Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1912-10-10
Truth About Line Storm.

1t has always been easy for New Eng
land to believe in equinoetial storms.
The settlers promptly had one. With
accessory freshet and tidal wave il
chased the Narragansett Indians into the
treetops; SO at least runs the old record.
And ever since that early tempest of 1885
the linestorm, or in Longfellow's phrase,
'sThe gigantic Stormwind of the equi-
noX,' has swept or ravaged the Atlantic
seaboard and even the central valleys.
Far out on Cape Cod, n shaft commem-
CRATES 81 men and boys of Truro drowned
in one autumnal storm at sea. The
great September gale is no longer
household word, but it still roars and
whoops in DR.. Holmes doggerel A kind
of storm that for 40 miles inland can
blight the foliage with salt, and drive
the Hurried sea gulls into Worcester inn
presses itself deeply on mems memo
ries,. The Nova Scotia gale of '73, with
its windows of wreckage, over 1900
vessels, and with its harvest of 600
deaths, also wrote its story plain. And
the September storms that are of still
more recent memory have brought de-
vastation upon the Gulf Coast and upon
the Sea Islands.
Yet critical men smile at old folks for
believing that the suns crossing of the
line compels storm. The celestial
equator. like the earths, is only imagin-
airy. They point out. too. that the line
storm seldom comes eactiy on time.
With two or three weeks leeway on
either side of Sept %, any marked dis
turbance gets the name of an equinoc-
tial and feeds the fancy for another
10
Ilinestorm rained and blew and raised the
tides over all the world at once. But
now barometer and telegraph show that
a storm travels ON a local track; 1t is a
progressive windwhirl mere eddy in
some great air stream of the globe.
For instance, the cyclone that was ac-
cepted in 1900 as the equinoctial storm
left the field of observation Sept 16; it
had been felt in Boston four days be-
fore; but it first came into view off
Barbados Aug 80. For all these rea-
isons the linestorm is now widely called
superstition, akin to notions about the
grounding and about termination in the
dark of the moon.
This break with tradition is neverthe-
less too hasty. In truth the linestorm of
our fathers weather lore neither is fact
nor yet is fiction. OF course the sum-
crossing OF an imaginary line cannot be-
get real storm. But on the other
hand, at the time of the autumnal .equi-
| nox the sun is shining straight down
upon the equatorial sea, and the region
| of Gains is a little north of the equator.
These are just the conditions for easy
development of tropical cyclones, and
| for their easy passage westward. The
violent storms arising from overturns
: of hot and cold air in the doldrums fol-
low the general wind movement west
ward to the West Indies or into ne
gulf; there they reach the prevalent
southwest drift of air, and recurve to
! the right, sweep northeastward near the
coastline, and disappear at last far out
1 in the north Atlantic. These tropical
cyclones, the hurricanes of the logbooks
are the half truth in the linestorm
They are also the reason why the gov
ernments daily weather reports men
ton at this time of year the West Indiar
weather conditions.-Boston Herald. SG'