Calamitous Cleo

Nothing illustrated the worth of overhead weather surveillance better than Tiros' advance warning fortnight ago that dangerous winds were gathering force in the Atlantic, 1,100 miles southeast of Puerto Rico.

To experts, photographs flashed down from the orbiting satellite suggested a big blow 60 miles across. Sure enough, within two days Hurricane Cleo was island-hopping toward Miami, and before the storm dwindled off the Georgia coast at week's end, it had left behind 150 deaths and a jagged line of destruction that cost property owners more than $300 million.

Blocked Vision. The French island of Guadeloupe took the first serious impact of Cleo's winds. There, the capital of Basse Terre suffered hundreds of demolished homes, and the hurricane devastated sugar and banana plantations, and left 14 dead. Bypassing Puerto Rico, Cleo next moved into Haiti, where the port city of Les Cayes was practically leveled, and 124 Haitian lives were lost.

What happened to Cleo next was obscured by Cuba, where, for political reasons, U.S. weather-tracking planes may not prowl. Moreover, the peaks of Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains blocked the view for the big new radar in Miami used to track hurricanes up to 300 miles away. Cuba's mountains did something else. They broke up Cleo's eye, forced the hurricane to regroup. When it did, it changed direction to a more northerly course, was thus only 200 miles from the Florida coast when the hurricane trackers spotted Cleo again. Flying into the storm's eye, one tracking plane was buffeted so badly that seven of its crewmen were injured.

Blasted Windows. Even so, Miami got ample warning that a big blow might be near. Nevertheless, the citizens on Florida's Gold Coast were so nonchalant that hotel and shop windows were unboarded, luxury yachts still at their moorings when Cleo struck. Sucking up energy from the Gulf Stream and being carried along by a fast-moving upper air mass, Cleo hit Miami full force. It was the first time in 14 years that a hurricane had done that, and many new Miamians will be talking about Cleo 14 years hence. It bent palm trees to the ground, crumpled street signs, uprooted shrubs, took gravel right out of roadways. Blowing at 115 m.p.h., Cleo knocked down so many power lines that more than 60,000 telephones in Dade County were without service. At least two dozen fires broke out in Miami, and winds were so high that firemen could not cope with them for hours. At Opa-Locka Airport, a DC-3 was lifted 50 ft. off the ground, flopping helplessly at the end of its ropes. A runaway freight car was blown eight miles from Hollywood to Fort Lauderdale, finally crashing into a railway station that had been nudged onto the tracks by the gale.

The hotels were hit just as hard. A huge plate-glass window at the Fontainbleau Hotel collapsed, and water and wind caused as much as $250,000 damage to rooms in the Deauville and Americana hotels. "It was worse than Argonne," said a 72-year-old World War I vet, but incredibly, the most serious injury Cleo appeared to have caused in all of Florida was a broken arm, suffered by a 60-year-old woman guest at the Fontainbleau when a door fell on her.

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