5 Days to Landfall

by Robert Roy Britt

  He ate an olive, spat the pit into the Hudson, then drank deeply. He was in heaven.

  CHAPTER 15

  In the Block House,

  near the Canal Street Subway Station

  9:15 p.m.

  Father had been thoughtful all evening. Probably what that scientist woman said about hurricanes. Jonathan hadn’t completely understood the conversation, but he could tell that it meant danger. Jonathan wasn’t frightened. Father would protect him.

  In the darkness, he waited for Father to tell a story. He decided he better say something so Father would know that he was awake, waiting.

  “What’s a storm surge, Father?”

  “It’s like a giant wave that comes up the river during a hurricane.”

  “And it would flood the Block House?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What would we do?”

  Jonathan listened to PJ’s snoring across the room. PJ was the only other person who lived with them. He was a funny looking man, small and round with a body like a barrel and fingers like sausages and blond hair that stood straight up on top of his head. But he was nice to Jonathan, and he was Father’s friend.

  “I suppose we should have a plan,” Father finally said. “A plan for getting out.”

  “Is that what the hole is for?” Father and PJ had been digging all day. “To escape the storm surge?”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

  “Well, you’ll save us somehow,” Jonathan said. “Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me a story tonight?”

  Father was silent for a long time, making up a story. Jonathan pulled the tattered blankets under his chin, snuggled into the warmth of two bodies pressed together, and waited with all the patience a six-year-old could muster.

  “Once upon a time,” Father began finally, “there was a young prince—”

  “Jonathan, right? His name was Prince Jonathan?”

  “One upon a time, there was a young prince named Jonathan whose father was the King of York—”

  “Sleepy, King of York,” Jonathan butted in.

  “I don’t know about that,” Father said. “Anyway, York was a beautiful place with green valleys and plenty of stone for building and a magnificent castle. The king was sick, and he called young Prince Jonathan, who was only six years old, to his bed.”

  Jonathan worked hard not to butt in any more as father told another fantastic tale about a faraway place. Father always told of magical places where Jonathan wanted to go. Or maybe they were places where Father wanted to go. He was always talking about getting out. About living in a house like normal people. That was more than Jonathan could imagine.

  He listened in the darkness with his eyes open. At first, the story was sad. The King of York died. But the young prince kept the vow he’d made to the king on his deathbed, took the throne and made York an even better place. “Father, do we live in a castle?” the real Jonathan asked afterward.

  “Sure we do.”

  “The Castle of York!” Jonathan decided.

  “Prince Jonathan!” Father said. “Prince Jonathan Hart of York.”

  “King Sleepy!” Jonathan said. “King Sleepy of York. Father, what’s your last name?”

  “Not important.”

  “Why do I have Mother’s last name?”

  “Because she did good things in this world. I’ve never done good. My family has never done good, and I’m not proud of the name, stopped using it long ago. Hart is a good name, anyway. Regal. Makes you sound like the prince you are.”

  “Did you do bad things?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Father? How come you never talk about the intruder?”

  “Go to sleep, young prince.”

  “King Sleepy?”

  “What.”

  “You’re not going to die soon, are you?”

  “No. I’m not going to die soon. Now go to sleep.”

  Jonathan snuggled happily into the warm place and did just as Father asked.

  CHAPTER 16

  Keesler AFB,

  Biloxi, Mississippi

  10:45 p.m.

  The media wasn’t paying much attention to Tropical Storm Irene wandering around in the Gulf of Mexico. Irene’s winds were at sixty miles an hour, paltry compared to Harvey. She was drifting vaguely toward Texas, her outer edges flinging thunderstorms into southern Louisiana and Mississippi.

  Captain Glen Barnes was paying attention to Irene. He had a rendezvous scheduled with Hurricane Harvey that he wasn’t keen to miss, and now one of Irene’s thunderstorms was threatening to delay takeoff of the specially equipped, high-winged, four-engine WC-130 Hurricane Hunter plane that sat on the tarmac, fueled and ready to go. Captain Barnes climbed hastily up the ladder to the flight deck.

