Blowin' in the wind

Watching the news as Hurricane Ike heads down on the southeast Texas coast. Weather is fascinating especially something huge like this. We can only hope those souls are tough enough and aware enough to survive it. A former dear friend of mine is directly in the path at this hour, though she lives farther northwest in Austin.

The insightful news heads are reporting the storm at this point is a cartegory 2 hurricane, saying it might go to category 3. Now get this: the upper limit for a category 2 is 111 mph winds. Sustained winds being reported right now are 110. You have to wonder how much worse that 1 mph makes it. That is the problem with categorizing anything, you impose strict limits that might under or overstate the actuality.

For example, the weather service calls it a storm at 63 knots and a hurricane at 64 knots. Here is an anecdote about what a difference that makes.

I wrote a story years ago about a storm that tore through the Aleutian Islands. One of the sources was Peggy Dyson who lives in Kodiak. Her husband Oscar was one of the original king crab fishermen. He made his millions and got out before it crashed. An orginial “Deadliest Catch” guy. In those days there was very little weather forecasting in the Bering Sea, so Peggy got a serious single sideband radio and called Oscar twice a day with a weather report. In time other fishermen began listening in, too. Then came the requests: “It’s our anniversary, could you send some flowers to my wife?” The weather service knew a gem when they heard one and eventually hired her and set her up as the broadcast station for weather in Alaska waters. No one on the ocean missed Peggy on 4125 at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. and her call “Hello, all mariners.” There was something comforting just in her voice, She could forcast the most unimagineable bad weather in the same voice she might tell you the cat had kittens. (Not like these new talking heads who have to inject drama and outrage with inflection in every news story they report.)

So, for a storm story in the Aleutians, she seemed the perfect source. She told me basically what she knew and then came this anecdote. Now, you have to understand this storm actually blew the house (cabin) off a fishing boat. A fisherman who weathered it went in to see Peggy when he returned to Kodiak. And this was why. According to her, in a very angry voice he told her, “Damn it Peggy, we get 110 knot winds out there all the time. But you went and called it a hurricane and scared the hell out of everybody.”