By JON WILSON, Times Staff Writer
Published October 23, 2005
As Hurricane Wilma flailed to our southwest, I tore away from what was filling my computer screen: something called tropical cyclone genesis potential fields.
Another kind of curiosity pulled me to old newspaper microfilm, which is merely a different, if not better, way to go blind.
Interesting material flashed past.
On Oct. 24, 1921, the St. Petersburg Times carried a small story on the bottom half of Page 2. The headline: "City Escapes Big Hurricane."
The next day, that big hurricane slammed the city with winds of at least Category 2 strength, 96 to 110 mph. As most know, it was the last storm that strong to hit St. Petersburg directly.
Put aside the premature assertion and the potential irony of the date. The thing is, until the day before the 1921 strike, the Times hadn't carried a word about an approaching tropical cyclone.
In 1985, Hurricane Elena spent a Labor Day weekend bedeviling Florida's west coast.
Newspapers and TV stations covered the approach consistently - not obsessively - but many residents didn't pay serious attention until Friday night, when it became clear Elena was reaching for us.
Since then, we've experienced a seismic cultural shift. Technology and communication have dramatically changed the way we watch hurricanes.
Merely catching radio or TV bulletins is so 20th century. We've progressed from sketching lines on tracking maps to discussing wind fields, eyewall replacement cycles, ridges and troughs.
We are able to judge the relative merits of each of several forecasting models. We follow a storm's progress on the Internet and call up live radar screens.
We watch wind-whipped Weather Channel meteorologists reporting from coastal towns caught in the dreaded cone of uncertainty.
In his book about Florida, Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, University of South Florida history professor Gary Mormino says hurricanes have come to signify "geopolitical markers" in what has become a media-soaked society.
"Now reporting on hurricanes has become the domestic equivalent of covering wars," Mormino observes.
In 1921, officials hoisted storm-warning flags at the fire station a few hours before landfall. Now we watch shifting path projections for days, hoping tendrils of dry air will breach the typhoon's walls.
It's a Category 5 information cyclone. It must be a natural wonder that I do not feel freer and wiser.
Perhaps I'm not alone.
I have an e-mail pen pal who corresponds occasionally about topics of the day.
"Even with VIPIR, Double Doppler, Super Cloudfinder, etc., no one has a clue," he wrote last week.
And he wrote: "These guys go on and on and on about spaghetti models and all this technological stuff to fill a lot of air time with not much more than educated speculation."
It's a tradeoff, I suppose.
Twenty years ago, blissfully benighted, I'd go to the minimart the day before a storm and buy a few batteries, a couple of Cuban sandwiches and a quart of cheap beer.
Today, having absorbed millions of words and hundreds of frightening images, having experienced in the past few years at least a half-dozen scares, my family is packed and ready to roll with equipment and comestibles enough to sustain a marching platoon. I could use a forklift to load the gallon jugs of water.
I'm in a foul mood about all of it, while realizing that a state as vulnerable and as thickly populated as Florida needs information and warning long in advance.
I can't help but think of a curio you perhaps can still find in one of those few remaining roadside tourist stands.
The curio featured an equine character with a tail made of yarn. A limp tail, said the legend, meant the weather was warm. A frozen tail meant cold. If the yarn was moving, it was windy. You get the picture.
Like its tourist attractions, Florida has changed drastically through the years.
Though I yearn for cheap beer and telltale tails, I know in my heart I should give thanks for latter-day technology. I don't have to panic at the last minute. I can be jumpy, distracted and ill-tempered for days - and have an excuse for it.
Stay safe and stay dry.
Times staff writer Jon Wilson has lived in St. Petersburg 49 years.
