Greetings everyone we have the distinct pleasure to welcome our to guest today author of the furious sky of the hurricanes in america. Louisiana was blasted this week and our thoughts and goes out to the whole area speaking earlier to say many weeks or months to have trouble with the water system and with shreveport and monroe is still without power. So with jack davis today in conversation with our author who is a professor of history specializing in sustainability studies. The New York Times book review calls it a beautiful homage and with the Pulitzer Prize the notable book for 2017 and several other best of list including washington post, npr and forbes. Welcome. Its a pleasure to have you here with us today. We will turn the floor over to jack and lets start the conversation. If people have questions they can bring into the chat room and also to encourage people to have signed copies here at the bookshop they can go to the website we will be happy to ship books for you anywhere in the country and anywhere in the world. Welcome. Thank you. Introduced seeing eric he is a prolific author and is a nonfiction writer who specializes in writing history that is for the intellectually curious audience and the outstanding narrative writer the moments of more notable books and among the more notable ones is leviathan on which is a New York Times bestseller and where i read a couple of years ago and then to talk about the history of pirates and then to tackle hurricane history and the book that i have known for a long time we have been due for a good book on hurricanes. This is a huge topic despite being so huge that you can actually hold in your hand. So i am looking forward to having this conversation today. So i want to say why did for some level to bring it into that is something manageable . I thought about writing a book about hurricanes but i wanted to write about a particular hurricane was the galveston hurricane of 1900 which hit long island and new england where i happen to live. Will there is a problem they are both of those hurricanes had quite a few really good books written about them so i went on to write black lives in blue waters then came the summer and fall of 2017, the Hurricane Season from hell with Hurricane Harvey and irma and maria to destroy different parts of the United States. Right after that season was over my editor and your editor got to gather with those at the time and on the history because those that spans centuries and came to have a particular talent to pull together huge amounts of information into a narrative so they reached out to the literary agent and asked him if i would be interested in writing a book and then they reached out to me. I did not immediately say yes because before a sign on to do a book i have to have a vision of what the book would look like. I didnt know a lot about hurricanes. So for a month and a half i read articles and primary accounts of hurricanes and to say i will write the book and put together a proposal and the rest is history. You said you have the vision of writing the book but as you were writing the book and came to completing it did that vision remain the same or did you find yourself staring off in Different Directions to make the book into what you wanted for your reading audience . Thats the same from the outset because before i start a book although i outlined the book the way i wanted it to go there were some stories that didnt make it that i discovered along the way but believe it or not the general outline and the rough chapter outline stayed fairly constant because my book had to be chronological but most often they march through history and a chronological fashion so once you know the lay of the land and those bigticket stories and the themes then it is a matter but there are always surprises when you write a book at least for me because virtually every one of my books except for one was on a topic i know a huge amount about but i did that on purpose because i have to spend almost two years working on these books. I get bored easily so if i pick a topic that will excite me every couple weeks or every day that will be a problem in one of the best ways to do that is to pick a topic im not an expert in because then i am guaranteed to be surprised along the way and that surprise and excitement that only fuels my work on the book but i hope it translates to some extent to the written page. Talk about chapter outlines and then to complete that research. And that is very different. So the archive is our study with the computer in front of us. You are absolutely right. My first book for norton was the wailing book writing six or seven books before that and the proposal very detailed outline of the chapters they trust me more so my proposal over time has gotten shorter and shorter. With those 17 doublespaced pages its more like an essay of what i thought it would be about i had a rough idea for my purposes. So you have to have a map to get someplace and i like to think because i had gotten better at this process and we know more quickly the thing i want to talk about in the book and what direction. So it has changed tremendously when i started writing books in the late 19 nineties, what is almost always at a Specialized Library to get the information that i needed. Was taking a lot of notes which was a problem for me because i flunked handwriting in Elementary School with very poor handwriting and i dont write fast using a typewriter was good back then for what has happened in the last ten or 15 years is the entire seachange. Allowing you to access any book written before 1923 on almost any topic but one of the Major Research institutions around the country has spent a lot of money digitizing the key documents. s with a few keystrokes i can quickly be overwhelmed with data so just today im working on