All this work of charting the weather day by day and week by week is not wasted if no hurricane develops. Planes take off every day from southern and eastern airports, carrying passengers to Bermuda, Nassau, Trinidad, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico, and Central and South America. The crews stop at the weather office to pick up reports of wind and weather for their routes and at destination. The weather over these vast expanses of water surface is reported and predicted also for ships at sea. And when a storm begins to develop, ships and planes are among the first to be notified. Sooner or later, one of these swirling waves shows a definite center of low pressure, with winds blowing counterclockwise around it. Now the modern drama of the hurricane begins. In the region where these ominous winds are charted, radio messages from headquarters ask for reports from ships—every hour, if possible—and weather offices on islands are asked to make special balloon soundings of the upper air and send reports at frequent intervals. Warnings go out to vessels in the path of the storm as it picks up force. Alert storm hunters in Cuba and other countries are contacted to discuss the prospects, to furnish more frequent reports, and to assist in warning the populations on the islands. On the coast of the United States, excitement is in the air. Conversations in the street, offices, stores, homes, everywhere, turn to the incipient hurricane, and become more insistent as the big winds draw nearer. And finally the hour comes when precautions are necessary. By this time, business in the threatened area is at a standstill. The situation is like that during world-series baseball games and almost as dramatic as that which follows a declaration of war. Few people have their minds on business. At this point, the reports of storm hunters and the decisions of forecasters involve the immediate plans of hundreds of thousands of people, large costs for protection of property, and the safety of human life along shore and in small craft on the water. Some of the men and women who came down to the weather and radio offices this morning know now that they will not go home tonight. There will be an increasing volume of weather reports, the rattle of teletypewriters will become more insistent, the radio receivers will be guarded by alert men growing weary toward morning, planes will be evacuated from airports in the threatened region and flown back into the interior, and the businessman will go home early and get out the frames he uses to board up the windows when a hurricane is predicted. The Navy may take battleships and cruisers out of a threatened harbor, so that their officers will have room to maneuver.