Category: Weather

Happy 40th Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

9/1/2013

My parents, Terry and Jennifer (Bellan) Kowalski were married on September 1, 1973 at St. Anthony of Padua Church in Parma, Ohio. To commemorate the day, I've created a special online photo album of their wedding pictures. The album can be found at this link: http://kowalski-bellan.weebly.com/kowalski-bellan-wedding-album.html

The one "story" we (the kids) always hear about that day is how HOT it was. The church was not air-conditioned - it wasn't even air-conditioned after it was turned into our school gymnasium in the 1980s - BUT the reception hall thankfully was air-conditioned. Since I know the places in which to obtain historical weather information, I decided to look up the weather details of that day. I found two Cleveland observation stations not too far from Parma. Here are their temperature observations for September 1:

The average high temperature for September 1st in Cleveland is around 79F, so yes, that's pretty warm, and it was likely quite humid, too. Several observations stations mostly east of Parma recorded some precipitation for the day, likely due to smaller "pop-up" thunderstorms. (The second column shows rainfall for September 1, in inches.)

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May 31, 1889: The Johnstown Flood

5/31/2013

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On this day 124 years ago, the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania was destroyed by the worst flash flood in our nation's history. The flood was caused by extreme amounts of rain swelling the man-made Lake Conemaugh to epic heights, which caused its poorly-maintained earthen dam to collapse. The lake completely emptied, sending a wall of water equal to the flow of the Mississippi River down the Little Conemaugh River Valley. Several smaller towns along the way were destroyed as the flood moved downstream, during which time the water became filled with all sorts of debris: wood, metal, livestock, trees, stone. Johnstown was hit in the mid-afternoon, less than an hour after the dam broke. The devastation in Johnstown was indescribable. Over 2,200 people perished in the flood. Sixty-seven year old Clara Barton and her 'forces' arrived less than a week later to help survivors; it was the first large disaster relief campaign headed by the Red Cross.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

My husband and I visited the National Park Service's Johnstown National Memorial in 2004. We attended a wedding not far from there, and, both being meteorologists, we were very interested in the event. The Memorial site is located at the site of the former Lake Conemaugh, fourteen miles upstream of Johnstown. I took several photos:

Imagine this basin full of water (those railroad tracks were not there). This was Lake Conemaugh. At the time of the flood, it held approximately 20 million TONS of water. The lake was surrounded by a large clubhouse and lake houses owned by members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, a summertime haven for wealthy Pennsylvania executives and entrepreneurs, including Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew W. Mellon.

Part of the basin of the former Lake Conemaugh.

Here I am standing at the site of the dam. If you look across the river, you can still see where one side of the dam was situated.

And here is the view downstream, through the opening where the dam used to be. I drew a red line to indicate (roughly) where the top of the dam would have been located.

Looking downstream through dam opening.

Like most National Parks sites, this one was wonderfully informative and interesting. I highly recommend visiting if you are ever in this part of Pennsylvania. Now that I do a lot of genealogy research, I find myself looking at this disaster from more of a family history perspective. Ninety-nine entire families completely perished in the disaster. Almost 100 children lost BOTH parents, and more than 320 people lost a spouse. Over seven hundred victims were never identified, but their remains are buried in Grandview Cemetery, which sits on a hill overlooking the town of Johnstown. Not only did this disaster affect the physical structures of Johnstown, but it forever altered the stories of these families.

For a detailed account of the flood and its aftermath, I highly recommend reading David McCullough's book, The Johnstown Flood. I'll leave you with one more neat image I found on Wikimedia Commons. It is an 1889 stereoscope of the dam site after it collapsed (looking upstream).

Source: Wikimedia Commons

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When Nature Steals Our Memories

3/18/2013

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Most of you who read my blog regularly already know that in my pre-kid days, I worked as a meteorologist. One of my former professors, Dr. John Knox, made the news today for a study of his that was recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Using another woman's Facebook page that successfully helped reunite lost objects with their owners, he and his students traced the paths of peoples' personal items as they were picked up and deposited by storms during the April 27, 2011 tornado outbreak in Alabama. Some of the recovered items had great amounts of sentimental value to the people who lost them, and, as stated in the article, "Knox said he sought to teach them how to conduct the research in a way that was ethical and sensitive to the victims since the tornadoes destroyed lives and homes."

Ten years ago, I would have found this study interesting mostly for the potential it has to help scientists understand the dynamics of a severe storm system. (Imagine a tornado striking a facility containing toxic or radioactive substances and needing to know where to evacuate and/or warn people who live downstream.) Since "crossing over" into the role of a family historian, I have developed a new appreciation for the destructive potential of Mother Nature. Yes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires cause terrible damage to buildings and infrastructure, but what about the family heirlooms INSIDE those buildings? Photo albums, birth certificates, church sacrament and education records, newspaper clippings, letters, and diaries all help tell the stories of our ancestors and will someday help tell OUR stories. When items such as these are picked up by violent atmospheric winds or damaged beyond repair in a flood or wildfire, they are likely gone forever and so is a part of our families' histories.

