The Storms of November...

The Storms of November

The Ganges, the Pacific, and Atlanta in the Tempests of the autumn.

Three storms - all destructive, and all in November, lay waste to their hosts. The Ganges floods, Hermann Mellville stirs the Pacific, and Sherman burns Atlanta!

"The gales of November" were the winds which singer Gordon Lightfoot wrote of as having doomed the coal freighter, S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald. But let us now take a look at three other storms which occurred on dates within a week of each other during the month of November:

The Ganges Floods

"Then we heard a roar like it was the end of the world and the tidal wave was on us. The roof of the house was ripped loose. I grabbed my youngest son. The roof was floating and I grabbed a tree and held on for hours. I was freezing from the rain. Children would be swept by, screaming for help. I tried to grab on to them, and tie them to me, but the current was too strong. They were swept away. I felt helpless."

This was the memory of Nomhan Das a costal villager who lived on the coast of Ganges River Delta of the harrowing night of November 12, 1970. On that evening, a major cyclone crashed down upon the Delta of the Ganges River in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The storm winds reached up to 150 mph, and produced a tidal wave estimated to be fifty feet high. By dawn, the waters had receded sufficiently to allow Nohoman Das and his family to reach dry land safely. But vast numbers of others were not so lucky. The death toll estimates ranged between 300 and 500,000, most of them struck down, or washed out to sea by the initial wave. But many more of those deaths occurred during subsequent weeks as a result of outbreaks of typhoid and cholera.

Melville and Moby Dick

Elsewhere in time, in New York, the mind of an American writer conjured up a storm on the Sea of Japan:

"It is in these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepytown. Towards the evening of that day, the "Pequod" was torn of her canvas, and bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightening, that showed the disabled mast fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for it's after sport."

This was how the American writer Herman Melville described a typhoon on the high seas in his classic novel, "Moby Dick", published on November 14, 1851 by Harper and Brothers in New York City. Melville's tale of the young Ishmael's adventure on the whaling ship, "the Pequod", and of Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the great white whale of the novel's name has long since come to be recognized as one of the great classics of American literature, capturing as it did the adventure as well as the perils of life on the great oceans of the world. But at the time of it's debut, it was very cooly received, and Melville receieved little acclaim for it in his lifetime.

Thirteen years later in the state of Georgia, a very different, but no less damaging kind of storm was beginning it's fabled path of destruction:

 

Sherman Burns Atlanta

"A grand and awful spectacle is presented to the beholder in this beautiful city now in flames.....The heaven is one expanse of lurid fire; the air is filled with flying, burning cinders; buildings covering two hundred acres are in ruins or in flames; every instant there is the sharp detonation or the smotheredbooming sound of exploding shells and powder concealed in the buildings, and then the sparks and flames shoot away up..... scattering cinders far and wide."

So wrote Union Army soldier George Ward Nichols in his book "The Story of the Great March" in remembering the burning of the city of Atlanta which took place between November 14 and 16 in 1864. Having captured the city two months earlier, General William T. Sherman elected to march the bulk of his army three hundred miles east to the city of Savannah. Before departing, he ordered the burning of the industrial section of the city in order to keep it from being used by the Confederacy again. In his wake of his army and it's trek all the way to the Atlantic coast, he would leave a wide path of destruction as his army lived off the land, commandeering everything it needed and destroying everything else, as an example to break the back of southern resistance once and for all. As he wrote to his commander, General U.S. Grant, his march through the very heart of Georgia would be "proof positive that the North can prevail." A popular Union song put the matter a good deal more colorfully:

"Marching Through Georgia.....

""Sherman's dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!..... So the saucy rebels said, -- and 'twas a handsome boast...... Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon on a host,... While we were marching through Georgia!!
Hurrah, hurrah! we bring the jubilee! ....... Hurrah, hurrah! the flag that makes you free!.... So we sung the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,....... While we were marching through Georgia."

Hence "the gales of November" that Gordon Lightfoot would describe in his song about the Edmund Fitzgerald came together in different ways to exact a terrible price on mankind.

Sources:

"Darkest Hours - A Narrative Encyclopedia of Disasters from Ancient Times to the Present." - Jay Robert Nash, Pocket Books, 1977.

