By John Toth
The Bulletin
This play-by-play hurricane reporting can play on one’s nerves. Where will it go? When will it turn? How strong will it be? Should we evacuate or stay?
It goes on day after day, as the meteorologists use the most modern computers to predict two weeks out where and when a tropical storm may affect an area. Each little change is dramatically announced. Forecasters tease it in the beginning of a newscast and tell you to stay tuned for more details later.
Forecasting has gotten better since I landed on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1979 and got a quick lesson in what summers are like here and what hurricanes and tropical storms do.
But forecasting a tropical storm is still dicey, mostly because there are so many factors that control its movement.
“For the most up-to-date information, download our free app.” I may not want the most up-to-date information. Maybe once a day. Continuous updates may be as bad for my health as the hurricane itself.
I liked it better the way it was in the old days, when we were not getting every bit of information about storms. It was not as safe as now, but it was a lot better on the nerves.
Hurricane Beryl is the latest one to get people all nervous. As the computer spaghetti models (or noodles) kept extending, we were all hoping here that they’d wiggle somewhere else. The noodles kept changing as more information was fed into the computers.
They represent different trackings, and often, at first, the models tend to spread out in all directions.
I was rooting that they would extend somewhere else other than the Houston-Galveston area. People who live in Mexico or states east of here, were rooting that the noodles come straight at us, not them.
It’s all a guessing game for a while. Just when we start to relax, thinking that the hurricane is going into Mexico, the noodles start jumping around, and now we’re back on square one.
One hurricane set of noodles years ago veered all the way from Mexico landfall to Louisiana. While it was being moved around, of course it had to park in the direction of Freeport for a while.
Now the trick was for it to keep moving. Scoot on over to Beaumont a little. There is nothing good for you in Freeport. Keep moving. When I woke up the next morning, the noodles were dangling in the direction of New Orleans. That was better for us, but not for the folks in New Orleans.
Beryl wasn’t that bad. It was lingering around the Texas-Mexico border. Most of the time. Its noodles did move close to Corpus Christi for a while, but then drifted south again - and then nudged north a little. Then some more to the north, and then it became obvious that we would be getting some action. We just didn’t expect this much action.
Back in 1979, when I landed here, there were no noodles. We all went to sleep at night, thinking that the storm would wake us up whenever it got here. It was supposed to make landfall somewhere around Matagorda County. I was in Bay City.
My publisher posted a piece of paper on which we were supposed to write down where we’ll be during the storm. I was going to be in my apartment. Being wise-guy reporters, we wrote down various locations, like Mustang Island and Rockport. We thought it was funny. None of us were from Texas, and we had never seen a hurricane.
I asked my apartment complex manager if those apartments could make it through a hurricane. She didn’t know. They were new and had not been storm-tested. I stayed up late into the night, waiting for the hurricane and finally fell asleep. The next morning I woke up to sunshine. No storm, no rain, no clouds. This was my kind of hurricane.
Alicia was my true testing ground. We found out a couple of days earlier that it was going to hit Freeport head-on. That was enough time to get a coverage game plan going in place for the Houston Chronicle, where I was working at the time.
I rode out that Category 3 hurricane in the Brazoria County Courthouse in Angleton, where we never lost power. I drove back to my apartment in Clute the next morning. It still had power. That made things a lot easier.
I drove out to Surfside and found a payphone that still had a dial tone. I used it to call the office and told them I was coming in with a feature story and lots of pictures. The story and a photo ran the next day on Page 1.
That was my first big Page 1 story in the Chronicle, and I got a couple of photo credits to boot. Not a bad start. I had been employed there for about three months. I felt like the newspaper version of Dan Rather, who got his big boost from Hurricane Carla a few decades earlier.
We’re a lot safer now than we were back then. But the noodles drive me nuts. Back in those days, we just sprung into action, and it was all over in a few hours - maybe overnight. It seems like the worst storms always strike at night.
Now, we’re more aware, but I think I liked it better without noodles. I’ll just ignore them. There. I’m not even looking.
O.K. I looked.
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