Oh, Mother!
Just before Charley and Frances wreaked havoc on Florida and surrounding states, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reiterated its original spring 2004 Atlantic hurricane outlook by calling for 12 to 15 tropical storms, with six to eight becoming hurricanes, and two to four of these becoming major hurricanes. These experts predicted a 90 percent probability of an above-to-near normal season and only a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season.
While forecasters have shown impressive skill in predicting the seasonal activity as a whole, they can’t predict whether a given locality will be hit by a hurricane. They also can’t prevent or redirect hurricanes they know are coming.
However, scientists and others have investigated ways to lessen the impact of major storms on human life and property. In the early 1960s, the hopes of those seeking to eradicate the hurricane were boosted by advances in cloud seeding processes by Dr. Robert H. Simpson, director of the National Hurricane Research Labs in Miami, and by a team at the Navy Weapons Center in California. (Simpson —who is no relation— is the same man who created the classification system known as the Saffir-Simpson Scale that measures hurricanes.) Encouraged by these developments, in 1962 the government created Project Stormfury to test the ideas in real hurricane situations. But Mother Nature didn’t cooperate. Over the next eight years there weren’t any storms far enough from populated areas to safely experiment with seeding. Then in 1969 came Hurricane Debby, who showed up shortly after Hurricane Camille slammed the Gulf Coast near Mississippi and Alabama. The Stormfury team seeded Hurricane Debby several times over a two-day period. The seeding was initially credited with substantially reducing Debby’s winds. But in the final analysis scientists were not totally certain whether the seeding or other environmental factors caused the winds to slow. Project Stormfury was cancelled in 1980.
American business, too, has had its eye on the storm. A Florida inventor, Peter Cordani—originally from Smithtown, N.Y.—has been attempting for years to get federal research dollars to further his hurricane mitigation product, Dyn-o-Gel. Dyn-o-Gel is a compound that absorbs water—much the way his company’s other products absorb oil and hazard spills. Cordani maintains that if enough of the gel is directed at the storm, the storm can be drained of its strength. A few years ago, a government-backed computer test showed he might be right; however, since then enthusiasm has waned as there was no way to get the thousands of tons of gel needed into the sky. But don’t bet Cordani out yet; he’s reportedly working on the plane that could do it.
Already this year, storms have taken thousands of lives and caused billions in property loss. The insurance industry, government, charitable organizations and others work hard to help communities and families rebuild after the storms, but maybe more could be done to prevent them from happening in the first place. Is it time to rejuvenate Project Stormfury or other efforts to slow storms in their tracks?
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature but she isn’t very nice herself sometimes.