a new book of privateering in the American Revolution and i was reading a book from 1850 and mentioned the certain privateer so i got on google put in the privateers name and his vessel now i have six or seven other documents from the 18 hundreds that talk about the privateer. It is the same with hurricanes the big problem with this book is not a lack of information but deciding the huge amount of data that was available to me. So i had to make hundreds of decisions what to leave out and what not to read. What we looking for for the book was there a particular criteria that you wanted to include . Im sure there are criteria but i write books in the manner i would like to read them. And i love Human Interest stories that leave the deepest impression with me when its a story of people dealing with adversity or just planning in the face of what is likely to come i like the stories of the individuals that survive or did not survive the hurricane or the meteorologist or the politician and those that got swept up into the story both good and bad. People gravitate most easily to stories of other human beings in unique situations and hurricanes that the bill. I spend as much time talking about his ministry it is stuff and regulations. Wanted to focus on the human side of the story. Thats what i like about your book. And with climatology to leave out the Human Interest story. So it was the bridge and a Human Interest story. The hurricanes is right up there with the rest of them. And what they have clearly done so. One of the big surprises how hurricanes have affected the course of American History and in your state alone i was fascinated to read in the 15 fifties and 15 sixties when the spanish were trying to settle florida and the first settlement was wiped out by a hurricane and how that could have changed and also on the east coast of florida there was a Battle Royale between the french and the spanish interested in colonizing florida and the french had a formidable fleet was about ready to attack the spanish a little further to the south which is now Saint Augustine but at the moment when the french were getting ready to launch the attack hurricane comes along wiping out half of the french fleet than the spanish kill those stragglers that made it out of the water after the hurricane crashed their ships. I love those kind of stories it is a great what if. What her friends settle florida and not spain . How could the history of the country been different cracks maybe not the United States. So since i know a lot about hurricanes i certainly didnt know about meteorology, almost everything was a big surprise. The battle of the 18 hundreds with amateur and professional all meteorology involved and to understand hurricanes was fascinating to me and the rule of cuba early hurricane science that was fascinating to hear president mckinley said during the spanishamerican war when it started he was more afraid of what hurricanes would do to American Forces than any military attack that might occur. Every single story in the book i was excited to read about the what the new aspects of history with the Hurricane Hunter on how the first person decided to fly into a hurricane when nobody had done it before and how sputnik led to the creation of satellites and then weather satellites and still today with all technology and ability to watch a hurricane from inception to dissolution to see how much uncertainty there still is the computer model can only take you so far. With hurricane laura that devastated parts of louisiana last week. Just look at what happened in the last few hours before it came ashore 15 miles in either direction the story could have been different the storm surge may have reached 20 feet settle that last moment with landfall occurred there were still questions about where it would occur in the ultimate impact so thats an ocean how hurricanes affect American History it is meteorological happenstance so to go 20 or 30 miles this direction or that direction think how different it would be Hurricane Katrina had a major impact on new orleans. But just imagine instead of making landfall 30 miles to the east it had given new orleans a direct hit. That mightve been a very different story or an even worse story than what come out of it. So the hurricane forecast when did that become decent . And it was incompetent those that were forecasting and tracking hurricanes . With the Us Government and the meteorologist become reliable . It has the ability to keep their eyes on the storm there is the opportunity to send reports to the meteorologist on land and that that was sent over to be telegraphed back in the early years you started to change fundamentally in the forties and fifties when the hurricane came online so when it got a tank full of gas in the atlantic or the caribbean to see what it was doing sending instruments into the hurricane and related information back to the meteorologist on land but with the satellites it was a whole different ballgame now literally you can watch a hurricane dissolve across the atlantic and never lose sight of it and then adding to that to gather data with sophisticated computerized weather prediction models starting to come online in the 19 fifties and has greatly improved since then. That we have the added peace for meteorologist to take that data they are collecting in real time with the historical understanding of hurricanes and hurricane tracks to give a much better idea of what the hurricane is going and how powerful it is likely to be in there for what kinds of protections and steps we need to take to deal with this before it arrives. So the arc of understanding of hurricanes that meteorology go understanding and the ability to track them as they move across the globe is night and day compared to just 50 years ago were 100 years ago. We are