The Perfect Storm

by Sebastian Junger

  October 28th is a sharp, sunny day in Boston, temperatures in the fifties with a stiff wind blowing off the ocean. A senior meteorologist named Bob Case is crisscrossing the carpeted room, consulting with the various meteorologists on duty that day. Most of them are seated at heavy blue consoles staring resolutely at columns of numbers—barometric pressure, dew-point, visibility—scrolling down computer screens. Behind the aviation desk is a bank of hotline phones: State Emergency Management, Regional Circuit, and Hurricane. Twice a day the State Emergency Management phone rings and someone in the office sprints to pick it up. It’s the state testing its ability to warn people of a nuclear strike.

  Case is a fit, balding man in his mid-fifties. A satellite photo of a hurricane about to clobber the coast of Maryland hangs in his office. He is responsible for issuing regional forecasts based on satellite imagery and a nationwide system called the Limited Fine Mesh, a grid superimposed on a map of the country where the corners represent data-collection points. Twice a day hundreds of LFM weather balloons are released to measure temperature, dewpoint, barometric pressure, and windspeed, and relay the information back by theodolite. The balloons rise to 60,000 feet and then burst, allowing the instruments to float back to earth on parachutes. When people find them, they mail them back to the Weather Service. The data from the LFM, plus input from a thousand or so other ground sites around the country, is fed into huge Cray computers at the National Meteorological Center in Camp Springs, Maryland. The computers run numerical models of the atmosphere and then spit forecasts back out to regional offices, where they are amended by local meteorologists. Humans still “add value” to a forecast, as meteorologists say. There is an intuitive element to forecasting that even the most powerful computers cannot duplicate.

  Since early the previous day, Case has been watching something called a “short-wave trough aloft” slide eastward from the Great Lakes. On satellite photos it looks like an S-curve in the line of clear dry air moving south from Canada. Cold air is denser than warm air, and huge, slow undulations develop along the boundary between them and roll eastward—on their side, as it were—much like an ocean swell. The undulation gets more and more pronounced until the “crest” gets separated from the rest of the warm front and just starts to spin around itself. This is called a cutoff low, or an occluded front. Air gets sucked in toward the center, the system spins faster and faster, and within hours you have a storm.

  The mechanics of a hurricane are fundamentally the same as a cutoff low, but their origins differ: hurricanes brew in the lukewarm waters around the equator. When the sun hits the equator it hits it dead-on, a square-foot beam of light heating up exactly one square foot of water. The farther north or south you are, the lower the angle of the sun and the more water a square foot of sunlight must heat up; as a result the water doesn’t heat up as much. The equatorial sea cooks all summer and evaporates huge amounts of water into the air. Evaporated water is unstable and contains energy in the same way that a boulder on top of a hill does—one small push unleashes a huge destructive force. Likewise, a drop in air temperature causes water vapor to precipitate out as rain and release its latent energy back into the atmosphere. The air above one square foot of equatorial water contains enough latent energy to drive a car two miles. A single thunderstorm could supply four days’ worth of the electrical power needed by the United States.

  Warm air is less dense than cool air; it rises off the surface of the ocean, cools in the upper atmosphere, and then dumps its moisture before rushing back to earth. Huge cumulus clouds develop over the zones of rising air, with thunder, lightning, and terrifically strong rain. As long as there’s a supply of warm water, the thunderstorm sustains itself, converting moisture into sheeting rain and downdraft winds. Other thunderclouds might line up along the leading edge of a cold front into a “squall line,” a towering convective engine that stretches from horizon to horizon.

  Hurricanes start when a slight kink—a disturbance in the trade winds, a dust storm blowing out to sea off the Sahara—develops in the upper-level air. The squall line starts to rotate around the kink, drawing in warm, volatile air and sending it up the gathering vortex at its center. The more air that gets drawn in, the faster it spins, and the more water is evaporated off the ocean. The water vapor rises up the core of the system and releases rain and latent heat. Eventually the system starts spinning so fast that inward-spiralling air can no longer overcome the centrifugal force and make it into the center. The eye of the storm has formed, a column of dry air surrounded by a solid wall of wind. Tropical birds get trapped inside and cannot escape. A week later, after the system has fallen apart, frigate birds and egrets might find themselves over Newfoundland, say, or New Jersey.

