Our Heralds of Storm and Flood 



589 



which the original capital is paid back 

 twenty times over in twelve months is 

 extraordinarily profitable and well worth 

 investigation. How does the Weather 

 Bureau do it? 



As it is impossible in one brief article 

 to describe all the branches of the 

 weather service, which reaches inti- 

 mately about one-half of our population 

 ever}' day, I shall cite only a few of the 

 more striking phases of its work. 



WATCHING OUR TURBULENT RIVERS 



The eagle watch kept on our turbulent 

 rivers to see that they do not catch un- 

 prepared the people living on their banks, 

 or on the low-lying lands near them, is 

 one of the most dramatic phases of the 

 work of the weather service. By long 

 experience and close calculation, the 

 weather-man has learned to read the 

 symptoms predicting a rise or fall as 

 accurately as a physician can count the 

 heart-beats of his patient with his finger 

 on the pulse; he has posted hundreds 

 of rain-gages throughout the land feed- 

 ing each river, which, like sentinels, 

 tell him when the rainfall has been heavy 

 and the exact number of inches of rain 

 that have fallen. To find the amount 

 of water that will pour into the river 

 is then simply a matter of arithmetic, 

 as he knows the number of miles drained 

 by each river. He knows how much 

 water the river bed can carry in a given 

 time as nicely as his wife can judge the 

 contents of her coffee-cup. He knows 

 the strong and weak points of the river 

 banks, so that if the skies send more 

 water than the river bed can carr}', he can 

 predict where the waters will overtop 

 or burst its banks and drown the farmer's 

 cattle or flood the city streets. 



One of the most remarkable cases of 

 flood prediction on record was the warn- 

 ing of the disastrous floods of 1903. 

 Twenty-eight days in advance of its com- 

 ing, the forecaster at Washington an- 

 nounced the exact time when the crest 

 of a flood would reach New Orleans, 

 and said that the height of the flood 

 would'be 21 feet. Punctuallv to the hour 



the flood came, and its crest was 20 

 feet 7 inches, onl)- five inches less than 

 the height predicted. The immense ocean 

 of water had started one thousand miles 

 away. It had dropped from the skies 

 over a territory six times larger than the 

 State of New York (over 300,000 square 

 miles) ; but the weather-man knew its 

 rate of march as surely as the engineer, 

 with his eye on the indicator, knows the 

 speed of his locomotive. The people at 

 Memphis were warned that the waters 

 would rise to 40 feet and overtop their 

 levees, and they were given seven days' 

 notice. The people of Cairo were told to 

 prepare for a height of 50 feet; but as 

 they were nearer the starting point of the 

 flood, they received only four days' 

 notice. Such seasonable warning gave 

 time to the people to prepare for defense. 

 Thousands of men were set to work to 

 raise and strengthen the levees and em- 

 bankments, to clear the wharves and 

 river banks, to remove women and chil- 

 dren, to drive the cattle to places of safety. 

 When the flood arrived, the people were 

 ready for it. Comparatively few lives 

 were lost, and the damage to property, 

 while terrible, was millions and millions 

 of dollars less than it would have been 

 if the people had had no sentinel to cry 

 out the march of the waters. 



The devotion of the dike-watchers of 

 Holland has been the theme of children's 

 stories for generations, but the sleepless 

 watch of the hundreds of Weather Bu- 

 reau observers when a flood threatens 

 the land passes unnoticed and unpraised. 

 The scientific precision of American 

 science has made the work appear so 

 simple that it has been robbed of its 

 romance. 



FROST AND COLD-WAVE WARNINGS 



Much of the care of the Weather Bu- 

 reau has been devoted to developing a 

 perfect system of frost and cold-wave 

 warnings. A blighting frost or wither- 

 ing cold wave in early spring or autumn 

 may leave behind blackened orchards, 

 wilted vegetable gardens, and empty 

 pockets. In a night it may destroy the 



