Science and technology being applied to deal with them today. After that, Prime Ministers questions from the british house of commons. Then a campaign profile of joe biden. Host eric jay dolin, in your new book about hurricane history i , thought it would be interesting to start our discussion with one of the stories you tell because its the deadliest hurricane in American History and also the 120th anniversary. Eric in early september, a hurricane was fully making its way across the atlantic going inbetween cuba and florida, but the local meterologists in galveston, texas, isaac kline, based on his understanding of how hurricanes operated, he had told residents of galveston that the odds of a hurricane hitting galveston are virtually nil. The laws of hurricanes indicate that hurricanes would rarely hit texas. They were lulled into a false sense of complacency. As the hurricane got closer and closer. Isaac kline became more and more alarmed. It was really up to the Headquarters Office of the Weather Bureau in washington, d. C. To decide whether or not a hurricane was coming and whether or not you needed to put up hurricanes warning flags. The local meterologists such as isaac kline had left latitude in calling the shots. So on the morning of september 8, a saturday morning, he started to notice that the water and the waves and the winds coming off the gulf of mexico were getting stronger and stronger and he got quite concerned. There was no calling for a hurricane. The Weather Bureau hadnt indicated a hurricane was coming, but isaac was quite concerned and he relayed his concerns to the Weather Bureau, but by the time that he did so, the storm was so bad, that the telephone lines had been knocked out, so by that time, galveston was becoming inundated with an enormous storm surge and part of the problem that isaac klines view is that he and other meterologists didnt understand the importance of storm surge. He thought that if the hurricane ever came near galveston, the waters are very shallow offshore, the waves would break and most of the water would travel around galveston into the lands and bay behind it. Because he didnt understand storm surge and as this massive category 4 hurricane was coming into galveston, it was pushing an enormous wave, an enormous mound of water and that mound of water with the waves crashing and tumbling on top of it had slammed into galveston that day and essentially turned galveston into a lake, massive destruction, houses were torn apart. At least 6,000 people died on that day, but because it was tourist season and people were visiting from other parts of the United States and the world, well never know the exact number and some estimates have it as high as 10,000 or 12,000 people dying on that day. As you noted, it is the worst Natural Disaster ever to hit the United States by far and its a hurricane that every year, when we have Hurricane Season, there are always stories on the great galveston hurricane of 1900 because it was so horrific and the story behind it and the failure to warn the residents of galveston in advance of the hurricane makes for tragic and dramatic reading. Prior to the hurricane, it was quite the community, you described it as the wall street of the southwest. What was its recovery like . Eric well, it was really levelled and part of the problem was that a few years after the hurricane of 1900, galveston, before the hurricane struck was to be the leading port in the United States. It was already the second or third and it wanted to be the leading port. They just dredged the harbor so larger ships could come in, but the hurricane basically knocked them back to square one and worse for them, houston soon thereafter became the leading port of texas because of the discovery of black gold or oil in texas and so development passed galveston by to a certain extent. It was an important port, but it was knocked on its heels. The people of galveston decided it was necessary to rebuild and to fortify their city against hurricanes that they knew would come in the future. So they unshelved a project that had been razed years before and that was for building a sea wall around galveston. Not only did they build an enormous sea wall around galveston, they jacked up all of the buildings in galveston by quite a few feet and then they took sand from offshore and filled in the area under these buildings, so essentially the profile of galveston was much higher than it was on the eve of the hurricane in 1900 and not only that, they had an enormous sea wall to keep them from being buffetted by the storm surge and waves that worked quite well because in 1915, another major hurricane struck galveston, but the death toll was far, far less, it was in the 10s and 20s and the destruction of housing was much less than what had kurd what had occurred in 1900. So their investment was a wise one. Throughout the book, there are stories of both economic and Racial Discrimination on populations and the preparation and aftermath of hurricanes. Tell me a story from galveston that illustrates that. Eric galveston has black residents and white residents, an affluent community and middle class and poor people as well. After the hurricane, they had to collect the dead bodies and many black men at gunpoint were forced to do this horrific deed. Also, there were a lot of people wandering around shellshocked essentially and although there was probably a little bit of looting that took place, it was not widespread. Nevertheless, the National Media started to run with numerous stories of ghouls wandering around galveston, cutting off peoples fingers and ears and many of them being shot. One report has these ghoulish individuals who are almost always identified