  A mature hurricane is by far the most powerful event on earth; the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don’t contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day. A typical hurricane encompasses a million cubic miles of atmosphere and could provide all the electric power needed by the United States for three or four years. During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds surpassed 200 miles an hour and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles. So much rain can fall during a hurricane—up to five inches an hour—that the soil liquefies. Hillsides slump into valleys and birds drown in flight, unable to shield their upward-facing nostrils. In 1970, a hurricane drowned half a million people in what is now Bangladesh. In 1938, a hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under ten feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact five thousand miles away.

  A lesser version of that is heading toward the Grand Banks: Hurricane Grace, a late-season fluke that still contains enough energy to crank another storm system off the chart. Ordinarily, Grace would come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas, but the same cold front that spawned the short-wave trough aloft also blocks her path on shore. (Cold air is very dense, and warm weather systems tend to bounce off them like beach balls off a brick wall.) According to atmospheric models generated by the Cray computers in Maryland, Grace will collide with the cold front and be forced northward, straight into the path of the short-wave trough. Wind is simply air rushing from an area of high pressure to an area of low; the greater the pressure difference, the faster it blows. An Arctic cold front bordering a hurricane-fortified low will create a pressure gradient that meteorologists may not see in their lifetime.

  Ultimately, the engine behind all of this activity is the jet stream, a river of cold upper-level air that screams around the globe at thirty or forty thousand feet. Storms, cold fronts, short-wave troughs—they’re all dragged eastward sooner or later by upper-level winds. The jet stream is not steady; it convulses like a loose firehose, careening off mountains, veering across plains. These irregularities create continent-sized eddies that come ballooning out of the Arctic as deep cold fronts. They are called anticyclones because the cold air in them flows outwards and clockwise, the opposite of a low. It is along the leading edge of these anticyclones that low-pressure waves sometimes develop; occasionally, one of these waves will intensify into a major storm. Why, and when, is still beyond the powers of science to predict. It typically happens over areas where a leg of the jet stream collides with subtropical air—the Great Lakes, the Gulf Stream off Hatteras, the southern Appalachians. Since air flows counterclockwise around these storms, the winds come out of the northeast as they move offshore. For that reason they’re known as “nor’easters.” Meteorologists have another name for them. They call them “bombs.”

  The first sign of the storm comes late on October 26th, when satellite images reveal a slight bend in the leading edge of the cold front over western Indiana. The bend is a pocket of low barometric pressure—a short-wave trough—imbedded in the wall of the cold front at around 20,000 feet. It’s the embryo of a storm. The trough moves east at forty miles an hour
, strengthening as it goes. It follows the Canadian border to Montreal, cuts east across northern Maine, crosses the Bay of Fundy, and traverses Nova Scotia throughout the early hours of October 28th. By dawn an all-out gale is raging north of Sable Island. The upper-level trough has disintegrated, to be replaced by a sea-level low, and warm air is rising out the top of the system faster than it can be sucked in at the bottom. That is the definition of a strengthening storm. The barometric pressure is dropping more than a millibar an hour, and the Sable Island storm is sliding away fast to the southeast with sixty-five-knot winds and thirty-foot seas. It’s a tightly packed low that Billy Tyne, two hundred miles away, can’t even feel yet.

  The Canadian Government maintains a data buoy seventy miles east of Sable Island, at 43.8 north and 57.4 west, just short of Billy’s position. It is simply known as buoy #44139; there are eight others like it between Boston and the Grand Banks. They relay oceanographic information back to shore on an hourly basis. Throughout the day of October 28th, buoy #44139 records almost no activity whatsoever—dinghy-sailing weather on the high seas. At two o’clock the needle jumps, though: suddenly the seas are twelve feet and the winds are gusting to fifteen knots. That in itself is nothing, but Billy must know he has just seen the first stirrings of the storm. The wind calms down again and the seas gradually subside, but a few hours later another weather report creaks out of the radiofax:

  WARNINGS. HURRICANE GRACE MOVING E 5 KTS MXIMUM WINDS 65 KTS GUSTING TO 80 NEAR CENTER. FORECAST DANGEROUS STORM WINDS 50 TO 75 KTS AND SEAS 25 TO 35 FT.