fortunate it doesnt reduce the impact of the hurricane because that there is nothing we can do is human beings to cover the strike. We can do is better plan and prepare to deal with the aftermath. So dealing with these Human Interest stories those figures that stand out and the long time weatherman and interest in the Us Weather Service and with those squeaky markers on the whiteboard so look at these particular hurricanes to save lives. One that has residents today her camera came through and did a number on the parish. But not too long ago in 1957 a hurricane came ashore at the end of june and basically leveled there for one individual doctor cecil clark and his wife at a clinic in cameron and during the height of the hurricane, he left his house and left behind his wife, three youngest childre children, and then made it to go into the clinic to help patients who were there and anybody who might be coming in after the hurricane. He didnt make it to the clinic. His car was thrown off the road by water. He sheltered with the family not too far from his home. He survived. He came out of the house the next morning and people crowded around him. They all knew him because he was the local doctor and bade him to go to the courthouse those that were injured needed to be tended to. He was torn because he had no idea what happened to his wife and three children and his made. He had no idea but yet he decided to go with his professional responsibility to his patients that he would go to the courthouse and tend to them and he did. And not until many hours later to turn on his wife survived but the three youngest children and the made were killed. And then call the hero but he said i was just doing what was asked of me being responsible. And expect others to do the same but he is certainly one of the heroes who put the needs of others oppose the needs of himself. Another similar the place hero was clara barton with the hurricane of 1893 killed as many as 3000 people. We didnt have the mechanism or the machinery but those of the American Red Cross and volunteers swept off a georgia and helped those people during their time of greatest need to start planning for the future. Theres one other story coming out of the hurricane of 1893 of dunbar davis that was a lifesaver and North Carolina it is a lifesaving station and after the hurricane he went without sleep for almost 35 hours and in that span he saved nearly 20 mariners whose ships had foundered offshore and brought them back to a lifesaving station and then finally he could take a nap at the end of the ordeal. There are many heroes you remember in new orleans with Hurricane Katrina many people came to help out. One of the most interesting was the cajun natives around louisiana come down to new orleans and how to save 10000 people over the span of a week or two and in my eyes they are true as well. I dont know what philosopher or writer wrote this first but it goes back hundreds if not thousands of years but if it introduces a man or woman to themselves but just like a hurricane people who do work deeds because they have been called upon. A lot of people step up. A lot of people dont. One thing about the hurricane in 1957, some 500 people lost their lives. And those in louisiana still remember but that is something of what i call hurricane amnesia. Those are not in agreement with me there are important lessons from hurricanes now and what that might be quick. To say up front to see the four legs of a hurricane striking of the hurricane, the immediate aftermath and what do people do it for years and decades to hear with the destruction . And with that element that i dont talk about in the book that much is what we can learn from hurricanes and mentioning in the epilogue. Inevitably because of the coverage with the vast amount of money involved, and 2017 generating 265 billion of damage and irma alone destroyed 50 percent so with massive dislocation what is on the economic Richter Scale for the entire country it forces people to focus there is a lot of good writing where people can do and i do believe today compared to years ago certainly people are much more familiar with the anatomy of a hurricane, how meteorologist give us information, they know where to go with it is headed for their area, i believe many communities have good evacuation plans in place for the Emergency Responder system. Has been governe extent not completely but by the amount of funding that they get at the federal level and also by the expertise of people. Are they expert in an emergencyy preparedness and response or are they political appointees who are there for other reasons, so i think theres plenty we can do to improve the situation whether we actually do that or take the steps necessary we have to win to see because it costs money to hurricane proof your house. It has to be made one of the most difficult with the fact people still want to live on the coast. People are still moving to the coast and people are building right on the oceans edge often times in floodplains or areas unless we have better planning, thats going to be a continuing refrain well into the future. So we are in the area we are starting to see Climate Change refugees [inaudible] in the center of this thing and weve become somewhat of a climate refugee city. More and more are leaving the coast and coming to gainesville because they feel safer there with less congestion. They feel more so out of harms way. Are we going to start seeing more refugees or is that happening already. Look at hurricane andrew. A 30mile swath of destruction through Miamidade County almost 200,000 homes were destroyed. Many people about 100,000 lost their job because the place of business was demolished and coincidentally thats the same number about 100,000 people in Miamidade County in the months after the