Lake City's Hurricane Hunter Killed in 1955

"Lost at Sea" is inscribed on a monument at Lake City's Memorial Cemetery, followed by the title, "Hurricane Hunters."
The monument to Lt. George W. Herlong, located at the graves of his parents, pays tribute to the Lake City native who disappeared with the rest of his crew almost 50 years ago on the only airplane lost in a mission inside an Atlantic hurricane.
Herlong, who grew up in the bright pink, 19th-century house at the corner of Alachua Avenue and U.S. 90, was a co-pilot on the Navy Neptune P2V that was probing the eye of Hurricane Janet in late September 1955. He was 25.
The Right Rev. Bert Herlong, now the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, has fond memories of the two brothers making model airplanes and riding their bicycles to the old airstrip in Lake City, where they would wash airplanes in exchange for a ride.
Herlong thinks about his brother, especially when hurricanes threaten U.S. coastline, as they've done frequently to Florida in the past two months.
"I think about all the terrible damage done by storms over the years," Herlong said in a telephone interview from his Nashville office. "The place I lived in Jacksonville wasn't a great distance from the naval air station, so I was reminded every time I drove by there."
The story of Herlong and the rest of the Airborne Early Warning Squadron Four crew is told in the 2002 book, "Storm Chasers: The Hurricane Hunters and Their Fateful Flight into Hurricane Janet," by David Toomey.
"They entered and explored the most powerful storms on earth in aircraft of World War II vintage," Toomey wrote of the early Hurricane Hunters. "They estimated the drift of their aircraft by looking at windblown waves, and they located the hurricane they were seeking with rudimentary radio waves. They had no computer technology, no global positioning system, no satellite images."
The book also gives three scenarios of how the end might have been like for the crew. This was especially difficult for Herlong to read.
"I always had in my mind some kind of picture of what it must have been like," he said. "I just pictured a huge racing storm, with the airplane being tossed about. I remember him telling me about flying really low, close to the waves.
"So I always wondered if they might have hit some kind of a downdraft. You always wonder, but you never know."
Longtime resident Morris Williams was in Boy Scouts with the younger brother and also remembers G.W. Herlong as "an exceptionally bright young man." Herlong excelled in math and science, as well as model airplanes, which were prominently displayed in the family home. It was this love of airplanes that eventually led Herlong into hurricane reconnaissance.
When news that the plane was missing reached Lake City, Williams remembers residents' surprise that there was even a hurricane flying mission.
"It was surprising that we had airplanes flying into these hurricanes," Williams said. "We weren't at the level of meteorology that we are now. I remember thinking, 'Why would the government send a plane into a hurricane?'"
Herlong graduated from Florida State University and enlisted in the Navy. He was selected as a candidate for Officer's Candidate School and eventually sent to Naval Air Station Jacksonville for the Hurricane Squad.
"He was an excellent pilot," his brother said. "He was, what you would call in baseball, a natural. He had all the moves and instincts."
Herlong and the rest of Commander Grover Windham's 9-man crew and a Canadian news team left Guantanamo Bay, Cuba at 6 a.m. Sept 26, 1955, in the middle of the worst hurricane season on record.
As second pilot, Herlong assisted the crew in planning missions by obtaining pertinent weather forecasts, intelligence reports and maps, according to "Storm Chasers."
He also assisted Windham with operating the controls and equipment and helped the navigator with charting the mission route and calculating the route information and fuel requirements.
"When it first happened," Herlong said, "I believed if anyone could have come out of that alive, my brother would have done it. That's the kind of person he was."
Even though the military had never lost a plane in hurricane missions, several crews had been lost during wartime reconnaissance, and the Air Force lost a 10-man crew in Typhoon Wilma in 1952.
But the crew had no reason to be especially concerned when they took off at 6:30 a.m. from Cuba on Sept. 26. The P2V Neptune was the workhorse of Navy weather reconnaissance, and the squadron had already completed five missions in Hurricane Janet. But this hurricane was 240 miles wide and had already proven to be an erratic storm.
At 8:15 a.m., Windham radioed before penetrating the storm and the pilot lost radio contact at 10:15. By 11 p.m., the Navy classified the plane as overdue and the crew as officially missing. Neither the remains of the plane or any sign of the crew has ever been found.
Herlong was living in a fraternity house at the University of Florida when his father contacted him to tell him his brother was missing. He had fallen away from the Episcopal Church, but the tragedy sent him back to his faith and his calling.
Services were held for Herlong and five of his crew mates and the newspaper reporters on Oct. 4 at the NAS Jacksonville Protestant Chapel.
One of Herlong's most vivid memories are of wreaths being loaded on to a plane, which dropped them at the last known position of Squadron Four.
"We saw them take them onto the airplane and flying away," Herlong said. "We watched that plane until we could no longer see it. I had dreamed about those wreaths for a long time after that."
When hurricanes dominate the news, Herlong thinks about his brother and the lives that are saved each year because of the people who risk their lives by flying into storms that chase most people hundreds of miles in the other direction.
"Think of the number of lives that have been saved by the Hurricane Hunters doing their jobs," he said. "What they were doing was a lifesaving mission. There was something noble about that."

