Inventor wants to sap storms

He says dropping canisters of coolant into eye walls should be tried by the NOAA.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN, Times Staff Writer
Published September 9, 2007

Gene Hoffman, a retired computer engineer, has a pending patent application which, if approved and acted upon by the federal government, he says could control hurricanes, reduce the threat to millions of lives, save "trillions'' of dollars in property damage.
	[Skip O'Rourke | Times]

SUN CITY CENTER -- His knees knocking, Gene Hoffman sat amid hundreds of other retirees, waiting for his chance.

President Bush bounded on stage at the Kings Point clubhouse. It was May 2006, nine months after Hurricane Katrina, and a sweating Hoffman clutched his weather plan, barely listening to Bush's speech on Medicare.

He knew he would have just seconds to talk. So much was at stake -- millions of lives, trillions of dollars. He was going to be the next Albert Einstein, the next Christopher Columbus, he thought. He just needed someone to listen.

"You," Bush said, pointing to Hoffman, whose hand was up for a question. Hoffman felt faint.

"Mr. President, we have submitted a patent to control hurricanes," he said.

Everyone turned toward him.

In the next 15 months, Hoffman would become a persistent pest to prominent scientists. He would not take no for an answer, even when shown past failures to control big storms. He would brush off treaties from the Cold War era that bar weather tampering.

He has the certainty, and eccentricities, of a man with a big idea. He wonders if his phone is tapped and blusters that his will be the century's greatest invention. It just needs to be tried, he argues to anyone willing to listen and some who aren't.

And who else has the power to test it besides the president of the United States?

Bush looked at Hoffman and laughed. "Where were you last year?" he asked. The president told Hoffman to give his plan to his entourage. Before leaving, he joked he wanted a picture taken with "the Hurricane Man."

Hoffman looked at a Secret Service agent. "Do I go forward?"

"No sir, Mr. Hoffman," the agent said stepping toward him.

But to Hoffman, that moment was the chance he had been waiting for.

* * *

Hoffman had been restless in retirement. The 79-year-old former computer program analyst hit the links, read biographies, attended the occasional cocktail party with his wife.

But he was itching to do something big, something that could change the world. He toyed with inventions with his old buddy, Dave Lund, a 70-year-old semi-retired computer engineer from North Carolina he had known since the 1960s, when they worked on missile defense programs.

They had been working on a plan to interface telephones and televisions when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

Hoffman called Lund.

"We've got to do something about this," Lund recalled him saying. "Why don't we try to control hurricanes?"

Hoffman poked around the Internet and found a rich history of hurricane-killing schemes. The atom bomb idea. The goo idea. The plan to blast them with giant tubes of cold air, or deploy icebergs or drop ice chunks.

Then there was the idea the government actually tried.

Project Stormfury was launched against four storms in the 1960s and 1970s. Planes seeded storm clouds with silver iodide in an effort to produce a counterstorm to weaken a hurricane. Scientists later deemed it completely useless.

Natural conditions change or weaken hurricanes, not humans.

But Hoffman was encouraged. No one had tried a supercoolant.

Supercold liquid nitrogen would vaporize and expand quickly and safely, he theorized, robbing the storm of its heat. The world would get rain, but not deadly winds and storm surge.

"This is the safest thing that'll work," Hoffman said in a voice that sounds like tires on gravel. "If this doesn't work, nothing will."

* * *

They needed a patent. Hoffman and his friend got busy on an application. They read up on cargo planes. They found a formula for a hurricane's kinetic energy on wikipedia.org.

The text of the application, dated August 2006, is part action-adventure, part science fiction:

Two or more cargo planes haul liquid nitrogen in large cryogenic containers. The liquid nitrogen is released or dropped like "cluster bombs" above the forming eye wall of a tropical cyclone whose eye is half a mile to a mile wide.

"The key is to hit it early," Hoffman said.

He expects the liquid nitrogen to vaporize and be pulled as ice crystals into the storm. Operations would be run out of a new agency, called the National Hurricane Control Center. Pilots would coordinate with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In an emergency, the plane would jettison the crew cabin, which would parachute to the surface of the sea. It does not explain how the pilots would be rescued while adrift in the churning waters of a hurricane.

* * *

After Hoffman spoke to the president, officials referred him to Sean O'Keefe, a former NASA head and chancellor at Louisiana State University.

O'Keefe wrote to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Their "concept may have merit," O'Keefe wrote in a September 2006 letter.

But that office sent a rejection.

It included a copy of a letter it had issued to a Texas senator urging her to drop a bill that would jump-start research on weather modification. The main reason: international conflicts.

One country's deadly storm could be another's needed rainfall. It also cited potential problems with a 1978 treaty that banned weather manipulation for hostile purposes.

The office chartered a study on the topic that's due out this fall.

Hoffman was flummoxed.

"If Cuba doesn't want to join in, or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, let 'em have the hurricanes," Hoffman said.

* * *

Then came more bad news: U.S. patent officials initially denied their application in April.

"Undue experimentation" was needed, the response said. The application was "indefinite," "imprecise" and failed to show someone trained in the area how to implement it, the reply states.

They had three months to revise the application, which they did. A patent office answer is expected later this month.

Their new application includes statements from two new supporters, a former Air Force meteorologist and an engineer with the government's rocket launch program.

But in June, the NOAA weighed in. It identified "several potential complications" in the pair's idea.

The upward push of vapor in a hurricane eye wall is so powerful that it would quickly overwhelm the liquid nitrogen, Frank Marks Jr., director of the NOAA's Hurricane Research Division said in a letter to Lund.

Hoffman and Lund were furious. Lund fired off two response letters. He called Marks' opinions "conjecture," and bemoaned the lack of consensus among scientists on the topic.

"The only way to prove the project is to do it," Lund wrote.

Peter G. Black, a NOAA research meteorologist, said he hasn't read their plan. But he questioned their theory of hitting a forming eye wall when it's a half-mile or mile in diameter.

"We almost never see an eye wall that small," Black said. "When you do, it's a super intense hurricane the size of Charley."

* * *

Hoffman said he has lost his patience with the NOAA.

"We now feel we are the experts," he said, comparing his idea to a cure for cancer. "It's like Columbus going west," he said.

They are in search of new allies, like former Vice President Al Gore and the National Weather Service.

"We want to go to the American people now. We're tired of waiting," he said. "Will it affect the (2008 presidential) election? Of course it will!"

Times researcher Carolyn Edds contributed. Saundra Amrhein can be reached at amrhein@sptimes.com or (813) 661-2441.

[Last modified September 8, 2007, 23:19:32]