as black men wandering around. One indicated that 75 of them had been shot dead. However, more sober observers including the editors of some of the local newspapers said that that was all extremely exaggerated, maybe a few people were shot dead because they were looting and the looting was divided equally if at all between blacks and whites. But that was just reflecting the racial stereotypes of the day, these reports that these black ghouls wandering around stripping people of their possessions. As a writer, how did you get interested about writing a book about hurricane history . Eric every book that i have written has been on a topic that i came up with except for two. The way i came up with topics is just whatever interests me. Its like brownie in motion. I write one book and i read something while researching that book that has an interest in another book. I have loved marine biology, but the two books that i didnt come up with the topic for are my white house book, that was proposed by my editor and this book. I had long thought about writing a book about a hurricane, a single hurricane and the most likely candidates were the galveston hurricane of 1900 and the great hurricane of 1938 which plowed into long island and then into new england where i happen to live. But there was a problem. Both of those hurricanes were very well known and both of them have had wonderful books written about them. So i decided that i didnt want to write yet another book on one of those two hurricanes and add to the literature, stuff that was already there essentially, so i criticized my hurricane i put aside my hurricane idea and wrote a book on pirates. After the season, the Hurricane Season of 2017 as you and your listeners will remember was the Hurricane Season from hell, thats when hurricanes harvey, irma and maria pummelled the United States and cumulatively caused 265 billion worth of damage. After that Hurricane Season came through, again, my editor and the head of sales thought, you know, a book on the history of americas hurricanes would be fascinating and they thought that i would be just the person to do it because a lot of my books span multiple centuries and require the synthesis of huge amounts of information into a popular narrative. So they reached out to my agent and my agent sent me an email saying, hey, would you like to write a book on the history of hurricanes. I didnt say yes right away. I took about a month to go off and read a bunch of books on hurricanes and to see if i could get a vision of what the overall book would look like. After doing that research, i was totally onboard. I said yes, and i wrote a proposal and the rest is history. Thats where the book came from. So in addition to the research that you did that you just described, did you travel for your experience, did you do any things such as visiting noaas Weather Center or going up in a hurricane with airplanes . Eric i did not. I wrote a book on whaling, never harpooned a whale, i wrote a book on the history of the fur trade, never trapped a beaver. I wrote a history on white on lighthouses, and i had only seen one lighthouse before working on that. I didnt go up in a plane nor did i ask to. I did not visit the National Hurricane center, but i had the benefit of being able to track down enormous quantities of information and documents and reports written by Hurricane Hunter pilots and people that were onboard, things that were written and visual accounts of National Hurricane center meterologists doing their jobs. So i dont feel that the book, you know, suffered at all from me not having experienced directly with going up in a Hurricane Hunter plane or visiting the National Hurricane center. Also, i have to add that i have never lived through a major hurricane or a niner hurricane. I have only lived through the tail end of hurricanes. When Hurricane Sandy came up and plowed into new jersey and new york, i certainly felt it up here in marblehead, massachusetts, and hurricane bob in 1991 and hurricane gloria, so i felt the outer effects of hurricanes, but i have never had an experience like which i talk about many times in the book. People who have suffered a direct strike of a hurricane. And although i have heard from many people already who read the book, who have lived through hurricanes and have that experience that so many people who have lived through hurricanes have of denoting life before the hurricane and after the hurricane and ive been very happily not surprised, but i have been very happy for me to hear from readers who have lived through hurricanes telling me they enjoyed the way that i described the hurricanes and have felt their memories flooding back. One tradition you note in the book is your daughter does illustrations for you, the palm trees being whipped. How did that get started . Eric that started with my book, brilliant beacons, the history of the american lighthouse. I work on these books for two years. My daughter was a teenager at the time and lived at home. She is a good painter and often painted with her grandmother who is a professional painter. I was getting near the end of brilliant beacons. I guess my daughter was tired of me spending so much time in my office which you see behind me, it is our converted garage. One weekend she had a painting class with her grandmother. She took a photograph of the edgartown lighthouse with her. During that day she painted an 18 by 20inch painting of the edgartown lighthouse and gave it to me later that day. She said, dad, this is an incentive to get you to finish this book faster. I framed it and put it up on the wall and i decided we should start a tradition. For black flag blue waters when i was getting near the end of the