by Sarah J. Blake
September 2, 2005
My roomies had evacuated and gone to St. Louis for the week. Of course, they turned off the power, hoping that the neighbors would go in and turn it back on if the storm moved away. The neighbors were not able to find the fuse box. All the food in the refridgerator spoiled. The refridgerator was ruined, and the house stank until the refridgerator was replaced.
I did not go back until the end of September, after hurricane Jeanne came through on its way out into the Gulf of Mexico. When I arrived, there was quite a site to greet me. A tree had fallen and blocked the front entrance; and it had been chopped and stacked at the end of the walk leading to the street. The pile was so big that probably 15 people could have held hands and circled around it. I could see it from the front porch--and since my vision is very poor, this is very telling.
The tree disturbed me. Amy and I had stood on the porch during the afternoon and recorded the wind from hurricane Frances. As I stood looking at the tree and remembered Christy describing the sound of it falling, I realized that it had been the grace of God that kept it standing while my roommate and I stood in that very spot, fascinated by the wind from the previous storm. Perhaps the tree only came down because Frances had weakened it previously. I don't know... I only know that I can never stand outside during a storm again. It was a very foolish thing to do even though it helped me to understand what a hurricane is.
I always thought that a hurricane was a circular storm with a constantly blowing wind of so many miles per hour. This was part of the reason for my fascination while standing on the porch: I expected constant howling. This isn't what a hurricane is at all. It's a series of storms that form a circular pattern with a calm center. The storms come in bands, and there are sometimes relatively calm spaces in between some of the bands. The wind would die down during these lulls and then pick up suddenly as the bands passed over. Some of the bands are light, and some are very furious. This is why meteorologists say that "maximum sustained winds" are so many miles per hour. Sustained winds may last minutes or longer periods of time. There is no way to know how long a sustained wind will last; but it is longer than a gust, which lasts a few seconds. Within the bands, individual storms may move in completely different directions from that of the storm system as a whole or from the band itself. A hurricane is not one massive storm. It is a storm system.
The other thing I learned while standing outside is that the wind speed is different in the tree tops than it is on the ground. This can make a significant difference to the tree--trees tend to be strongest near the bottom, but the wind speed is greater in the air in a hurricane. So it causes the trees to snap. This can cause only limbs to break off, but if a tree is heavy at the top and the wind is extremely strong it can bring the tree up from the roots. The location of a weakness in the tree can make a difference.