“Wasn’t That A Mighty Storm?”

 

When the 1900 hurricane hit Galveston, there wasn’t even a term for the storm. It wasn’t called a hurricane, just a “storm.” (Or a “Texas Cyclone,” according to the Pittsburgh Post.) When I read Kate Chopin’s “The Storm,” I belatedly realized the titular storm was a hurricane. Knowing that changed the story for me. A storm is something I’ve known my whole life. A hurricane is a different beast altogether.

Behold the power of labels; and of narrative.

Houston, you may have heard, suffered a major storm recently. It uprooted trees, blew off roofs, shattered windows all through downtown, took down power lines that took weeks to repair. And nobody saw it coming.

Nobody saw the storm of 1900 coming, either. But that’s because we didn’t have radar and weather satellites and radio and other forms of mass communication. Now we have local TV stations in an arms race to tell the many-headed what’s coming and how bad it will be. (One brags about how well access to local NOAA technology allows them to “protect” us with their broadcasts. That kind of came back to bite them.) We predict hurricanes to the point Houston officials scared everyone to death when Rita followed Katrina and was headed, not back to New Orleans (like lightning, hurricanes seldom strike twice. I wonder why that is?), but to Houston. Which led to a panic exodus from Texas, a bumper-to-bumper traffic jam from here to Dallas, and (fortunately for all those stuck in traffic), a hurricane that went to Beaumont (sorry, Beaumont). So we saw it coming, and we got it wrong.

The point is, we have a narrative for hurricanes now. We know what they are, how to plan for them, how to predict them, and most importantly, how to predict them. Mostly because we know what we are predicting.

What hit Houston, the local news unhelpfully said 24 hours later, was “probably” a derecho. Probably because a derecho is a storm covering huge distances (this one reached from west Texas to east before turning down to Houston, it actually spread north and south as it got here, reaching up to near Arkansas. Look it up: motherfucker was HUGE.). You need that feature, a loooong line of thunderstorms, coupled with very high winds, to establish a derecho. And it has to move across a broad area: in this case, the breadth of Texas. But still we couldn’t even identify it until 24 hours after the fact.

Now, we can track thunderstorms by radar, and measure wind speed by even less technological means. I have a “weather center” on my roof, I can tell you the wind speed at any given moment (and no, I don’t know how fast the wind blew by my house that evening. The power went out before I thought to check the wind gauge.). I mean, this isn’t rocket science.

Now, we got tornado warnings. We know what tornadoes are, we can expect them based on conditions (and can’t announce them until they are seen/touch down which, yes, can be a little late. Not much one can do about tornadoes, though, except hope they don’t come to your neighborhood. You can board your windows against a hurricane. You can just hope tornadoes leave the building you’re in, alone). We also know what to expect from tornadoes: very specific damage in very specific locations, unless it’s a very rare and very large tornado.🌪️. We also get hurricane warnings. But nobody warned us to expect a derecho.

If they had, we’d have been done with it before the explanation made sense.  We were warned about tornadoes; but those hit you, or they don’t. We weren’t warned about 100 mph winds, which is like a hurricane well inland, with no warning. Those winds can, and did, (within limits) hit everyone. It can be useful to know what’s blowing outside your door is not a thunderstorm, but a violent windstorm driven by the energy it’s gathered as it sweeps across the plains toward the coastline. That’s what hit Houston, and nobody told us what was coming because nobody had the concept for it, or the ready tools to examine conditions and tell us what was coming. 

Because they didn’t know, either.

We have a narrative for hurricanes, and tornadoes, and thunderstorms. Radar can tell us conditions for tornadoes exist (🌪️ watch), can identify lines of thunderstorms, we can even identify drought. But derechos? We don’t have the concept for that, yet. Almost, but not quite yet.

We’re still working on that narrative. I mean, we’ll get there. But it’s interesting to see such a clear example of how we rely on narrative to understand what happens.

Might be a lesson in there somewhere.