book, i said, lily, i need a painting. She went off and painted a small painting of a pirate ship looking for its next victim and that appeared in black flag, blue waters. For this book, a fewious sky, i was near the end of the book. She was living in new york city at the time. She came home for a weekend. Went over to her grandmothers studio and painted this weekend of palm trees being buffetted by Hurricane Force winds and that made it into the book. Its a nice tradition, a lot of meaning for me and actually when i give talks, especially here in new england, people always ask me, where is your daughters painting, those people have read multiple books of mine now are getting used to the fact that one of lilys paintings is going to be in there. I wanted to run through fairly quickly some basic facts about hurricanes with you that you detail in the book. First of all, what is the actual definition of a hurricane . Eric a hurricane is a violent swirling storm with winds of at least, sustained winds of at least 74 Miles Per Hour and there are five categories of hurricane and it gets stronger with each category as you go up. Essentially a hurricane forms, what it needs are three basic ingredients. It needs warm Ocean Temperatures of about 80 degrees fahrenheit down to 150 feet and that provides massive amounts of heat energy needed to fuel the storm. Two other conditions for a hurricane to form to keep being ripped apart are low vertical wind shear. You dont want winds at different heights going different directions, it will tilt the hurricane over or rip it apart. You also need an abundance of warm moist air coming off of the ocean. As that moist air rises, it schools and condenses into water and ice crystals. When it does that, it gives off what are called latent heat or condensation which is the heat that in turn powers the storm. They simply are the greatest storms on earth, the most powerful storms that we experience and as you know, hurricanes in different parts of the world are called different things. Here in the atlantic and eastern pacific, we call them hurricanes. In the indian ocean, they are called cyclones, in pacific ocean, typhoons, in australia, some people call them willie, willie. Theyre all the same mere logical phenomenon. You talk about the amount of energy that hurricanes actually create. Can you explain that . Eric there is wind energy and there is the energy that comes from latent heat condensation. In terms of wind energy, an average hurricane generates 200 times the annual electrical generating capacity of the world. You look at the latent heat of condensation which is what really drives the storm, an average hurricane generates 200 times the annual electrical generating capacity in the world, so these are absolutely enormous powerful and as we know often quite destructive storms. If there was only a way to capture all of that energy. Eric yes. What exactly is the eye of the hurricane and what causes it . Eric the eye of a hurricane is basically when there is a low pressure area, the moisture air rises off of the oceans surface and essentially, it doesnt create a vacuum, it creates a low pressure area. Wherever you have a low pressure area, wind or air wants to go and fill that low pressure area. As the moist air is rising in the center of the hurricane, there is wind and stuff coming in from the side. The effect sort of causes that wind to be shifted a little bit to the right. Thats where you get the swirling nature of the hurricane and the center becomes this clear, sometimes you can even see the sky above with gentle winds because what you have there, you have all of this air going up and then exiting at the top of the hurricane, but around it is this swirling mass of extremely active wind. So its just, the center of the hurricane. One small but surprising fact to me in this part of the book is that most hurricanes dont originate over water. Eric yes, most of them, about 85 or so, they start over the Sahara Desert where there is very hot air, but also there is moist air coming in from the guinea coast and from the indian ocean. And when those mix, they create very unstable areas or african easterly waves, the thunderstorms that travel towards the west and when they exit the edge of the african continent and then head over to the cape verdy islands, a certain percentage of them, a small percentage organizes to the point that it becomes a Tropical Storm which has winds of at least the same winds of at least 39 Miles Per Hour. And then a smaller percentage of those will elevate, sort of evolve to become hurricanes with winds of at least 74 Miles Per Hour. Then those cape verdy type hurricanes travel across the atlantic. Some of them dont hit land. Some of them go into the gulf of mexico or the caribbean, others go up the east coast. There are also hurricanes that originate in the gulf coast area or a low off of the Northern Edge of south america and then there are some hurricanes that originate in the middle of the atlantic ocean, but most of them are cape verdian hurricanes, most of our major hurricanes tend to be these cape verdetype hurricanes. One thing i want to mention that is really important, my book is the history of the hurricanes over 500 years. I am not a meteorologist. There is a lot of science in the book, but its described in a fairly simple way. And one of the things that this book did for me, i always had respect for meteorologists and weather forecasters, i knew their job was difficult. After reading what meteorologists have to do and the complexity of their jobs and these computer prediction models and just what goes into just making a hurricane forecast and understanding the dynamics of hurricanes, i have even more respect