  Billy’s at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into the mouth of meteorological hell. For the next hour the sea is calm, horribly so. The only sign of what’s coming is the wind direction; it shirts restlessly from quadrant to quadrant all afternoon. At four o’clock it’s out of the southeast. An hour later it’s out of the south-southwest. An hour after that it’s backed around to due north. It stays that way for the next hour, and then right around seven o’clock it starts creeping into the northeast. And then it hits.

  It’s a sheer change; the Andrea Gail enters the Sable Island storm the way one might step into a room. The wind is instantly forty knots and parting through the rigging with an unnerving scream. Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don’t want to hear. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she’d never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child.

  By eight o’clock the barometric pressure has dropped to 996 millibars and shows no sign of levelling off. That means the storm is continuing to strengthen and create an even greater vacuum at its center. Nature, as everyone knows, abhors a vacuum, and will try to fill it as fast as possible. The waves catch up with the wind speed around eight PM and begin increasing exponentially; they double in size every hour. After nine o’clock every graph line from data buoy #44139 starts climbing almost vertically. Maximum wave heights peak at forty-five feet, drop briefly, and then nearly double to seventy. The wind climbs to fifty knots by nine PM and gradually keeps increasing until it peaks at 58 knots. The waves are so large that they block the anemometer, and gusts are probably reaching ninety knots. That’s 104 miles an hour—Gale Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The cables are moaning.

  Minutes after the evening weather report, Tommy Barrie raises Tyne on the single sideband. Barries from Florida, a solid, square-shouldered guy with slicked-back hair and a voice like a box of rocks. He wants to know, of all things, how much gear to fish that night. He’s six hundred miles to the east and figures he might as well squeeze in as much fishing as he can. The conversation, as Barrie remembers it, is brief and to-the-point:

  We’re over here around the forty-six, Billy. What’s it look like?

  It’s blowin’ fifty to eighty and the seas are thirty feet. It was calm for a while, but now it’s startin’ to come on pretty good. I’m 130 miles east of Sable.

  Okay, we’re gonna keep the gear in the boat but let’s talk at eleven. Maybe we’ll throw a little bit of gear in late.

  All right, I’ll give you a check after the weather. I’ll tell you what’s goin’ on out here.

  We’ll be standin’ by.

  After talking to Barrie, Billy picks up the microphone on his single sideband and issues one last message to the fleet: She’s comin’ on boys, and she’s comin’ on strong. The position he’d given Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden—44 north, 56.4 west—is a departure from his original heading. It appears to be more the heading of a man bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, or maybe even Louisbourg, Cape Breton Island, than Gloucester, Massachusetts. Louisbourg is only 250 miles to the northeast, a twenty-four-hour drive with the seas at their stern. Maybe Billy, having looked down the barrel of the gun, has decided to dodge north like Johnston. Or maybe he’s worried about fuel, or needs to pick up ice, or decides that the cold countercurrent inside Sable is starting to look pretty good.

  Whatever the reason, Billy changes course sometime before six PM and neglects to tell the rest of the fleet. They all assume he’s headed straight for Gloucester. Albert Johnston on the Mary T, Tommy Barrie on the Allison, and Linda Greenlaw on the Hannah Boden all hear Billy Tyne’s six o’clock bulletin on the weather. Only Linda is worried—“Those boys sounded scared and we were scared for them,” she says. The rest of the fleet is more nonchalant. “We live in this stuff for years and years,” says Barrie. “You have to look at the charts, listen to the weather, talk to the other boats, and make a decision on your own. You can’t just go out there and wait for nice weather.”

