Yankee Meddling?

In Savannah last week, Southern blood bubbled toward the boiling point. A Miami weatherman had hinted that last month's disastrous hurricane might have been not an act of God, but just a low Yankee trick.

In a letter to Chatham County Commissioner Judge James T. Houlihan, Miami Forecaster Grady Norton spelled out his suspicion. Aerial seeding of the hurricane with dry ice might very well, he claimed, have diverted the storm from its course (500 miles out at sea, headed for Bermuda). The joint Army-Navy-General-Electric experiment (an attempt to break up the storm), Weatherman Norton explained, might have been at least partly responsible for the storm's abrupt left face and subsequent heavy march through Florida and Georgia.

In Washington, Army & Navy officials remained mum. But Dr. Francis Reichelderfer, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, took a stormy view of the Miami suggestion. Said he: "The Weather Bureau has no evidence which would indicate that artificial factors had anything to do with the development of the hurricane. There have been other hurricanes which behaved just as erratically." In fact, there was a hurricane back in 1906 which did just about the same thing, "and that was long before we ever heard of dry ice."

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