for meteorologists. But dont read this book if you want a detailed science lesson on meteorology of hurricanes, if you want to understand the basis, this will do a good job for you. To that end, were talking as the 2020 Hurricane Season are in full swing. In fact, there are two named storms that are heading towards the u. S. Gulf coast, what did you learn about what contributes to years like this one where there is a higher prediction, higher forecast of named storms . Eric a lot of things go into it. The most important is having warmer temperatures in the ocean. We talked about it before, the main fuel source for hurricanes is the warm water in the ocean. And we have above average temperatures in almost all of the atlantic. There are very positive conditions over africa, monsoon conditions that contribute to hurricane formation. It looks like there is going to be a la nina as opposed to a l la nino which allows stronger hurricanes to form. There are a lot of factors combined that make for the prediction. The prediction is pretty scary. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration came out with a prediction that there would be 19 to 25 named storms. Thats Tropical Storms and higher. In a normal year, there are only 12. Were beyond 12. Were on number 14 right now and weve got hurricane laura which is making a beeline for texas and louisiana and then we have briefly hurricane marco which degraded to Tropical Storm status. As we saw with hurricane, even a Tropical Storm can cause widespread devastation. People shouldnt focus on just the category level, a lot of levels go into it. While youre referencing both categories and names, can you tell the history of the naming conventions, when did that start and how theyre done . Eric yeah, that was in the late 1960s, early 1970s, a guy named herbert who was doing work in the indian ocean on developments and urban developments and he developed the wind scale which has five sort of categories. He showed that to Robert Simpson who worked at the National Hurricane center, Robert Simpson had long been looking for a convenient sort of shorthand way to give viewers and consumers of the news a way to understand the nature of the storm that was heading their way before the wind scale basically, they said it was a huge hurricane, give the wind speed, but people didnt have easy shorthand way of saying, what kind of a hurricane is this. So essentially he took the wind scale, modified it a little bit and came up with the simpson wind scale which goes from category one up to category five which are hurricanes with winds, sustained winds of 157 miles an hour or more. And were all very familiar having consumed weather news for years with the simpson wind scale and it gives us a good sense of how concerned we should be and thats why right now with hurricane lawyer which is projected to become a major hurricane, hurricane category three or higher of at least 111 miles an hour. People are getting more agitated. On average, more powerful hurricanes can do more damage. Again, dont let the hurricane category alone determine what you do if one is approaching. Even a category one storm like Hurricane Sandy that plowed into new jersey and new york can cause widespread devastation. And what about the naming conventions . The naming convention is fascinating. Thats one of the parts of the book that i enjoyed the most. You basically, early on in the 1600s and 1700s, they would just name hurricanes after the year it occurred or where it occurred, the great colonial hurricane, many hurricanes in the caribbean were named after saints. Around late 1800s, down in australia, down under, a guy named clement, a meteorologist started naming hurricanes after tahitian maidens. He mentioned one, he called her alina, a maiden who is found to cause trouble. He got in trouble, not for naming them after maidens, he was sacked after the job, he continued to report on typhoons and hurricanes but he started naming them after local politicians and saying rather nasty things about them. And that got even more of his funding cut off. We skip to 1941 when a very popular novel called storm by George Stuart was published, a National Best seller. It wasnt about a hurricane, but a storm that battled across the pacific ocean. In it, a junior meteorologist decided to name all storms after women. He sort of christened them with a name to give them a personality. He named the storm in that book maria or mariah actually. That book was sent out to g. I. S and navy men throughout the Pacific Theater during world war ii. They were very familiar with it and actually in the 1940s in the Pacific Theater, the navy and the army started naming typhoons after women. That didnt get adopted right away here in the atlantic, but in the early 1950s, the Weather Bureau decided that people were often getting confused keeping track of hurricanes, so they adopted the army navy if a phonetic alphabet, a bell, baker, charlie to name hurricanes in 1951. That lasted a few years. And partly based on the influence of georges novel storm they decided in 19 in the mid 1950s to start naming hurricanes after women. There was some pushback, a lot of women in particular doesnt like that idea. One woman said she would much rather that her house be struck by an unnamed hurricane than one named after one of her husbands former girlfriends, but despite the protestations, the Weather Bureau, the precursor to the National Weather service decided to stick with the female only naming convention. That lasted for quite a while. Then we bumped into the late 1960s when the Womens Movement was really gaining steam and one woman, roxie bolton from florida, who was the Vice President of the National Organization