Passing Storms

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 17, 23 April 1903, Page 1

Passing Storms

One night Old Sam Pepys woke up amidst the rush and clatter of a great wind. And h» said to hia wife : ' I pray God I hear not the death of some great person, this wind is so high.' Pepyß gave voice to a super^ stition that is by no means dead, although it is within precisely a month of 200 years since the famous dia,rywriter passed over to the majority. If there were anything in the aged superstition, the past few weeks would have coffined a big percentage of the ' great persons * of .Europe and Australia. For the wind has been blowing furiously on and off till it slit its bellows. It left Mr. Lipton's ' Shamrock 111.,' like poor Tom Bowling, a ' sheer hulk ' off Weymouth ; it wrecked and foundered vessels- in Marseilles harbor ; and a few weeks ago it played red havoc over the British Isles, but especially in Ireland, uprooted valuable park tress by thousands, flailed the forests, ripped houses into flying smithereens, sent people flying out of jerry-built tenements to the safer shelter of the more nolidly-built police stations, and repeated most of the destructive antics associated with that epoch in Irish history, ' the bight Of th« big wind 'of 1839. Some of its reputed exploits remind us of a newspaper description of ft cyclone ixx North Dakota, which is said to have ' turned a well inside out, a cellar upside down, moved a township line, changed th« day of the week, blown a mortgage off » farm,, and knocked the svind out of a stumping politician.'

The storm in Great Britain is said to have been moving at a high velocity when it struck things in a heap and tore around among the wreck. It is credited with -a Bpeed of a hundred miles an hour. This was what our American cousins would call a pretty ' slick ' performance ; for the pace of European storms strike an average of only 17 miles an hour. Those of the United States hold the world's championship with an average of 28 miles. Much better running is, however, frequently made, for, like Mr. Dooley's Admiral Dewey, a windstorm can take things easy and be calm ' when they'se anything to t>e calm about ' But it can also ' light out ' like a grizzly of the Rockies when it is ' so dispoged.' In 1872, for instance, a hurricane — or whatever else you prefer to call its— tore along at the rate of 78 miles an hour from Texas to Maine. Nine years previously (according to Mulhall) another rushing windstorm swept over Liverpool at a pressure which indicated 90 miles an hour. And there are records of intermittent gusts in Great Britain which, for a brief space, did a sprint of two miles in a single minute. The tropics lay claim to typhoons and cyclones that career over the surface of sea and land at even greater speed than this.