hurricane and i think it is inevitable theres going to be people who will decide they have to leave to get out of the way before the next one comes along but when it comes to coastal living there is such a strong drawl and magnet for it that there is going to be outflow, people whove been impacted and then in the subsequent years will come back. Weve seen that time and time again. Where i live on the coast we dont get too many hurricanes but we get pretty severe noreasters that do quite a number on the coast, yet people love living right on the oceans edge and people whose houses have been either destroyed or just damaged often say rebuild hopefully a little bit better than before and pray that they are not going to get struck again, so i think it is almost inevitable with population expansion and the allure of living in a coastal area that we are going to continue to having development. But in a place like miamidade and florida, they have some of the best building codes in the country when it comes to hurricanes. So if you build smarter and better you can avoid some of the problems of the past. Often one may think of hurricanes we think of the gulf coast and the american south, southeast. Sandy was obviously a terrible hurricane and turn the eyes towards building codes in florida. Are there hurricanes that were more pivotal . Absolutely. In florida you get 40 of the hurricane strikes. Louisiana, south carolina, North Carolina and texas. So, as northerners often dont think of hurricanes nearly as much as you do, for good reason because new england only gets smacked with a hurricane about five or ten times a century. But we have had some doozies. The biggest is the hurricane of 1938 which slams into the eastern end and then plows into new england causing the most damage in rhode island and ends up killing 680 people about 500 million worth of damage, 1,938, and its still to this day the single worst Natural Disaster in new englands history and if you speak to anybody thats over 90yearsold or 85, they remember that hurricane and you speak to many other people who grew up here, they heard about that hurricane extensively while they were growing up. Hurricane sandy had a major impact on new jersey and more importantly, new york but also the outer edge of the Hurricane Sandy caused a lot of damage up here in new england and after all it was over a thousand miles wide. In the mid1950s, there was an outbreak of hurricanes that affected new england. Hurricane carol, edna and diane and people around here remember those. There is a funny picture in the book and the color section 1991 my wife was working with the state of massachusetts and she had to go down and check the damage in massachusetts on cape cod so i went along with her and she snapped a shot of me standing next to a summer cottage and found that it was leveled by the storm surge and the wind. Take a look at the picture and please notice the hawaiian shirt that im wearing. It was one of my favorite shirts at the time. My soontobe wife hated it and right after we got married, she got rid of that and my best and i still miss both of them. [laughter] thats me when my hair was brown. [laughter] when you had hair. [laughter] sharing any questions in the chat room we have plenty of time for questions from you. Talk about that expression in this Natural Disaster, who is to blame for the human consequences of hurricanes . They are both Natural Disasters and manmade disasters, human made disasters. Of course the sense that its nature that is creating the hurricane. They are getting worse because human intervention in the area of Global Warming and Greenhouse Gases going to the atmosphere and the evidence is mounting that it will be worse than those of the past. But as we get into the more modern era certainly the last 50 or 60 years, a lot of it is a human made disaster because youve got a poorly built houses that are built too close to the coast. If people do not evacuate in a timely manner not only to their own personal safety but to the safety of the people that have to go in there and rescue them, so the entire framework that we have created depending what the Development Looks Like and what steps we have taken to prepare for the hurricane and then deal with this aftermath, that is the element and that is how it becomes a human made disaster. Katrina is a perfect example. You know, the levees they breached and almost 50 different places. They were poorly built that led up to the catastrophe. It acts as a natural breaker and absorbent for this storm surge. There were bad decisions made about the construction. If you go back in time even further you can read about them in the early 1800s with destroyed levees that were even at that time and parts of new orleans. Ive read a lot about their history and take this the right way. Not by a long shot but its kind of a strange place to build the city. Basically a big saucer under a coastal region. In the wake of katrina to shore up the levee system to build up one of the largest in the universe and to protect new orleans from another category three hurricane low and behold we learned because of the substance and construction divisions that were made, that a system which is very new isnt going to afford the level of protection that was built. It is adequately protected so from the National Disaster you cant get rid of the natural component, but its compounded by this decision that we make at every level. The army corps of engineers shouldnt be allowed to build anything larger than average. [laughter] no, they have many successes. There are so many ways you can describe a hurricane on landfa landfall. Did you make a list talking about one . I didnt know the list but i had to do that. My editor warned me against that and said youve got to use different words. While i didnt have a list, i