Unlike our ancestors, we are fortunate today to have the option of digitization when it comes to photos and any sort of paper-based records. But how many of us actually do it? Not only that, but once the information is scanned onto a computer, how many of us save it in multiple places - on a separate 'cloud' drive or on a CD or external hard drive that is stored at a location AWAY from our place of residence? If you are, like me, into preserving your family's memories, you are probably likely to take these precautions, but the average person usually does not, and when nature strikes, generations of memories may be lost. We also need to continue to support our libraries in their efforts to digitize historical records, because, unfortunately, they suffer from the effects of natural disasters just as much as the rest of society.

(By the way, the image above is the front page of the Chicago Herald Examiner from March 20, 1925. On March 18, 1925, an exceptionally strong and long-lived tornado (or a continuous series of strong tornadoes - it is still debated), completely destroyed several towns in Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, killing 695 people and injuring over 2,000. It is known as the Tri-State Tornado and, to this day, remains the deadliest tornado in our nation's history.)

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The Great Hurricane of 1938 (Sandy Who???)

10/28/2012

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Unless you live under a log, by now you've heard all the hype surrounding Hurricane Sandy which will make landfall along the U.S. Mid-Atlantic Coast tomorrow. Even though I don't work as a meteorologist anymore, I am nonetheless still very much fascinated by these large weather events and the impacts that they have on people and society. I still regularly look at weather observations, maps, and computer forecasting models. And, like most professional forecasters, I like to compare current storm happenings with historical events. So, today I thought I would blog about the New England Hurricane of 1938.

Here is a surface analysis map from 21 Sep 1938 (left) and the current storm (right):

1938 Hurricane: 21 Sept 1938

Hurricane Sandy: 28 Oct 2012

The 1938 Hurricane was actually much stronger than Sandy; it reached Category 5 status on the Saffir-Simpson Scale while it was still over open waters with sustained winds up to 160 mph. It has been estimated that it was probably a Category 3 with maximum sustained winds of 125 mph when it made landfall in Long Island, New York on the afternoon of September 21st. As it approached New England, the storm's forward speed reached an incredible 70 mph, which, when added to the already-fast rotational winds, made the total observed winds at landfall even higher on the right-hand side of the storm.

Great Hurricane of 1938 path.

One of my favorite actresses, Katharine Hepburn, experienced this storm first-hand, and it left such a strong impression on her that she dedicated a chapter to it in her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life. She describes what she and her family members went through in their home on the Connecticut coast:

"Then there was a rip and a crash and the big laundry wing fell off the back of the house. By this time, the wind seemed to have doubled its strength and the tide had risen up over the bulkhead and was rushing across the lawn. The house, which was a big old wooden house built in about 1870, was shaking like a leaf. Windows were being blown out or sucked in. Two of the chimneys had blown down."

She then goes on to describe how she, her mother, her brother, and their cook escaped the doomed house by climbing out of a dining room window with a rope and then running to higher ground. About 15 minutes after they escaped, the house "just sailed away - easy as pie - and soon there was nothing at all left on the spot where the house stood for over 60 years."

The storm became known as the 'Long Island Express.' It is estimated that anywhere between 600 and 800 people were killed and that 57,000 structures were damaged or destroyed. Thousands of fishing and shipping vessels were also destroyed, which was devastating to the region's economy. The cost of damage in 1938 was about $306 million, which would be equivalent to around $6.3 billion in today's dollars. IF this strong of a hurricane were to ever make landfall along the Long Island and Connecticut coastlines today, the property damage would be well into the tens of billions simply due to the fact that population in these areas has grown a lot since 1938, which means more structures and more personal property would be in danger of destruction.

And THAT is one of the reasons why Hurricane Sandy is getting so much press today. Sandy is not as strong of a hurricane as the Long Island Express was, BUT it is a very LARGE, expansive storm that is going to affect millions of people just because of the sheer population density of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast states. I worked as a meteorologist in the insurance industry, and I am confident that the damage caused by Sandy will be well over a billion dollars. The one benefit of experiencing a hurricane today as opposed to in 1938 is the improvements in weather monitoring and forecasting. Some of the computer forecast models saw this situation coming together over a week ago, and satellite tracking of hurricanes is an invaluable tool to meteorologists today that forecasters in 1938 simply did not have. We have more time to get prepared today, which, as any emergency manager will tell you, does save lives.

Because our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in Ohio, my husband and I do not have any people in our family tree who were affected by the 1938 storm. Do you have any ancestors that were affected by this 1938 storm? If you are in the path of Sandy, what are you doing to get ready?

©2012, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Happy 40th Anniversary, Mom and Dad!

May 31, 1889: The Johnstown Flood

When Nature Steals Our Memories

The Great Hurricane of 1938 (Sandy Who???)

Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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