of women decided to speak up. She argued with the Weather Bureau and the National Weather service that they shouldnt name hurricanes after women. She was tired of reading news reports of hurricanes being referred to as vicious, treacherous, villainous and other horrible adjectives to describe them and she said that women resented being arbitrarily associated with such destruction. So she urged the Weather Service to start naming hurricanes perhaps after birds or senators or politicians who loved having things named after them. She then argued that hurricanes should be called himicanes instead. Her protests fell on deaf ears for a number of years. But then jimmy carter who got in office in 1976 and he appointed the first female secretary of commerce, juanita krepz. She was a selfdescribed feminist and took on roxie boltons cause, through the influence of the United States in 1979, we adopted the system that we all know today where hurricanes are named after men and women on an alternating basis. And if we go through 21 named storms, thats how many storms are on each list. And the names, you get a name after you become a Tropical Storm, not just a hurricane. So we go through 21 named storms, then we veer into the greek alphabet. Who knows, we might make it there this Hurricane Season if its on the worst end of what the predictions say might happen. We can only hope thats not the case. Your book as you mentioned goes through 500 years of American History of hurricanes all the way back to christopher columbus. We will not have time to cover lots of it. Let me pick out a couple of famous names. What was Benjamin Franklins contribution to understanding of hurricanes . Eric in october of 1743 when he was living in philadelphia, he was very excited because there was supposed to be a Lunar Eclipse on one night. He walked outside to take a look at this Lunar Eclipse, but then cloud cover quickly occluded his view and then a hurricane basically came down upon him, the winds coming from the northwest. Now his brother was in boston at the time, he assumed since the winds were coming from the northwest, that his brother also was disappointed in his efforts to see the Lunar Eclipse. When he heard from his brother later, his brother said, oh, we saw the Lunar Eclipse fine. It was only a couple of hours later that this massive storm descended upon us. This got Benjamin Franklin thinking if the winds are coming from the northeast, he thought that the hurricane would have come from that direction. But he started looking at newspaper accounts between philadelphia and boston and he discovered that this hurricane actually traveled from philadelphia toward boston, so he was the first person to realize that a hurricane had Forward Movement and that it could move in a direction that was different from that which the winds were blowing. So he was essentially on the left side of the hurricane with the winds coming in from the northeast. If he had been on the east side of the hurricane and the winds would have been coming from the south, the southeast. So that was a good and important contribution to understanding of hurricanes because before that time, many people thought that hurricanes didnt move much at all, generally rose or died where they were experienced. So that moved hurricane understanding forward a little bit. It wasnt until the mid 1800s that you got the next dose of understanding. Well, in the mid 1800s, samuel f. B. Morse and the invention of the telegraph, how did that revolutionize meteorology . Eric before that, it was as fast as a horse or pony express could go. Meteorologists were bemoaning not having real time information about the weather many, many miles away. All of a sudden, samuel morse with the invention of the telegraph, he became literally the lightning man because information could travel lightning quick and as long as you had wires and telegraphs set up between different locations, you could get almost instantaneous reports of what was occurring farther inland and over time, this enabled them to get a really good handle on how weather travelled over the continental United States, also with underwater cables, we could get a handle on what was happening in the caribbean before the weather made its way to the continental United States. So this helped a bit with hurricane forecasting, not as much as it did with norm normal daytoday weather forecasting which is extremely important forage cultural interests, but the problem is that the telegraph wires ended at the end of land or if there was an underground cable, they could go to islands, but you essentially were still blind as to what was happening over the broad atlantic or anywhere that was far away from the coast. So the telegraph helped a bit, but it wasnt cataclysmic in terms of forecasting hurricanes. While were staying with the history of technology, we talked earlier about the Hurricane Hunter airplanes, i have a video of a recent news story about how they work today. Lets watch that and then learn a little bit about their history. They are a crew of men and women. Given a task like no other. Were going to be sampling the wind at our altitude as well at lower levels to figure out if the storm has strength then the. The noaa Hurricane Hunters fly directly into Tropical Storms. Most importantly, we need to get the Hurricane Center information on the intensity because they can issue new advisories. We just went through the expected center of the storm. At times were about to fly into what is supposed to be the most convective corner. The ride isnt so smooth. This will probably get bumpy. This well trained and dedicated crew hardly notice. Who had the crazy idea, first of all, to fly into the eye of a hurricane . That goes to a man named Joseph Duckworth who was a naval pilot in 1943, he was the head of the bryant, texas, air station. He had formally been a pilot for Eastern Airlines in the late 1920s pilots were learning about a new way of navigating through the skies and that is instrument flying. Thats when you cant see, when there are pieces of fog or too much fog cover and you cant look at landmarks on the land or contact flying but you still want to be able to fly. That is very important during wartime. This is 1943 and he is down in bryant, texas, he has the small planes, which he uses to train the people and a hurricane forecast coming to galveston to go into texas. And on the base, the higherups decided that they were going to move the 186 texans farther in land, take them off the tarmac to protect them from the winds. There were british flying aces taking a break to learn better techniques in bryant, texas, they started making fun of the americans, they said, a big thunderstorm or a storm hits the british isles, we dont move our planes. Theyre not that fragile. They can handle that kind of punishment. And so Joseph Duckworth looked over at these british flying aces and first he disabused them of the notion that the hurricane is just a bad, bad storm. Then he realized that this might be a Good Opportunity to prove how effective instrument flying was and also to prove how strong the texans were and they could deal with the punishing beating. So he grabbed a local navigator, a navigator who was on base that day, he hopped into the plane, took off and flew through toward the hurricane. He had to check in with the galveston air tower and when the guy in the tower asked him where they were heading and they said, well, were going towards the hurricane, he said, well, tell me your name again because i want to be able to know which plane went down because youre doing something that is crazy. Youre flying directly into a hurricane. Duckworth didnt expect to go into the eye of the hurricane, but he did penetrate the wall and before he knew it, he was in the eye of the hurricane and then he came back out and he landed in the air base, word had gotten around of this historic flight and the local not local, but the naval meteorologist said you got to take me up again because i want to take notes on this. This is a historic event. Duckworth went up a second time and made it back and one thing i forgot to add that is very important, duckworth wagered with the british flying aces that if he made it there and back in one piece, they would buy him a drink of his choice at the officers club. And he did, so they saluted their chief that day with a drink. Susan so world war ii also brought us radar with airplanes and radar and the 1960s, we added satellites and computer modeling. So by the time we get to the current age, how well is the Scientific Community able to really predict what is really going to happen with a hurricane . Eric there are two things. All of the advances in what theyve done, absolutely, it means that hurricanes can no longer sneak up on them. We are able to keep a bead on them and see them from almost inception to dissolution. We are no longer surprised by hurricanes coming ashore. The exact location, perhaps, but in terms of how good they are in predicting what a hurricane is going to do, these are extremely complex meteorological events. Computer models which do millions of runs and have numerous equations, from a lot of data, cannot tell you exactly what is going to happen, especially the further out you go. Thats why whenever on the screen you see a hurricane forecast, you see this cone of uncertainty which essentially says there is a 2 3 chance that the hurricane is going to make landfall. That is when the eye intersects the coast somewhere within that column, but there is a onethird chance that it might stray farther outside of that cone. Although hurricane forecasts in the last 30 or 40 years have gotten much, much better, they are not unerring, there are still surprises that hurricanes throw at us often up until the very last minute until landfall. One of the things that is most difficult to predict is rapid intensification. Hurricanes, the labor day hurricane of 1935 in the florida keys and still to this day the most intense hurricane ever to hit the United States, that hurricane just ramped up from a category class one or two status to category five status in a very brief window of time and it was super charged by very warm waters in the caribbean. So meteorologists know a lot more about hurricanes than they did even five or 10 years ago and the forecasts are Getting Better and better, but the forecasts will never be perfect. There is going to be a limit to predictability. You tell us that florida is the postimpacted state in the United States. I would like you to briefly tell the story of one of floridas worst hurricanes that involved the bonus army and also earnest hemmingway. Eric right, that was the hurricane that i just mentioned, the labor day hurricane of 1935. After the great war, which is what they called world war i, a lot of our veterans were promised a dollar a day for every day they served if they were in the continental United States and 1. 