National Hurricane Center: A Rich Source of Historical Storm Data

My return to work for the 2011 – 2012 academic year was delayed for a day due to power outages caused by Tropical Storm Irene. While some neighbors remain without power and cleanup of downed trees continues, we didn’t see the type of devastation here in Southeastern Massachusetts that others did elsewhere.

While tracking the storm over the past week, I learned the National Hurricane Center’s website has a wealth of historical data related to past tropical storms and hurricanes. Visit the site’s history section and you can retrieve data about the deadliest and costliest Atlantic tropical storms. Additionally, you can find an archive of forecasts and advisories issued in past hurricane seasons.

The AP picture above left illustrates some of the damage inflicted on southern Vermont by Irene over the weekend. The image below left comes from the Providence Journal and shows the wind-driven surf of 1954’s Hurricane Carol into a Cranston, RI yacht club.

The Pandemic of 1918-1919

One of the websites I visit most every day is HISTORY.COM’s This Day in History. Perusing that site this morning, I learned that on this day in 1918 a parade in Philadelphia drew crowds to the city and helped spread the influenza virus throughout the region. The pandemic of 1918-1919 sickened people around the globe. When it was over, some 30 million people worldwide had perished after contracting the highly contagious virus.

The National Archives has put together and impressive array of digitized documents in their online collection, The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918. There, you’ll find photographs, telegrams, letters, and government documents. Additionally, The United States Department of Health and Human Services had compiled a rich collection of digital resources related to the outbreak titled The Great Pandemic: The United States in 1918-1919. Like the National Archives collection, it contains photographs, letters, and other documents.

The photo above of a New York City letter carrier was taken in October of 1918 and comes from the National Archives.

Does Dust Bowl top the list of the nation's worst environmental disasters?

As oil continues to leak into the Gulf of Mexico, environmental historians are debating where the spill ranks on the list of the country’s most devastating environmental disasters. Commenting in the New York Times this week, Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University, argued the Dust Bowl was “one of the worst ecological blunders in world history”.

There are a host of sites that feature primary sources pertaining to the Dust Bowl. Through images, personal narratives and government documents, those sites detail the decade-long devastation visited on the Great Plains. Some of those sites are: the Dust Bowl Migration Digital Archives at California State University, Bakersfield; Voices from the Dust Bowl, part of the Library of Congress American Memory Project, Surviving the Dust Bowl, the companion website to the PBS American Experience program by the same name and NASA’s website, which provides a collection of Dust Bowl images.

The image above comes from the Federal National Resources Conservation Service.

An environmental crisis threatens the Gulf Coast

As the huge oil slick caused by last week’s oil rig explosion approaches the Gulf Coast, federal officials are grappling with ways to contain the spill and lessen the potential environmental damage. On Thursday, federal officials said they feared the oil is leaking underwater at the rate of 210,000 gallons per day. While the exact toll of this spill remains to be seen, it calls to mind thoughts of the Exxon Valdez disaster. In March 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran around in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Damage Assessment and Restoration provides digital access to a wealth of primary source documents relating to that environmental disaster including: photographs, copies of environmental impact statements and documents pertaining to civil settlements related to the spill. As the current situation in the Gulf continues to unfold, you can visit NOAA’s website to keep track of remediation efforts. The photo at right of an oil-covered duck on Alaska’s shore comes from NOAA and was provided by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council.

NITLE in New Orleans

I’m in New Orleans for the next couple of days attending the
NITLE Summit. I haven’t been to Louisiana in many years, and this is my first post-Katrina visit to this great city. Prior to my departure, while searching for material pertaining to the history of the city’s flood control planning, I turned to JSTOR. History students love JSTOR because they can find full text articles quickly. However, they don’t often tend to think of JSTOR as a primary-source-finder. It can do just that - very well. I played around with a variety of search terms – Mississippi River, Louisiana, New Orleans, levee, dike, Lake Ponchatrain, etc. I limited my search to the first half of the 20th century. And, I found some solid sources. For Example: The Plan for Flood Control of the Mississippi River in Its Alluvial Valley. Presented to the Secretary of War and by Him to Congress, published in 1928 in Volume 135 of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. One snippet from that report reads:

To afford proper protection to New Orleans, with its population of nearly half a
million and property value of over a billion dollars, a special floodway
upstream from the city is essential.

The picture above of the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans comes from NASA’s earth observatory.