The October Hurricane Submitted by Larie Tedesco Daily Picayune 10-04-1893; pg. 4; Issue 253; col. B ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ There was no warning of Sunday night's storm because there were no means of getting information concerning it, save what the barometer could give. Science to-day possesses no means of predicting the weather outright. When a storm or a cold wave starts in one part of the country and advances in a particular direction, then, by means of the telegraph, it is not difficult for those who have given attention to the conditions of temperature and air pressure to say with considerable success when and where they will be felt. But this is not a prediction any more than is the foretelling of the probable arrival of arrival of a railway train when the telegraph has told what stations have been reached and passed. The ignorance concerning Sunday's storm arose from the fact that it came in directly from the sea and did not pass over any considerable extent of country before reaching here. Ships which arrived in port yesterday from the south and east report that when at a distance from the mouth of the river, to the extent of fifty to eighty mile, they encountered a gale about 5 o'clock in the afternoon of Sunday. They kept on their way until 7 o'clock in the evening, when they encountered a wind blowing with hurricane force from the west and southwest. The steamer John Wilson reports that the barometer went down to 29.06. They all declare that the waves were tremendous. So great was the fury of the storm that the mariners were afraid to continue their course, and so they steered to the southward to save themselves from being driven on the coast. Thus it is established that the storm was first encountered twenty-five to fifty miles at sea directly south of this city, blowing from the southwestward. One ship coming in from the eastward found a southeast wind, but blowing with hurricane force. This ship was on the eastern side of the revolving storm, while the others met the western side of its periphery. The hurricane was formed in the West Gulf, or else it came into the Gulf from the Caribbean Sea through the lower or Yucatan Pass, and was not experienced in Havana at all. It was probably of small diameter for a cyclone, not more than 100 miles across, but of extreme violence. It would be interesting to have the velocity of the wind officially determined at various points in its course. Coming in directly from the sea, nearly due south of this city, it was impossible that any information of its approach could have been telegraphed, unless from Port Eads, Quarantine Station, or Pointe-a-la- Hache, but the wires were quickly prostated, and the advance of the meteor was so rapid that it struck this city only a few hours after it was first encountered at sea. After working its havoc in the waters and on the land south of New Orleans, the cyclone moved off to the eastward, along the coast, dealing death and destruction in its course. The reports of devastation upon the waters and coasts of the various bays, bayous, creeks and inlets to the south of the city are extremely serious. Many fishing and oyster luggers ply those waters, and as the coasts are either low- lying sand banks or sea marshes, the wind swept over them with its full fury, and, as there was no shelter for the fishing craft, they must have suffered terribly. The statement that hundreds of the fishermen and oystermen have been lost is not improbable, but the Picayune indulges the hope that it is at least exaggerated, as it does also in regard to the accounts of disaster at Grande Isle. In regard to the origin of the storm there is no assurance that it did not come into the Gulf of Mexico through the Yucatan Pass without being know at Havana, and moving westward, wandered about in the Gulf until it recurved somewhere about the junction of the ninety-fifth meridian of west longitude with the Tropic of Cancer and moved to the northeast. It will be a long time before the people of the stricken locality will forget the cyclone which dealt death and ruin on the settlements of Sabine Pass and Johnson's Bayou on the night of October 4, 1886. Some four or five days before that, the Picayune and received from Havana a special telegram announcing the passage into the Gulf of Mexico, from the Caribbean Archipelago, of a cyclonic storm. For days an anxious watch was kept for it, but it was not heard of until it poured its full fury on the country near Sabine Pass. I was not felt as far west as Galveston, nor as far east as New Orleans, but it rushed in from the sea and precipitated all its force upon a region not more than a hundred miles wide, with Sabine Pass for its center, and thence passed off to the northeast. It is not impossible for cyclonic storms to originate in the western bight of the Gulf of Mexico, because there, under a tropical sun, meet and wrestle the south winds with those that have come from the Arctic seas over the open plains of the trans-Mississippi region. The resultant of the two forces would, in all probability , be a revolving storm which would be unable to force its way through the dense atmosphere over the snow-covered peaks of the Mexican Cordilleras , and so be force out to the northward. These conditions could organize a storm in the West Gulf, but, in most cases, those that appear there are sent forth from the cyclone cradle in the Caribbean Archipelago. Possibly this storm was of that sort.