25 a day if they served overseas. Come the mid, the early to mid 1930s, a lot of these men, all of these men hadnt been paid yet. They want to do get their money because the Great Depression had descended upon the country. These quote unquote bonus armies, thousands and thousands of men descended upon washington, d. C. To demand their money. The Hoover Administration was not particularly sympathetic. General mcarthur ran them out of town and f. D. R. Was elected, he had his own bonus army, people came into town and had tent cities near the capital. So f. D. R. Decided with hopkins, they decided to put these men to work. This is the time the civilian conservation corps and the federal emergency relief administration, so many veterans were given a job and about 700 veterans were given the job to go down to the florida keys and help build the highway from the tip of florida all the way to the end of the florida keys. A lot of the portions of that road were already there, but there were some gaps. So there were 700 veterans in florida in the keys at these different camps. It was the end of august and a hurricane was coming in. A lot of them had never experienced a hurricane, so they were kind of excited with the prospect. One of the problems is the Florida Railway had an agreement with the people working at the work camps to evacuate the men if a hurricane threatened, but there was a slight misunderstanding. The people at the camp who were running the camp thought that the train could be ready almost at a moments notice, a couple of hours perhaps maybe down there to evacuate the men. But the railway, the railroad itself thought it would take sometime before you could get men to man the railway, railroad and then also fire up the boilers and get down to the keys. So as this hurricane approached, they thought, the Weather Bureau thought that the pushing hurricane was going farther to the south. With each successive forecast, it started angling more and more to the northwest headed straight to the keys. It wasnt until almost the hurricane was upon those men and the keys that the Weather Bureau got the track and the strength of the hurricane correct. The people heading up the camps had requested for the train come down, but the request was fairly late and it took quite a few hours for that train to make it down to the keys and by the time the hurricane was already there with 185mileanhour winds, major storm surges and essentially the hurricane got the train got caught in the maelstrom and none of the veterans were evacuated by rail. In fact, the train toppled over and a few hundred of those veterans as well as many residents of the florida keys ended up dying. And earnest hemmingway was very upset. He was very good friends with one of the veterans. He, of course, was an ambulance driver in italy during world war i. He had fond memories and would work with the veterans on their day off in key west where he lived at sloppy joes bar. He was one of the first people to be on the scene after the hurricane to try to save anybody that they could and the scene that he saw when he arrived begs the description, he was absolutely mortified and he wrote an i am passionate he is yay in a communist newspaper at the time calls the masses, a magazine. He didnt say, but heavily implied it but the government and the Railway Service and the Weather Bureau were to blame for literally leaving these veterans out to face death. That was the labor day hurricane of 1935. We have about 10 minutes left in our hour with you. Your book has a chart of most destructive hurricanes and the names are all very familiar to people, Hurricane Katrina topping that list at category three and were celebrating the 15th anniversary of that storm. I want to talk to you about that. Before i do, you have dollar damage estimates, but you talk about how hard it is to calculate the loss of human life for hurricanes. Why is that challenging . Eric it depends on the time frame you use. There are initial deaths that are direct deaths that are a result of the hurricane winds, houses collapsing on people, people drowning, but then there are deaths that occur later, that could be from people during the cleanup of the hurricane maybe experiencing a heart attack or maybe electricity is out in the area and a car accident occurs because the Traffic Signals at intersections arent working or maybe somebody in a particularly hard hit area doesnt have access to the medicines they desperately need and weeks or months later, they succumb, so depending on how you define the indirect deaths or the later deaths determines the ultimate number and its only in the 1980s that people started taking account of both immediate deaths and those that occur at a later time. More out in the future, the higher the death toll. The 15th anniversary of katrina, the city of new orleans marks its anniversaries regularly, this year with the was the 15th. There are a spate of columns on the internet asking whether or not the country has learned the lessons of Hurricane Katrina. What are the lessons of Hurricane Katrina . Eric clearly have an evacuation plan in place and everybody be aware of what it is, so in the event you need to use it, it is used effectively. You need a coordinated Emergency Response system where the local officials, the regional officials, the state officials and the National Officials are all in open communication and clearly tell each other what is going on and taking the necessary steps. You have to have individuals take steps to hurricane proof their house, perhaps, if they are in an area that often gets hit by hurricanes. They also should have a go bag or supplies ready should they need to evacuate. They should be familiar with what they are going to do should they evacuate. So those are some of the things that are important to think about. You shouldnt ignore the warnings and also, i would make a plea for people to be more forgiving of meteorologists and officials because predictions are just that, predictions. And a lot of people in an area get upset if its predicted to be a hurricane, a category three hurricane and then its only category one or Tropical Storm and they did all this to prepare for it. Similarly, local politicians