  Gusty winds swooped under the high wings and shook the plane.

  Barnes strapped himself in, said hello to his copilot and put a stick of Doublemint chewing gum in his mouth. He expected to chew on it for about ten hours. The flavor would be gone in less than one.

  The crew of six included a navigator, flight engineer, weather officer and dropsonde systems operator. Strapped into the back of the plane were four journalists.

  “How’s Hugo?” Barnes asked his copilot, a tall, lanky southerner named Duggan.

  “Wings haven’t fallen off yet,” Duggan said.

  Barnes knew that Duggan meant the exterior pre-flight inspection had checked out OK. Barnes and Duggan had been flying Hugo into storms together since 1989, when the plane got its nickname. Mission control had told the crew that the hurricane churning across the Atlantic was a Category 1. Barnes flew in at 1,500 feet, far too low for what turned out to be a Category 5 storm. The plane pitched violently in the severe updrafts of the intense storm. Several objects were tossed dangerously about inside. The media people—and even the flight engineer—had thrown up.

  Then an engine had died.

  It was the closest the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron had ever come to losing a plane. It wasn’t Barnes’ fault, but it was a turning point. Until that flight, he’d been just another Air Force pilot, sure of his ability and eager to push the envelope. But Hurricane Hugo had made him white in the face. In the zero visibility, he wondered if his plane could survive, wondered what the hell he was doing up there.

  The plane limped back on three engines to the air base, none of the crew saying anything outside of what was necessary to fly the plane. Duggan had pissed his pants. “Glad the wings didn’t fall off,” he said as they landed.

  Next morning, Barnes painted “Hugo” in crude black letters on the silver plane. To the “o” he added two curved wings to make the pinwheel-shaped hurricane icon used by meteorologists.

  Now Hugo was the oldest WC-130 in the fleet. A relic, in many ways, made more so by the 53rd’s introduction of a Gulfstream-IV in 1997. The high-altitude jet was the new princess of the squadron: Meteorologists said the information it collected—environmental data from high in the atmosphere around and ahead of the storm—helped improve forecasting accuracy by 20 percent.

  The Gulfstream-IV was up there tonight, somewhere six miles above the Atlantic.

  Barnes had no desire to fly into a hurricane at 40,000 feet anyway. He and his crew were proud of Hugo’s rugged, low-altitude history. The name had stuck. So had the joke of the wings remaining affixed to the fuselage.

  “Waiting for you to let the clutch out,” Duggan said. “Tower says we better roll out soon or we’re going to have to spend the night here with Irene. Not a one-night-stand I’m interested in. Wind is gusting to thirty-five knots and picking up.”

  “Extra attention to preflight,” Barnes said to the crew, letting an ultra-thin smile cross his lips as he glanced briefly at Duggan. “Everybody is tired, so let’s double check the double checks.”

  Barnes and his crew had flown into Gert three days straight. Ten hours of flying each day. Today they were bound for Harvey. Assuming the takeoff an
d first hundred miles through the leading edges of Irene were uneventful—and Barnes wasn’t assuming any such thing—a relatively boring four hours awaited them before they penetrated the eye of Harvey.

  The team ran quickly but methodically through the preflight checklist.

  The dropsonde operator stood outside in the driving rain and watched for flame, smoke or leaking fluid as Barnes started all four engines, each a four-thousand horsepower Allison turboprop.

  The dropsonde operator climbed aboard, removed his raingear and strapped in.

  “Are the newsies tied down?” Barnes asked.

  “Like prisoners,” said the dropsonde operator.

  The four journalists were tense, clutching at the arm rests as if an extra grip might aid the shoulder harnesses in keeping them safe. Hugo, like each of the WC-130s, had seats for up to six media people. When a slot opened, it was the journalist’s responsibility to get to the base on short notice. On board were a reporter and photographer each from the Miami Herald and the Mobile Register.

