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Florida.

Chapter 4
    Hurricane Watch
    Friday, September 16
    T he hurricane watch began at the Jacksonville station of the U.S. Weather Bureau about suppertime on Friday, the sixteenth of September, when Grady Norton picked up a radio signal from a Brazilian freighter. The SS
Alegrete,
bound for her home port of Belém, had sailed into a cyclone in the Atlantic Ocean off the Leeward Islands. She reported pounding seas, seventy-five-mile-per-hour winds, and a barometric reading of 28.31 inches and falling.
    If you were casting a hurricane hunter, a superhero battling the forces of wind, wave, and floodwater, Grady Norton would be an unlikely choice. A slight man of forty-three with thinning sandy hair, he was more Dagwood than Clark Kent. Norton combed his hair straight back, wore round oversize glasses, and in photographs often had a startled look. He had little formal education. His three favorite teachers were mythology, the Bible, and Shakespeare, and he quoted liberally from them to describe the weather he watched. Norton had worked in the U.S. Weather Bureau for almost twenty years, with time out for service in the Army Signal Corps during World War I. In 1935 he was named director of the Weather Bureau’s first hurricane center.
    The original U.S. Weather Bureau was chartered by an act of Congress in 1870 and officially designated the Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce. As the name implies, it was devised as a tool for trade. A central Washington office, linked by telegram to a network of twenty-four observatories across the country, was set up to monitor the weather and issue daily forecasts. If storms, squalls, blizzards, frosts, and other Acts of God were predicted accurately, the thinking went, businesses could take protective measures and commerce would prosper. Within a few years, the agency had more than three hundred weather stations from coast to coast.
    The Weather Bureau went through several configurations before Congress decided that a decentralized agency would respond more quickly to weather emergencies. In March 1935 the central office was replaced with forecasting stations strategically positioned in Washington, Jacksonville, New Orleans, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Jacksonville station was designated hurricane central, and Norton, a soft-spoken southerner from Choctaw County, Alabama, was transferred from New Orleans. He had been on the job for six months when the new system was tested for the first time. On Labor Day 1935, a Category 5 hurricane, the most intense tropical cyclone ever to strike the continental United States, hit the Florida Keys. Norton and his assistant, Gordon Dunn, saw it coming but misjudged its severity, and 428 people died.
    Most of those killed were destitute World War I vets put to work by the New Deal building U.S. Highway 1. They died aboard the government train that was supposed to evacuate them. The rescue train did not reach the Keys until the height of the storm, and when it tried to return to the mainland, it was swept into the sea. In an article for
New Masses
magazine, Ernest Hemingway, one of the Keys’ most celebrated residents, demanded to know “Who Murdered the Vets?” Gruesome reports of metal roofs that flew off shacks, guillotining the hapless men, and sheets of sand that sheared off their clothes, leaving nothing but belt buckles, horrified the nation. In the heart of the Great Depression, donations for a hurricane memorial poured in and a congressional committee convened to investigate what had gone so horribly wrong. Although the main culprit had been a paucity of information, Norton vowed to himself that not one more life would be lost to a hurricane on his watch. Now, almost three years to the day later, another killer storm was blowing toward Florida and the same two-man team would track it.
    A weather forecaster who does not own a raincoat, hat, or umbrella is either supremely optimistic or supremely confident. Gordon