In December, all the men connected with the hurricane warning service in the Army, Navy, Weather Bureau and other agencies—including the top officials, the forecasters, the men who directed the flights, the pilots, weather officers, and others who made up the crews, the radio men on shore, and the Coast Guard people—were fully represented in a conference in Washington. Here they all went over their experiences and offered every possible suggestion for improving the service. Many things were needed, but two tough problems worried everybody. One was how the crew could find out where they were in latitude and longitude or in distance and direction from some point on an island or on the coast after they found the center of the storm. After all, the weather observer, navigator, and the radio man might figure out how to get in the eye, and the plane might get into it, but if they failed to get their position accurately, the information was of doubtful value. This nearly always depended on radio signals from distant shore stations, for it was seldom that they could get a celestial fix as a mate does on a ship at sea. The second problem was communications—how to get the weather message off and be sure it had been received at a shore radio station, and see also that it reached the forecast offices promptly. All of this had many sources of delay. In a hurricane, the atmospherics were often excessive. At times the radio man on the plane could hear nothing but loud static in his ear phones. He was powerless to do anything except to send “blind” and hope somebody would receive it and understand what it was. Slowly these problems were solved in part as time went on. _10._ KAPPLER’S HURRICANE _Black it stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell._ —Milton Kappler’s Hurricane was one of the most violent of history. It got its name from a weather officer, a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps named Bernard J. Kappler. The story includes the vivid personal reactions of a number of men who explored this tremendous storm as it built up its energy while crossing fifteen hundred miles of tropical and subtropical sea surface and finally ravaged parts of Southern Florida, including the outright destruction of the big Richmond Naval Air Base. The fact is that this storm seems to have had its birth over western Africa. There were signs of it there and near the Cape Verde Islands on the first two days of September. Later there were some indications of its winds and low pressure in radio reports from ships but eventually it was lost for the time being, far out in the Atlantic.