Dora, September 1964 A Time when Another Hurricane Burned Itself into Columbia County's Memory

June, too soon. July, stand by. August, look out, you must. September, remember. October, all over. (Mariner's weather poem)

Trees bent in unnatural angles. Lakes filled into Columbia County homes and streets. All local talk was on how weather had turned its ugly face on the area.
All this happened Sept. 5 when the county faced the worst hurricane disaster in its recorded history as Hurricane Frances delivered more than 15 inches of rain with the Category 4 storm's destructive winds. It also happened almost exactly 40 years earlier when Hurricane Dora swept across the state from the First Coast Sept. 9-10, 1964.
But unlike this year's storm, high winds forecast for the county didn't materialize from Hurricane Dora. But the area still had to cope with a rainfall comparable to Frances - an average of 14 inches.
"Live Oak was literally under water downtown," said Harvey Campbell, whose family had just moved to Lake City in 1964. "It's ironic almost exactly 40 years later to the day, we would have this Hurricane Frances just about do the same thing to us."
In 1964, water overflowed Lake DeSoto. Three miles of Lake City's roads were damaged so badly, they had to be rebuilt. Furniture floated inside flooded homes along the Santa Fe and Suwannee Rivers. And in Live Oak, which was deluged with more than 18 inches of rain in two days, people checked their mail in canoes.
"I've never seen the like of that much water in all my life," said Beatrice Sullivan, who lived in Bradford County in 1964. "That was one hurricane I'll never forget."
September has historically been a dangerous month for hurricanes in Florida. This September has already delivered Frances and Ivan, which hit Grenada, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands at Category 5 strength before aiming toward the Panhandle.
More than 60 percent of the major hurricanes that struck the state happened in September. There were Hurricanes Donna, Betsy and Eloise in 1960, 1965 and 1975. The worst was the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 in the Keys, one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the U.S. mainland in the 20th century.
But a hurricane making a direct hit on northeast Florida was a rarity, at least in recent memory. Before 1964, Jacksonville had not faced a landfalling hurricane since 1871. In fact, a hurricane had not struck north of Stuart since the Hurricane of 1880.
After hanging on the northeast Florida coast most of the day on Sept. 9, Dora's eye struck at an almost 90-degree angle at St. Augustine about midnight Sept. 10 with 125-mph winds and a 10-foot storm tide at Fernandina Beach and Jacksonville.
About 1,000 people, many from Jacksonville, stayed in three Lake City shelters. By the time Dora left Lake City, it had caused about $100,000 in damages to city streets and sewers, then-Mayor J.R. Tison told the Lake City Reporter.
Seventh Street was practically undermined from one end to the other. Poplar Street was completely washed out, 10 feet deep in some places.
The storm greatly damaged corn and pecan crops. The Lake City drive-in theater lost its screen. Loyd Shaw Furniture lost 80 percent of its stock to water damage. On the positive side, all electricity was restored by Sunday.
Live Oak's downtown business district and a residential area on the town's north side were flooded - to rooftops in some places - when the city's drainage system of dry wells failed to function in the heavy rainfall, according to The Jasper News' archives.
North Florida received $3 million in federal funds to rebuild.
Dale Williams, now county manager, was 6 when Dora came through the area. He especially remembers the damage in Live Oak.
"What I remember most was all the water after Dora," Williams said. "My dad was the food inspector with the state and he had to drive around the county to see all the damage.
"You couldn't get to Live Oak in a car. You had to stop right on 90. You just don't forget that much water."
A day after the hurricane, The Beatles and President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Jacksonville.
Winnie Richardson, now the Columbia County senior services activity director, remembers hearing advisories about the storm, but wasn't particularly concerned.
"I just remember late that night it started raining and it kept raining," she said. "We got a lot of rain. But I was never really afraid. Even with (Hurricane) Charley, I was concerned, but never really frightened."
In 1964, Sam Markham taught junior high school math during the day and closed his father's restaurant, Magnolia Barbecue (better known as The Mag), at night and was also working on his master's degree in school administration at the University of Florida.
That night, he helped prepare the building for hurricane conditions and closed The Mag at dusk.
"There was enough wind to blow signs down and I remember thinking, 'If it keeps going, the sign on top of The Mag will be gone.' But we didn't lose the sign."
Lake Lona overflowed on to U.S. 90 into low-lying areas within a couple of miles. The rainfall was especially heavy in White Springs near the Suwannee River.
"Going toward the Hopeful (Baptist) Church, I saw water 1 mile wide," Markham said. "I've lived in Columbia County all my life and have seen the Suwannee River peak and flood. That was the highest water level in Lake City I can remember," he said before Hurricane Frances repeated history earlier this September.