  “Radar shows big flashbulbs to the southeast,” Duggan said. “Moving this way. Better get it up.”

  A deep voice from the control tower came over the radio: “Teal One Niner, Keesler Tower. Cleared to taxi to runway two-one.”

  Barnes didn’t want to face lightning yet. There would be enough of it around the eye of Harvey. He took the controls himself and taxied quickly to runway two-one.

  “Teal One Niner, Keesler Tower. Cleared for takeoff runway two-one. Climb and maintain two thousand, runway heading.”

  Hugo rumbled down the rain-soaked runway until the ground speed was 100 miles an hour. As the plane rotated for liftoff, Barnes had to fly at an angle into wind, which gusted to forty-five knots just 200 feet above the surface. Crabbing, they called it. Hugo flew more or less sideways for four minutes, bumping and jerking in the erratic gusts, then banked into the storm and out over the Gulf of Mexico, heading for the Bahamas to refuel before penetrating Harvey.

  ~ ~ ~

  EXCERPTED FROM HURRICANES: HISTORY AND DYNAMICS, BY DR. NICHOLAS K. GRAY, HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY PRESS (1998)

  A large winged box floats above the earth, keeping watch over the Atlantic.

  Rectangular solar panels stretch behind the box, creating an awkward metallic bird that appears to be diving toward the planet. But the GOES East satellite isn’t diving, isn’t even moving in relation to the earth. It is, however, whizzing along at about a thousand miles an hour, maintaining a geosynchronous orbit that matches the planet’s rotation and keeps the satellite always at a fixed perch relative to the surface.

  The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite is equipped with an imager and a sounder to profile several horizontal slices of the atmosphere, providing information about temperature, wind movements and cloud heights. The data are transmitted to a command center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which processes the raw data, then transmits the information back through the satellite to the National Hurricane Center.

  The GOES dataset is but one element in a vast array of statistical and imaging data that goes into making a hurricane forecast. Computer models take into account global weather patterns, large pressure differences and wind movements, moisture levels and sea-surface temperatures. Forecasters use data from nearly fifty-thousand daily wind readings from jetliners, some four-thousand land stations worldwide, thousands of ships and fixed buoys that measure ocean temperatures, and perishable balloons released twice daily around the world to sample the upper atmosphere.

  In a message to Congress in May 1961, President Kennedy proposed putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. The same message also requested $53 million to develop and deploy a system of weather satellites to monitor the atmosphere around the globe. The first geostationary satellite began snapping half-globe pictures in 1966.

  But nothing did more to allow forecasters to improve their accuracy than the increase in computer capabilities. Before any forecast is made, incoming data is processed by a half-dozen computer models, each using a different method to forecast a storm’s movement and strength.

  The premier program since 1995 has been the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model, developed over two decades and tested for three years. The GFDL creates a grid of data points showing wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity. By measuring thermodynamic activity at various locations—how the air is warmed, cooled and condensed—the program predicts rainfall by projecting the grid forward. Heavy rainfall and a warming core indicate strengthening.

  The GFDL also looks at the steering winds around the storm. It understands that less intense hurricanes tend to be influenced more by these bullying winds, which push the storm around as if it were a weak child on a playground. Stronger hurricanes, in turn, fight back harder and tend to be more determined about where they want to go. The GFDL uses complex mathematical formulas to incorporate these broader elements of atmospheric physics and the interaction of the storm with the ocean.

  But predicting any storm’s exact track is like trying to estimate the precise path of a leaf as it floats down a river. Each shift in the current of the river changes the course of the leaf. And while the atmosphere’s rivers of air behave like rivers of water, they change constantly as they interact with other rivers, as global pressure differences—created by differences in heating of the equator and the poles by the sun—are created and equalized.

  Even if forecasters could measure all these major forces, there are still the butterflies.

  In 1961, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was running a theoretical computer model for weather prediction. He had stopped the program mid-stream and, to save paper, printed the status out to only three decimal places—plenty significant, he thought, to maintain accuracy.

