WEATHER: Two-Punch Emma

Emma and Kathleen were big, blowy and as like as two sisters, but there was nothing homey or lovable about either of them. Christened by Army weathermen and by the Red Cross, Kathleen was a typhoon* which last week rolled over Japan’s main island of Honshu, leaving hundreds dead or homeless, and Emma was a hurricane which took two ferocious licks at the U.S.

Most other great hurricanes—1928’s, for example, which killed 1,500 people around Florida’s Lake Okeechobee—had caught the U.S. more or less unprepared. This time, the U.S. was as ready as it could expect to get for a hurricane.

Emma, bred off the Cape Verde Islands, was first reported by ships on Sept. 11. She was then 800 miles east of the Antilles and traveling toward the U.S. at the rate of 20 m.p.h. From then on, diligent U.S. hurricane-hunters kept track of her every movement.

Measuring the Eye. In Army & Navy bombers, they made unprecedented clinical studies of a hurricane’s doughnutlike anatomy. They took temperature readings and measured wind velocities (up to 150 m.p.h.). They even flew through the tempestuous outer wind-swirl into the doughnut’s windless, cloudless central “eye” (TIME, Sept. 22). By radar, they found that the eye was 25 miles in diameter.

Emma moved steadily westward, then veered northward off the Virgin Islands. Meteorologists figured that she would probably keep on going northward—as most Caribbean hurricanes have done before —through a low-pressure trough created by two high-pressure banks. But the “highs” converged so fast that the big ‘cane’s northward path was blocked. For six hours, she stood ominously still near the Bahamas. When she started to roll again, she headed westward, straight for Florida’s southeast Gold Coast.

Out flashed Government warning bulletins. Floridians had 48 hours to get set for the impact. From Miami to Palm Beach, store fronts were boarded up, windows shuttered, shelters made ready. Out of Pahokee, in the Okeechobee farmlands, chugged two evacuation trains, carrying 5,000 refugees. Another 10,000 headed upstate in a bumper-to-bumper auto caravan.

Mowing a Path. One morning shortly before noon, Emma struck. Within ten hours, she mowed a 200-mile-wide path across Florida and howled out into the Gulf of Mexico.

Florida officially totted up a casualty list of twelve dead and seven missing. In addition, a Negro was shot to death by a white man who said he caught him looting a windowless Miami liquor store.

Damage ran into millions of dollars. Two radio towers were toppled at Fort Lauderdale (where, in the lull of the eye’s passing over, residents were amazed to hear birds singing). Hundreds of beach cabanas were blown away, and many a majestic palm was blown down along Palm Beach’s famed millionaires’ row and at Miami’s Hialeah race track. In the ‘Glades farmland, citrus, ramie, bean and tomato crops were badly whipped.

Still, by major hurricane standards Florida’s mowing was merciful. Several babies were born safely while things were at their worst, and some got souvenir names—e.g., Glory Be and Merry Gale.

Shooting a Splinter. But Emma was not done. She shot a tornadic splinter straight through the heart of the little northwest Florida town of Apalachicola. Then, still producing 90-m.p.h. winds, she thundered up out of the Gulf into Mississippi and Louisiana.

Along 25 miles of the old Spanish trail between Biloxi and Bay St. Louis, Miss., hardly a building was left standing. Sea walls buckled. Gulf coast beaches and roads were littered with poisonous water moccasins, blown and washed in from marshy offshore islands. Thousands of acres of sugar cane were flattened. Tidal waters flooded Louisiana’s bayou country. New Orleans got a day-long battering which left it a-clutter with twisted autos, broken power lines, shattered windows.

The Mississippi-Louisiana toll: at least 100 dead or missing.

At week’s end, gusty rains drenched the Mississippi River valley from northern Louisiana up to Illinois. That was the last of Emma. But this week, new storms were brewing in the Gulf and in the Caribbean. The Gulf storm was boring in on wounded southern Florida.

* The practice of giving feminine names to big storms was begun as a wartime security measure.