"Moby Dick" by Hermann Melville

"The Story of the Great March" - George Ward Nichols, Corner House Publishers, 1972.

Picasso and The Death of Guernica

Art And History - The Death of Guernica

How a Painting Kept the Destruction in Guernica in the Popular Mind

A searing portrait of the destruction of a small Spanish town is kept alive by a painting by Picasso.

In April of 1936, a small undefended town in Spain was bombed back into the stone age. In November of 1975 a merchant freighter was lost in a terrible storm on Lake Superior. And in April of 1789, the crew of a British naval/merchant vessel mutinied. These three events would all be nearly forgotten but for one thing: all were the subject of an artistic portrayal. For if you put the names of Pablo Picasso and Guernica with the bombing, Edmund Fitzgerald with the freighter, and if you put the name HMS Bounty with the mutiny, most people would light up with recognition. A searing portrait, a mournful song and a book along with a trio of Hollywood movies have brought what would otherwise be footnotes into the sunlight of popular memory.

The True Story of the Destruction of Guernica

The Civil War which engulfed Spain in the summer of 1936 was a fight between the Loyalists, supporting the elected Spanish government, and those backing an insurgent Army officer, one Francisco Franco. As Franco was a fascist, he was able to draw support from Adolf Hitler in Germany, and Benito Mussolini of Italy, both dictators looking to use the strife in the Iberian peninsula, as a theater in which to test their weapons of war.
The small town of Guernica was chosen as a target because it was in the Basque region of the country which was, and remains to this day, a hot-bed of separatist sentiment. Thus, as a potential challenge to Franco's rule, it's destruction would set an example. The bombing on April 26 began at the busiest hour of the day, when the streets could be expected to be filled with citizens going to the market. For three hours, German and Italian warplanes pounded and strafed the helpless village with over 100,000 lbs. of conventional as well as incendiary bombs. The town was ravaged with flames which lit up the sky for fifteen mile around and was left a smoldering ruin, with over 1600 civilians were killed.

George L. Steer Reports on the Spanish Civil War

The New York Times correspondent George L. Steer reported to a horrified world what amounted to the first instance of modern war directed specifically at a civilian population. No military target was even considered he wrote. "A factory producing armaments lay outside the town and was untouched." he wrote. "So were two barracks some distance from the town....the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population, and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race."

Pablo Picasso Paints Guernica

The 1937 World's Fair was being held in Paris at that time, and the Spanish cubist artist, Pablo Picasso was working on a mural which was to be a main feature of the Spanish exhibition. Picasso had been uneasy with the commission, as he had been unable to settle his mind on an appropriate source of inspiration. But on May 1, the newspapers were filled with lurid and detailed reports of what had happened to Guernica. May Day protesters filled the streets, and Picasso who was horrified by the photos he saw in the papers immediately decided on what he wished to show the world about his homeland. While the reaction of the time was cool to say the least, Picasso's painting has endured as one of the most powerful indictments of the atrocities of war ever produced. Long after the specific events of the Spanish Civil War, long after even the name of Franco himself has faded from the public consciousness, Picasso's painting remains to remind us.

Sources:

"Guernica And Total War" by Ian Patterson, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2007.

"The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939." by Anthony Beevor, Weidenfield & Nicolson, London, 2006.

"World War II" by C.L. Sulzberger, American Heritage Publ. Co. Inc., 1966, pp. 20 - 41.

Mt. St. Helens: Ruin and Recovery

Mount St. Helens - Ruin and Recovery

Thirty-one years ago, the Washington Volcano blew up and ruined nearly the entire region. But gradually, Mother Nature is picking up the pieces.

"Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the moon looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there."

This was the comment made by President Jimmy Carter on the scorched landscape left after the eruption of Mount Saint Helens thirty years ago on May 18, of 1980.

Mount St. Helens Begins to Rumble

Seismic activity at Mount St. Helens, which lies 96 miles south of Seattle, Washington started on March 16, when a 4.2-magnitude tremor was recorded. On March 27, the first eruption happened when a 250-foot wide vent opened up on top of the mountain. Ash shot 10,000 feet in the air, and this peculiar rain of ash caused static electricity and lightning bolts. The National Guard erected road blocks to keep people from getting into the area, but these were easily avoided by using the many unguarded logging roads in that area.