did use my thesaurus and Search Online and remember distinctly going through the entire book many times right before and after i handed it in and doing searches on specific words and if a word that describes a hurricane or impact of a hurricane appeared too many times and i didnt have an exact number but i had a sense of you to many times i said i have to go back and strategically change these. So that was definitely a consideration. Because when you talk about different hurricanes, well emma theretheres some elements thae the same and theres devastation. How do you talk about that. So, related to that was i was very happy to hear some early theories in the book say that the book wasnt just a litany of hurricane after hurricane with the same stories but each hurricane had its own personalities and i certainly found that to be the case and that in turn made it easier for me to describe the hurricanes in a way that wouldnt become too repetitive and boring basically. You can only say slam so many times. [laughter] of course the word that comes to everybodys mind is majestic, a bald eagle. A word i refuse to write about the popularity of that word but its a word i used to describe the bald eagle and so we are constantly searching for words to change up our language. One of the successes you had a laundry list of hurricanes that each is a story unto itself and is also part of a universal story as well and its great to see that the reviews are recognizing that and it speaks to your success as a writer and your awareness of your audience so we have a question and the question is from one of our i dont recall [inaudible] during the research what was the most surprising thing, and i think you touched on this on the hurricanes you came across and then i have a second question if you can answer this first question the what was the most surprising thing that you came across . This is the impact of the hurricanes in American History. I love the American Revolution and reading about the American Revolution and i had no idea about the massive hurricanes that slammed into the caribbean in 1780 that killed a total of 20,000 people but they also destroyed the british an british ships because they use that area for the battles further to the north colonies and also to protect their colonial possessions so what was fascinating to me as they decided they didnt want to stay in the caribbean for the next Hurricane Season and they were analyzed tallies to the colonieg resisted helping them in a major naval battle but they said we are going to go up in the summer of 81 and Everybody Knows what happens the french left the caribbean to get out of the way of the hurricane and also to help their allies and turn the tide at the battle of yorktown and it was a major turning point in the revolution. It wasnt the end of the american revolutio revolution ba longshot, but it helped for the beginning of the peace negotiations, so i thought that was a great its just fascinating for me to learn about that element of the american revolutio revolution tw nothing about. Now, technically when we read about the American Revolution, the role in the course of history is rarely if ever mentioned and youve described a major historical [inaudible] one way to look at it not just those i talk about in the book but they have a massive impact on that region local history. However, that impact has rippled that goes out well beyond the area of landfall. And if an economist could go back and gather data on all of the hurricanes from the late 1800s and look at the reverberations of each of those not just in the Community Region or state, but to the broader economy, i think that hurricanes would come to be seen more clearly as a major determinant in the nations economic history and also to determine other things to happen or that didnt happen because they had such a major impact. I think that it would just be a fascinating study. Not one that im going to do though. [laughter] so, i have another question. Can you tell us a little bit about the history of naming hurricanes . Naming hurricanes of this is one of the parts of the book i enjoyed writing about the most. Basically in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a guy named clement, a meteorologist in australia, started naming cyclones, which is just hurricanes by another name, after beautiful women, dusty maidens he referred to them as. Well, his effort got squashed for a variety of reasons. But that yo then you fastforwao 1941 when George Stewart wrote a book called storm which was a National Bestseller and in that book it talks about a storm that traveled across the pacific and slammed into california. Its not a typhoon, it wasnt a hurricane. But in the book one of the junior meteorologists decided to name the hurricane, that a storm anstormand others about women ae named this storm mariah. It got sent to gis and sailors in the pacific world war ii and that is part of the reason the navy and army started unofficially naming typhoons which again are just hurricanes by another name after women so in the early 1950s, the predecessor of the national Weather Service started naming hurricanes after the phonetic alphabet. But there was some confusion because there was another phonetic alphabet that was suggested so 1956, the Weather Service they finally decided to name hurricanes after women and they got that idea from what was happening in the Pacific Theater during world war ii so there were a lot of protests. One woman said she would rather have an unnamed hurricane hit her house than one named after one of her husbands former girlfriends. But the president died down and that was in the late 1960s when roxie bolton spoke up. This was a Vice President of the National Organization of women. She says that its horrible to associate women with these dramatic and