians and the Alabamians and the Mississippians, the theoretical summer ended with a mighty bang in the eventual landfall of the hurricane Elena. Now it seems to me possible that seen from abroad some people will think that an almighty fuss was made about the imminent approach of this monster, actually the fifth of the season, but much the biggest.

So what was the casualty list? How many thousands were drowned? Well, the answer appears to be three. A man was killed by a falling tree and two others died of heart attacks. So what is all this pother about winds of 125 miles an hour and towering tides? The fact is that the tracking and observation of Elena was an unprecedented triumph.

Thirty years ago there could well have been thousands of dead and missing. In those days there were no weather satellites. Of course there were weather forecasts and the air arm of the weather service flew down and into the storms to measure their intensity and discover their general direction and the people who were told they lay in the path, probable path, would gather up their blankets and beds and children and old folk and beat it inland into schools and gymnasiums and motels and such.

You never knew for sure which bit of land was going to be hit until it happened but Elena was different in a maddening way. It came whirling up from the Caribbean and seemed on a steady course for the west coast of Florida which consequently warned its citizens and prepared to evacuate them, but then Elena became worse news than usual. It paused. It crawled. It tried this direction and that.

It stayed for three days at sea, hovering over the Gulf and not making up its mind where to strike. The longer a hurricane stays over water, the more moisture it absorbs and the moisture is like fuel to a jet engine and increases the rotary speed. Days before Elena struck it was called a moderately severe hurricane, a number one, on a scale of one to five. Two days later the circling winds were in excess of 125 miles an hour and Elena was counted as a number three in severity. Then, on Labor Day, Monday the 2nd, it stormed ashore along the coast of Mississippi.

So once again, nobody knew for sure whither it was bound until it bounded, but what the weather satellite picture – those beautiful bird’s-eye or God’s-eye view of the whole country – what those pictures did was to show what no other device could have shown, that the hurricane had a huge diameter and was poised and tacking and hovering over hundreds of miles of curving coastline and could just as well strike Sarasota, Florida as New Orleans.

So the hurricane centre, the national institution, warned the governors of four states – Florida in the East and Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana – that their coastal residents were in peril and the mayors and police of many cities were told to begin the evacuation of everyone within reach of seaborne floods and you know how long that threatened coastline stretches, just over 700 miles, roughly about from Brighton to the Orkneys.

Everybody out – men, women, children, hospital patients, residents of towns, villages, trailers, hotels, motels, everybody. In all, just over one and a half million people were uprooted and driven way inland to every conceivable sort of shelter. It was a colossal undertaking and it was done.

Was this journey really necessary? Yes, the damage to piers first and then to whole towns, to buildings of all sorts, to forests, to power lines, was enormous right along that 700-mile stretch. New Orleans was at the western edge of the storm and most people there stayed put, positively grateful that all they were getting was a 70 mile an hour fringe wind. Trees down, roofs off, sure, but in New Orleans it was called “the storm that missed us”. Usually they assessed the damage at so many millions of dollars. This time nobody has dared to come up with a figure.

The president will declare those beaten stretches disaster areas and there will be federal funds available which no one will deny even though the government deficit will inch yet a little higher. Still, Elena deserves to go into the history books as honourably as those wars that United Nations prevented and which therefore nobody ever hears about. When John Glenn said, during a bitter wrangling early stage of the space programme, that all it would contribute to mankind was the non-sticking frying pan he could not have guessed that those nightly satellite weather pictures could save thousands of lives.

Back to school then. The phrase in America applies not only to children, but to everybody in college or a university. I still get a suppressed giggle from strangers who ask did you go to school at Cambridge. Well this year there are teachers’ strikes in about 20 cities and thousands of children are still at large and will be till the teachers in this city get more pay, in that city the same rate of pay for newcomers as for veterans, in another place inevitably no school until women get the same pay for what is called comparable work.

Chicago is the worst off with 35,000 teachers out and over half a million youngsters out on the town or the lake shore or otherwise rollicking in the school of life. On the campuses in the colleges across the country there is one quite radical change.

Twenty-one states have already passed law that raises the permissible drinking age from 18 or 19 to 21 and in the coming year, new laws will do the same for another 15 states. That leaves 14 states, all but two in the mid-west or the far west, that don’t propose to raise their drinking age.

Governor Cuomo of New York, after a tough parliamentary tussle, saw the 21-year-old bill passed and said it was the best thing that had happened to the state this year. The stated reason for this national movement is to stop or lessen drunken driving, and to soften the blow to young one-fisted drinkers, the colleges are bringing in a variety of reforms in the campus pubs, substituting fruit juice, “mocktails” they’re being called, banning townspeople who are not students from campus parties, setting aside corners of rooms for – I was going to say alcoholics only – for the students over 21 who want to drink.

The most severe new rule is the banning of alcohol from all college concerts and athletic events. In this state, New York, the law now allows administrators, teachers, dormitory supervisors and the like to have a set of keys in order to make surprise raids on the rooms of under-age students.

Well it all sounds very sensible and progressive but to many students it also sounds like a mini-repeat performance of the so-called noble experiment of prohibition, which in the 1920s was meant to make America pure but did, in fact, start people drinking who’d never touched the stuff and so generated a whole new tribe of criminals, the bootlegging gangsters.

It’s not hard to imagine the waves of protests that are rippling across the campuses. “We can join the armed forces,” said one student in Arizona, “we are consenting adults, we can go to prison, why can’t we drink?”

It will not be long, I’m fairly sure, before a legal test case and the trotting-out even before the Supreme Court of the good old First Amendment to the Constitution, which has been invoked before now to justify campus riots, mimic sex acts on stage, the "right" to go and make it in public. Of course the First Amendment is always brought up to defend freedom of speech which it guarantees but it contains also the phrase “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”.

Now if that sounds far-fetched you should have heard some of the debates in the state legislatures that defeated bills to compel the wearing of seatbelts in motor cars. You’d have thought that Tom Paine and Patrick Henry had been reborn in the speeches of passionate men who maintained – and in their own state successfully maintained – that the founding fathers were the first champions of the principle that every citizen of this country has a constitutional right, the liberty to assemble with another citizen and sit in the front seat of an automobile without having to assemble a seat belt across his chest.

How long this preposterous interpretation of the First Amendment is likely to last is anybody’s guess. New York State put the seatbelt law into effect at the beginning of the year and the results have been dramatic – fewer accidents in proportion to cars on the road than at any time since the 1920s, and these impressive figures have been published and publicised far and wide.

One southern politician who quoted Patrick Henry’s famous line “Give me liberty or give me death” may soon hear himself being quoted as saying “Give me liberty and give me death”.

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