And Washington’s Governor Dixie Lee Ray found herself faced with angry property owners when she declared a “Red Zone” around the area. Eventually, Ray relented and allowed the people to get their items, after they signed a waiver absolving the state of any responsibility for their safety. On May 17, a caravan of 20 such property owners, many of them sporting t-shirts which proudly proclaimed “I own a piece of the rock!” went to their homes. Another such caravan planned to depart at 10:00 a.m. the next morning. But by that time, all that they would own was a fistful of ash and pumice.

May 18, 1980 - Mt St. Helens Explodes!

This was because on May 18 at 8:32 a.m. with a sudden 5.1-magnitude earthquake and eruption that shook the mountain, the entire north side of the peak began rippling and blasting out ash at 650 miles per hour. The mountain literally collapsed in on itself. A cloud of ash, rocks, gas and glacial ice raced down the side of the mountain at 100 mph, and fourteen miles of the Toutle River were buried up to 150 feet deep in the debris. And that “piece of the rock” of which the property owners so proudly proclaimed ownership became a river of molten lava which at a temperature of 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit, flowed for miles around the blast zone.

Keith and Dorothy Stoffel Escape

“Within a matter of seconds, perhaps 15 seconds, the whole north side of the summit crater began to move simultaneously. The nature of movement was eerie. We were amazed and excited with the realization that we were watching this landslide of unbelievable proportions. We took pictures of this slide sequence occurring, but before we could snap off more than a few pictures, a huge explosion blasted out…” recalled geologists Keith and Dorothy Stoffel who were flying over the summit of Mt. St. Helens in a four-seat Cessna airplane when the blast occurred.
“ (The clouds) were billowing up, almost in big pillow sort of structures, and at that point of course, we were terrified… and we weren’t sure that we were going to make it out of that situation at all.” Their pilot had an idea that it would not be good to stick around for too long, and putting the plane into a steep dive, gave it full throttle and just managed to outrun the ash cloud. They landed safely at Portland International Airport.

Thousands of Acres Are Torched

The plume of ash belched out for nine hours; easterly winds carried it across the state and as far away as Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 17 days, it arrived again on the west coast, having circumnavigated the globe. Beyond that inner blast zone, trees were flash-burned and knocked down, forming what came to be known as a “blow-down zone”, in which every last tree, several million board feet of Douglas Fir, Cedar, and Hemlock covering over 86,000 acres were mowed down like so much tall grass.
Outside this “blow zone”, the blast had been strong enough to kill the trees but not to uproot them. In this, the “scorch zone”, they remained standing where they had been, with their leaves all burnt, and their branches shriveled up, and curled into a kind of macabre fleur-des-lis. The human toll had been steep. Fifty-seven people died overall from suffocation, burns and other assorted injuries.

Nature Leads the Recovery From Mt. St. Helens

Happily, the once barren and devastated blast zone has since that period of destruction become a natural laboratory for the study of how an ecosystem recovers from catastrophe. Scientists had expected that the renewal of the once densely packed evergreen forests would begin very gradually with the drifting of seeds and the migration into the area by animals from nearby.
But what paced this recovery was in fact the species that managed to survive the volcanic blast because they were protected by snowfall, topography, or in some cases, just plain luck. For example, little pockets gophers survived in some burrows, and tunneling as they ate roots and bulbs, they pushed fertile soil to the surface, which became beds for wind-borne seeds.

Elk Seed "the Pumice Plain"

On this re-born “Pumice Plain”, the elk population has soared. The elk hooves have broken up the crust on the soil, aiding in its erosion, and helping mix ash with the soil. The hoof prints gather detritus in which plants can grow. And the Elk dung spreads seeds which spurs even more growth.

But nature herself pointed the way to this from the first: on that Pumice Plain, a barren 3.750 acre open range, as early as 1981 delicate purple prairie lupines were poking their way to the surface, becoming the first precious bits of color in what had once been a devastated and sterile gray landscape. The recovery would take long, but it was definitely coming.

Sources:

"Mount St. Helens - The Eruption and Recovery of a Volcano" by Rob Carson, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, WA., 1990

"The National Geographic Magazine", May 2010, "Mount St. Helens - New Life in the Blast Zone." by McKenzie Funk, National Geographic Society, Washington, DC.