have to make a very difficult decision about evacuation. There are times where people have been evacuated and the hurricane had gone in a different direction and in heighten sight you didnt need that evacuation order. But i hope that people realize that the politicians and the meteorologists are acting in the best interests of the public. So its better safe than sorry and one other thing that we can do is think more broadly about how to protect ourselves from future hurricanes. Global warming there is a lot of mounting evidence, although the cause and effect relationship is not 100 clear, that hurricanes in the future are going to be stronger and wetter as a result of global warming. Already, we have increased impacts of hurricanes because of global warming, there has been a thermal expansion of the ocean and melting of the glaciers so the ocean level is a little bit higher than they were 50 and 100 years ago and there is where the storm surge causes greater destruction than it would have had the same hurricane hit an area 100 years ago. Go ahead. Eric i was going to say, there are many, many things we can do, but the difficulty is a lot of them take planning, time, forethought and most importantly, money. Individual expenditures and government expenditures and we have a lot of things that we have to deal with, so hurricane defense in a sense has to compete with many other priorities that society has. In an epilogue, and you tell readers that it is not a policy book, but nonetheless you think about some of these topics that are policy initiatives. One of the large ones seems to be development of coastal communities. Is there a substantive debate going on in this country or in a community by Community Level about building in coastal communities and how sustainable that is . Eric yes, i think there are debates in many communities, not all communities. I tell you in my little hometown of marblehead, massachusetts, which is right on the edge of the atlantic ocean, beautiful area, there have been meetings recently in the last year to look at models that have been done by scientists to predict what marblehead coastline would look like under different scenarios of global warming, and its quite sobering. Many houses and businesses that are right on the edge, right near the water are going to be impacted severely. I think many people on the National Level are thinking very hard about this, but we can always think about it a little bit more and also, thinking about it, planning for it, having major studies that tell us what we should do to protect ourselves from the future that is coming mean nothing if action isnt taken. Again, that is going to be a very difficult decision that many communities and the National Government are going to have to make about what steps we take to deal with a warmer world and the potential that hurricanes in the future are even worse than those in the past. So as we close here, after spending all this time learning about the history of hurricanes and their ferocity, what are your take aways of human kind versus hurricane . Eric the most obvious story, no matter what, theyre coming. There is nothing you can do about it except protect yourself as best you can. That is one of the sort of repetitive nature of Hurricane Seasons, more of the same but something that we know is coming. Another thing that is disappointing to me in reading the history of the past hurricanes is how often local, state, and federal government mechanisms that are in place to help protect people and help them recover after the hurricane blows by faltered or failed and the result was more misery and devastation than i think needed to be the case. But there also is a silver lining. There are stories of people being incredibly kind and charitable towards one another and stepping up to help their fellow man and woman. So there are good stories and there are bad stories in the book about our response to hurricanes and what is likely to happen in the future. So you told us at the beginning how one book often spurs your inquiry to the next. Has this inspired you to find another angle of study for your next book . Eric no, this one didnt work out that way. My next book which im currently working on is a history of privateering of it tears are on statesponsored merchant ships that had been converted to military vessels, how they affected the course of the American Revolution. Its a really exciting book, im really enjoying it. They didnt result from my work on this. There is a connection between the American Revolution and hurricanes. Eric absolutely. Well send them to your book to learn more about your story. Thank you so much, eric jay dolin, the book is called a furious sky. Thank you so much for spending an hour with us. Eric thank you for having me. Announcer all q a programs are available on our website or available as a podcast at cspan. Org. Cspans washington journal, every day were taking your calls live on the air, on the news of the day, and will discuss policy issues that impact you. Coming up monday morning, we will discuss president Trumps Supreme Court nominee with stephen dennis. We will talk about the trump the Republican NationalCommittee Spokesperson and rick wilson discusses opposition to trumps reelection. Watch live at 7 00 eastern monday morning. Be sure to join the discussion with your phone calls, facebook comments, Text Messages and tweets. Announcer next, british Prime MinisterBoris Johnson answers questions on proposed changes to his governments brexit plan and its response to the coronavirus. Other questions focused on how its impacting jobs, students, and Industries Like tourism. This is Prime Ministers questions. My honorable friend to discuss what we can do