suring hurricane forces. Any notion that humans might know a storm was
approaching, be able to prepare for it, and expect aid in relief during the
aftermath, much less file insurance claims and request government sub-
sidies, was faint or more likely nonexistent. Weather, especially the stormy,
became public and subject to the ambition of management gradually, be-
ginning notably during the s. In September , for instance, the
fledgling U.S. Weather Service (a branch of the military) failed utterly to pre-
dict a Gulf hurricane that flattened the community of Cedar Key, Florida,
killing . Two years later, President William McKinley, on the verge of war
with Spain in the Caribbean, declared he feared hurricanes more than the
Spanish fleet and prompted Congress to create a hurricane warning system.
In came the giant tidal surge that destroyed Galveston and, during re-
construction, invited the city’s introduction of the commission form of gov-
ernment—that is, an urban administration composed of expert-managers.^4
There would be more great storms—most of them ‘‘southern’’—as rec-
ord keeping, scientific measurement, and relief organization improved and
grew. The Great Florida Boom of the s was practically silenced by awe-
some hurricanes in and . The first inflicted property damage in
Miami and environs exceeding that of the Galveston disaster, and the sec-
ond killed probably more than , people in the Lake Okeechobee basin
and inspired Zora Neale Hurston’s bitter novel,Their Eyes Were Watching
God, of . In between came the Mississippi River’s ‘‘flood of the century’’
in . The Labor Day hurricane of —when the national weather ser-
vice failed again to warn sufficiently early—swept over the Florida Keys and
drowned a thousand-odd government workers who were building a road
alongside Henry Flagler’s old railroad tracks.
During the s, however, radar and aircraft reconnaissance propelled
weather science and forecasting. The star of this essential public service
was Grady Norton, whose calm Alabama drawl dominated radio airwaves
during hurricane season. More than a voice, Norton revolutionized fore-
casting with his (correct) theory that the directions of hurricanes are de-
termined not by surface high pressure areas but by wind flow in the upper
troposphere. Technological confidence finally persuaded others in govern-
ment employ to attempt actual management—not mere prediction—of
great storms. Beginning during the late s and most intensely during
the s, the National Hurricane Center, now a substantial bureaucracy,
sent hurricane-hunter aircraft to seed hurricanes with silver iodide crystals
in hopes of reducing their strength and dispersing them. Multiple seed-
ings produced no measurable effects. The U.S. army, in the meantime, had