But there is something about typhoons that causes the people to look upon them with even greater terror than in the case of hurricanes. Likewise, the storm hunters tackle the job of tracking them with less confidence. Typhoons come from greater distances. Their points of origin may be scattered over a wider area. Much more often than is the case with hurricanes, there may be two or more at the same time. In their paths of devastation they fan out over a bigger and more populous part of the world. It takes more planes, more men and longer flights to keep up with typhoons than with hurricanes. For many decades the people of the Far East struggled valiantly against the typhoon menace without much interest on the part of the Western World. Native observers reported them when they showed their first dangerous signs and then came roaring by the islands in the Pacific, including the Philippines, as they swept a path of devastation on the way to China or Japan. Men on ships equipped with radio sent frantic weather messages to Manila, Shanghai or Tokyo as they were being battered by monstrous winds and seas. Father Charles Deppermann, S.J., formerly of the Philippine Weather Bureau, who did as much as any man to help people prepare for these catastrophes, made an investigation to see why some of the typhoon reports from native observers were defective. He listed a few of the reasons. One observer said his house was shaking so much in the storm that he was unable to finish the observation. He added that ninety per cent of the houses around him were thrown to the ground. Another common complaint was that the observers could not read the thermometers because the air was full of flying tin and wood. Another apologetic man put on the end of his observation a note that the roof of the weather station was off and the sea was coming in. The observer on the Island of Yap fled to the Catholic rectory and looked back to see his roof, walls, and doors blowing away, but he sent his record to the forecast office! Another observer on Yap was reading the barometer when it was hit by a flying piece of wood and the observer was knocked to the floor. One of the observers had excuses for a poor observation because he had to run against the wind in water knee deep. In another place, the wind blew two rooms off the observer’s house at observation time. But the most convincing excuse for failure was from another town where the observer was drowned in a typhoon before the record was finished.