  * * *

  THE storm is centered around Sable Island, but its far western edges are already brushing the New England coast. The Satori—now too far offshore to abort the trip—starts to feel the storm as early as Sunday morning. Another wall of fog moves in from Georges Bank and the barometer starts a slow downward slide that can only mean something very big is on the way. The Satori is at the top of the Great South Channel, off Cape Cod, and working her way through an increasingly restless and uneasy sea. Stimpson mentions the weather forecasts again, but Leonard insists there’s no reason to worry. By Sunday morning the swells start to mound up in ominous, chaotic ways, and that afternoon, when Stimpson tunes in to the NOAA weather broadcast, she feels the first stabs of fear: NORTHEAST WIND 30 TO 40 KNOTS, AVERAGE SEAS EIGHT TO FIFTEEN FEET, VISIBILITY UNDER TWO MILES IN RAIN.

  By nightfall the wind swings out of the northeast, as predicted, and starts to climb steadily up the Beaufort scale. It’s clear that both the Satori and the boat she left Portsmouth with are in for a bad night. The two crews talk every hour or so over the VHF, but by midnight on Sunday, the air is so highly charged that the radios are useless. Around eleven o’clock Stimpson takes one last call from the other boat—We’re having a rough time and have lost gear on deck—and they’re not heard from again. The Satori heads alone into the night, straining crazily up the swells and struggling to maintain steerageway.

  Monday dawns a full gale, the seas building to twenty feet and the wind shearing ominously through the rigging. The sea takes on a grey, marbled look, like bad meat. Stimpson tells Leonard that she really thinks it’s going to be a bad one, but he insists it’ll blow itself out in twenty-four hours. I don’t think so, Ray, Stimpson tells him, I’ve got a bad feeling. She and Leonard and Bylander eat chili cooked by Stimpson’s mother and spend as much time as possible below deck, out of the weather. The navigation table is across from the galley on the starboard side, and Bylander sets herself up as the communications person, monitoring the radar and weather forecasts and tracking their position by GPS.
A dash into shore would be risky now, across shipping lanes and dangerous shoal waters, so they reef down the sails and keep to open sea.

  Monday night the storm crosses offshore and the “first stage wind surge” passes over the Satori. NOAA weather radio reports that conditions will ease off briefly and then deteriorate again as the storm swings back toward the coast. By then, though, the Satori might be far enough south to escape its full wrath. They wallow on through Monday night, the barometer rising slightly and the wind easing off to the northeast; but then late that night, like a bad fever, it comes on again. The wind climbs to fifty knots and the seas rise up in huge dark mountains behind the boat. The crew take turns at the helm, clipped into a safety line, and occasionally take a breaking sea over the cockpit. The barometer crawls downward all night, and by dawn the conditions are worse than anything Stimpson has ever seen in her life. For the first time, she starts thinking seriously about dying at sea.

  Meanwhile, five hundred miles to the east, the sword fleet is getting slammed. On Albert Johnston’s boat, the crew is so terrified that they just watch videos. Johnston stays at the helm and drinks a lot of coffee; like most captains, he’s loath to relinquish the helm unless the weather calms down a bit. On the Andrea Gail, Billy probably takes the helm while the rest of the crew go below and try to forget about it. Some guys get stoned, which keeps them calm, and some sleep, or try to. Others just lie on their bunks and think about their families, or their girlfriends, or how much they wish this wasn’t happening.

  “I picture it like this,” says Charlie Reed, trying to imagine the last evening aboard the Andrea Gail. “The guys are down below readin’ books, and every now and then the boat takes a big sea on the side. They run up to the wheelhouse and ask, ‘Hey, what’s goin’ on, Cap?’ and Billy says something like, ‘Well, we’re gettin’ there, boys, we’re gettin’ there.’ If Billy’s goin’ downsea it has to be an awful frightening ride. Sometimes you come off the top of one of those waves and it just kinda leaves out from under you. The boat just drops. It’s better to take the seas head-on—at least that way you can see what’s comin’ at you. That’s about all you can do.”