A View from Inside the Hurricane

Nothing silences an airplane full of newspaper reporters faster than a face-to-face meeting with the eye wall of a Category 4 hurricane.
While en route on a 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron hurricane mission, the questions posed by media representatives from Tallahassee to Tokyo often resemble those posed by children.
"How does the airplane fly without falling apart?"
"Don't you get scared?"
Then, there's the question almost every reporter asks:
"Has anyone ever died doing this?"
"Yes, but just a little," the crew member often responds, with a straight face.
During my public affairs career in the Air Force, I had opportunities to fly in several major storms while assigned to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. My duties included accompanying national media representatives on flights with the 53rd WRS, the famed "Hurricane Hunters."
Crew members compare penetrating the eye of a hurricane to a wartime kill for a fighter pilot. It can also be compared to going down a roller coaster blindfolded 100 mph in a stinging downpour at more than 30,000 feet in the air.
Riding on the Hurricane Hunters' WC-130J, an aircraft converted for weather reconnaissance, seems just like another military flight until the aircraft reaches the storm's eye wall at about 10,000 feet. The windows are pelted by blinding rain, hail and lightning, sometimes so heavy the crew can't even see the wings of the airplane. The WC-130J shakes and rolls throughout the 12 minutes or so in this treacherous part of the storm. The storm's most intense winds are found here.
The view through the windows is often not that spectacular. Through most of the storm, the airplane is flying through clouds, and once inside the eye wall, the rain is pelting the windows like nails.
After about 12 minutes of this barrage in the eye wall, suddenly the ride becomes smooth, almost eerily gentle. There is a mild breeze, sunshine and a blue sky above, with a whirling wall of almost heavenly white clouds surrounding the aircraft. This is the eye of the hurricane. Every once in a while, the most picturesque sunset can be seen through the airplane's windows.
There are moments in some storms when you can look out the window and see the ocean-blue water through the storm and sunshine above the plane.
Once the WC-130J hits the eye wall, all chatter stops - not that you would hear it if someone was talking. At this point, all anyone can hear is the rain pounding the plane, and that wind. This is a wind that screams.
Fortunately, the WC-130J is a tough airplane, built to land on short, dirt runways in third-world countries and places where disaster has hit.
The squadron's WC-130s, along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's WP-3 "Orions," furnish the National Hurricane Center with information unavailable to satellites. The 53rd WRS is responsible for missions in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico and Eastern and Central Pacific Oceans.
NHC officials say these inside-the-storm missions improve hurricane forecasts at least 25 percent. Hurricane reconnaissance began with Lt. Col. Joe Duckworth's flight in an AT-6 Texan into the eye of a hurricane during World War II. By 1947, the U.S. Weather Bureau began a full-time hurricane warning service, with the Navy in charge of flying into Caribbean storms and the 53rd WRS handling the West Central Atlantic. After Hurricane Camille devastated the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, the 53rd WRS moved to Keesler four years later. In 1991, the hurricane flying mission was given to the Air Force Reserve.
From the Navy to the NOAA and Hurricane Hunters today, these flights have obviously made a difference in saving lives. Between 1900 and 1910, an average of 800 people were killed each year by hurricanes, according to Facts on Files statistics. By the 1990s, the number dropped to five, even though the cost of property damage increased from virtually nothing at the turn of the century to $2.6 billion in the 1990s.
With the help of the WC-130J's Improved Weather Reconnaissance System, the crew measures outside free air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and evaluates other meteorological conditions such as turbulence, icing, visibility, cloud types and ocean surface winds.
The crew obtains other vital information by dropping dropsondes - 16-foot long cylindrical weather-sensor packages that resemble canisters at the bank drive-through window. These dropsondes gather information as they descend beneath a small parachute to the ocean. The canister radios weather data on the temperature, humidity, pressure and winds inside the storm. The crew then processes the data and transmits the information by satellite to the National Hurricane Center every 30 seconds.
Although the WC-130 begins flying in developing storm systems at 500 to 1,500 feet, the aircraft penetrates hurricanes at 10,000 feet. It makes four passes through the eye wall to gather data on damaging winds from all four sectors of the storm and determine the sea-level pressure in the eye and temperature difference inside and outside the eye.
In 1995, the second most-active hurricane season in the 20th century, the 53rd WRS flew more than 160 reconnaissance missions. Twelve were in the eye of Hurricane Opal, which struck the Florida Panhandle on Oct. 4.
WC-130s have enough fuel to fly up to 14 hours, but most hurricane reconnaissance missions last between 10 and 12 hours. About six of those hours are spent inside the hurricane.
There is an adrenaline rush when they're flying in the deadliest storms in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. But they do it mainly to save lives.
And although no Hurricane Hunter crew member would admit it on the record, silencing squeamish reporters is also a fringe benefit.