devastating meteorological events. She really got annoyed at reading all of the News Coverage about the vicious vicious, trea, wild, horrific female name hurricanes coming up the coast. So she lobbied the national Weather Service to change their naming system. She didnt get much traction until jimmy carter came into office and he appointed juanita, the first female secretary of commerce who was a selfdescribed feminist. And juanita agreed with roxie bolton and used considerable pressure because the World Meteorological organization to start naming hurricanes on an alternating basis after men and women and thats how we come up with the annual list of 21 names alternating between men and women. I adjus just love that story bus the surprise as i kne is i knewg about that story and i think it is just a fascinating play of the Womens Movement and meteorological history. We have a comment in the chat that says yay roxie bolton. Can you tell us a little bit about bonita vine. A jesuit priest who took over the observatory in cuba in the mid to late, sort of leader 1800s and was wellversed in the history of meteorology. He was fascinated by it. He decided to make the observatory a major leader in forecasting hurricanes and monitoring the weather in the caribbean. So he went back over all the records that had been taken in the years before he arrived and organized that. He bought some barometers and other weather measurements machines and started tracking the weather on cuba on a daily basis, sometimes as many as ten times a day he would write down his observations. He also had a network of people working throughout the caribbean to provide him with information and through this, he slowly came to create a sort of a shorthand understanding of hurricanes and he looked at the science not only the brick red skies in the morning and the lowering barometric pressure and the high wispy clouds and the long deep swells of the ocean but other signs and he basically became a very good forecaster of hurricanes. He wasnt always right but he was right more than would allow. The sad part of the story is that after he died, people continued his observation but right before the galveston hurricane in 1900, the United States basically cut off the connection between the Weather Bureau and the observatory so they didnt benefit from their observations right before the galveston hurricane came in and clobbered galveston. If they had paid more attention to the expertise, maybe there would have been a better evacuation and the death toll wouldnt have risen so high and have been the greatest Natural Disaster and maybe as many as ten or 12,000. But it was a sign of the times. A lot of americans were quite condescending in their view of their spanish counterparts in the caribbean, and unfortunately i think that we suffered for that. So, it was mainly americans that severed their relationship . American arrogance. For the Washington Headquarters he had a less than favorable view who felt were too often easily alarmed and slapped the title or the designation hurricane on too many storms and one of the things willis wanted to do is avoid panicking americans about oncoming threats but sometimes panic is necessary to get people to take the action that they should be taking. So, weve been talking for an hour now. Its been a lot of fun for me and im sure others, but before we go i wonder if you could tell us a little about your next book and do you expect is this going to be a twoyear project . Can you give us a little sneak peak if you will . Yes its sort of related to my pirate book because what people call privateers life of government during time of war to attack the enemy shipping. A lot of people call them license pirates and one of the things my book is going to strongly argue is that it isnt this inthe designation, they art licensed private and private hearing during the American Revolution played a very Important Role not only within the colonies but also with respect to providing goods and giving outlets to the sailors that have been put out of work and the onsein the onset of then but also played a role in the outcome of the American Revolution. And i think that far too often, the history of that war discount or disparage the role of privateers, and im hoping to write a history that gives them a place of honor that i truly think they deserve along with george washington, congress and Founding Fathers that they are an integral part of the story that is too often overlooked. And yes its going to count im looking at it right now. You asked before about my research process. I tend to do the research for the book before i write it. Im done doing the research for this book and i expect in the very near future to begin writing it but i will hand it in about 18 months, 20, 22 months after i signed the contract and it will come out if not next year the year after. [inaudible] will this be a morton book as well . Yes [inaudible] so writing this book on hurricanes and writing your new book on private hearing you have a whole new perspective on hurricanes and private hearing americans may not have had if youd written this. The eagerness with which you asked the question i wish my answer was yes but its no i dont think hurricanes are going to make an appearance at least not yet. Really. Okay. Theres good storms in there but i dont think that there are hurricanes. Human storms and natural. Well, [inaudible] wonderful conversation. I want to thank you both. Very enlightening. Cant wait to get more into the book and remind people that we will have signed copies and of people would like to order, get in touch with the bookstore. Congratulations and much luck in the future thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me. Thanks, jack. It was my pleasure. So enjoyable. Thank you, everybody for coming. Take care