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hurricane season, from June to November, they routinely alternated twenty-four-hour shifts and issued weather updates every six hours, seven days a week. Now, with a dangerous cyclone in their sights, they set up a surplus army cot in a corner of the station and remained on duty around the clock. They would monitor the approaching hurricane continuously for more than one hundred hours, from Friday evening, September 16, to the early-morning hours of Wednesday, September 21.
    In 1686, before he had sighted the comet that bears his name, Edmond Halley drew and published the first weather map. But it was not until Marconi invented the wireless telegraph some two hundred years later that maps became an essential weather tool. Marconi’s invention revolutionized forecasting, transforming meteorology from an empirical art to a science.
    With the invention of the telegraph, ships at sea could communicate directly with weather stations. The first ship-to-shore report was transmitted on December 3, 1905, and the first wireless hurricane communiqué came four years later, when the SS
Cartago
ran into a tropical cyclone off the coast of Yucatán.
    Direct and immediate communication allowed forecasters to translate the observations they received into same-day, even same-hour, charts called synoptic maps. Often described as weather snapshots, synoptic maps give a picture, or a series of pictures, of atmospheric conditions — barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, precipitation, winds, and cloud cover — over a broad area at a specific point in time.
    Whether hand-drawn as they were in the 1930s or computer-generated as they are today, synoptic maps are critical to forecasting, especially the map showing barometric pressure. Barometric pressure levels are the clearest measure of a hurricane’s strength. A precipitous drop means a storm is intensifying. Any rise indicates a weakening. On a barometric map, lines, called isobars, are drawn to link points of equal pressure. The density of isobars indicates the strength and location of a storm.
    During their hurricane watch, Norton and Dunn continually drew new maps. By comparing successive charts, they could see how weather systems were moving and evolving over a broad area at a specific time. Maps drawn with speed and skill were the key to an accurate prediction, and Dunn was a master of synoptic mapping. According to his seven o’clock reckoning, on Saturday night the storm was thirty miles closer to Miami, moving at approximately the same speed and still on course. With low-pressure, tightly packed isobars spelling a serious hurricane, a statewide emergency was declared. Throughout the day and night, Jacksonville telegraphed constant updates to newspaper offices and radio stations nationwide. In spite of their urgency, few beyond the panhandle took note.
    Disasters always seemed to happen in far-off places with romantic names, and in September, Florida was still a season away. In 1938 attention didn’t usually turn south until blizzards were blanketing New England.
    Sunday, September 18
    The storm intensified through the night. By two o’clock Sunday afternoon, winds were blowing at 150 miles per hour. Strong shifting squalls enveloped the Caribbean islands from Puerto Rico to the Bahamas. Coconut palms bent into the gale, rains blasted flimsy shelters, and winds shrieked like banshees over a tremendous, raging sea. The hurricane continued to deepen through the night. By two A.M. Monday, it was a Category 5 storm.
    The official gauge of a hurricane’s destructive force is the Saffir-Simpson Damage Potential Scale. Storms are measured according to sustained wind speed, storm surge height, and barometric pressure and classified on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being “catastrophic.” Only one Category 5 storm had ever reached the continental United States — Labor Day 1935. The Labor Day hurricane had been a tightly coiled tropical cyclone — small, swift, and singularly nasty. The