  When he restarted the program, Lorenz typed in .506 instead of .506127, the more accurate number the program would have retained. The miniscule difference, which Lorenz likened to the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings, changed the outcome of the program dramatically over time. Lorenz deduced that it would never be possible to predict the weather accurately with such a dynamic set of initial conditions, the ever-changing atmosphere. His work laid the foundation for the development of the theory of chaos.

  This chaotic nature of the atmosphere causes the GFDL and other models to sometimes make wildly varying predictions, especially in forecast periods beyond twenty-four hours.

  The trick to forecasting is in predicting the steering winds around the storm. To understand the steering winds, of course, one has to measure them, and there aren’t a whole lot of measuring stations in the middle of the Atlantic.

  That is the GFDL’s biggest shortcoming. In the center of a modeled storm, the data points are about eleven miles apart. This high density of data is provided largely by the frequent passes through the storm’s center by the Hurricane Hunters. Further from the center (and ahead of the storm) the data points become more sparse, relying on buoys, ships, and land-based measuring systems, so the GFDL model is focused intensely on where the storm is. It’s a model with a splendid brain, but its head is down and it isn’t paying sufficient attention to where it is going. The model’s myopia is a shortcoming forecasters hope to correct with a model now undergoing testing, the LOng RAnge eXtrapolation Hurricane Model, known simply as the LORAX.

  The GOES satellite provides the data needed to look ahead. Invisible to the naked eye, water vapor in the air moves with the wind. Time-sequenced satellite images reveal wind speed and direction. In the original GFDL model, nobody had figured out how to interpret the altitude associated with the water vapor images. Even if the data had been available to the GFDL, the old Cray C-90 computer would have been incapable of handling the data load. Now both problems have been solved. The nested grid of data points has been expanded hundreds of miles in front of the storm, forming a long-range view of the storm’s movement and intensity. Though it is not yet operational, the LORAX is “looking up.”

>   ~ ~ ~

  Wednesday, August 25

  CHAPTER 17

  Miami suburbs

  8:05 a.m.

  Amanda had hoped to sleep in. She needed it. Instead, she dreamt of Sarah being swept away by Gert, of Rico trying to save her, of Jack giving her a warm kiss and of not having the will to stop and help her own daughter.

  She woke in her small home at five with that feeling of having been awake most of the night. Once she sorted the dream out, she realized how much she wanted Jack Corbin, his long dark hair, his honesty, his passion. She wondered if it could ever work, if either of them could ever slow down long enough to let a relationship develop. Sarah came first, that was certain. And Amanda couldn’t imagine giving up her job—her life, her independence—for anyone, not even Jack Corbin. She wanted him. But…

  Her mind had been stuck in that circle for three hours as the earth rotated the sun into view out her bedroom window.

  Finally, she gave up and showered, let thoughts of Harvey take her mind off the intractable puzzle of mixing love with motherhood. She downloaded the latest:

  BULLETIN

  HURRICANE HARVEY ADVISORY NUMBER 46

  NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MIAMI FL

  8 AM EDT WED AUG 25

  … HURRICANE HARVEY THREATENS THE BAHAMAS …

  A HURRICANE WARNING IS IN EFFECT FOR THE NORTHWESTERN BAHAMAS. A HURRICANE WATCH AND A TROPICAL STORM WARNING ARE IN EFFECT FOR THE CENTRAL BAHAMAS… FROM ACKLINS ISLAND TO CAT ISLAND.

  A HURRICANE WATCH IS IN EFFECT FROM NORTH OF MATANZAS INLET FLORIDA TO CAPE FEAR NORTH CAROLINA.

  AT 8 AM EDT… 1200Z… THE CENTER OF HURRICANE HARVEY WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 23.2 NORTH… LONGITUDE 70.1 WEST OR ABOUT 470 MILES… 750 KM… EAST-SOUTHEAST OF NASSAU.