On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. 16 years later, on August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana at a Cat 4 hurricane with winds of 150 MPH and gusts clocked at 180 MPH. This type of synchronicity makes you wonder: who’s orchestrating this?
Another synchronicity on top of it. Rob and I are finishing up a book The Shift: Reports from The Mystical Underground and decided to include a story we’ve written about elsewhere, about how writers often tune in on the future.
On August 14, 1992, I mailed off a novel, Storm Surge, to my editor at Hyperion. It revolved around a category five hurricane named Alphonso that slams into South Florida, flattens neighborhoods, and devastates the coast. On same day I mailed the novel – in those days we didn’t email manuscripts – a tropical wave moved off the coast of Africa that, 10 days later, would become one of the most powerful hurricanes on record. The wave had completely escaped my notice. The Internet was still in its infancy, smart phones and apps lay nearly twenty years in the future, and we relied on TV for our weather news.
By August 24, about the time editor was reading the novel, that tropical wave had become Hurricane Andrew. At one point, its winds were estimated to be in excess of 200 mph. It slammed into Homestead, Florida as a category 5 hurricane with a central pressure just below 922 and flattened the city.
The precognition is striking in several regards. In fiction and real life, both hurricanes were the first named storms of the season and began with an ‘A.’ They were category fives, and were tightly compacted storms rather than sprawling masses that covered the entire state. In the novel, Miami and Miami Beach were devastated; in actuality, Andrew struck farther south of Miami. The parallels disturbed me enough so that for the next decade I didn’t write another novel that dealt with a hurricane.
Then in 2004, an hurricane idea knocked at my door. What if a sociopath breaks his girlfriend out of the county jail on the fictional island of Tango Key as a category five hurricane approaches the island? What if he and his girlfriend and another woman who also escapes take refuge in the home of Mira Morales during the storm?
The series features Mira, a psychic and bookstore owner; her daughter Annie; her fey grandmother Nadine; and her lover, FBI agent Wayne Sheppard. Tango Key was the perfect setting for this kind of story – an island twelve miles west of Key West, floating like a green pearl in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. But remembering what had happened the last time I’d written about a hurricane, was hesitant about opening this door.
Then I reasoned that kind of precognition couldn’t happen twice, could it? Of course not. Besides, Tango Key was a fictional place. It existed only in my imagination. I hurled open the door and off the idea and I went.
I wrote Category Five and emailed it to my editor. It was scheduled for publication in October 2005. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans as a category three hurricane with winds of up to 125 miles per hour. At its peak not long before landfall, it was a category 5 storm with winds of up to 175 miles per hour. Its central pressure at landfall was 920 millibars, which ranked third lowest at the time for a landfall hurricane in the U.S. Only Hurricane Camille of 1969 – 900 mb- and the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 – 892 mb – beat it. However, in October of the same year, Hurricane Wilma – another category five – became the strongest hurricane ever recorded, with a central pressure of 882 mb – but not when she struck the U.S.
On Tango Key, Hurricane Danielle struck with a central pressure below Andrew’s – 919 mb – and its twenty-foot storm surge destroyed the entire southern portion of the island. The twelve-mile bridge that connects the island to Key West fell apart halfway across, stranding all the inhabitants. Tango’s electrical infrastructure was obliterated and for the next two months the residents, without electrical power or running water, struggled to rebuild their lives within the context of this new normal.
As the media images of Katrina’s devastation began rolling in, I felt a kind of elemental horror about my novel and how it seemed to bring the synchronicities of Storm Surge and Hurricane Andrew full circle. On Wednesday, August 31, our daughter’s sixteenth birthday, I got a call from her publisher’s publicist. The media, the publicist said, was hungry for information about Katrina and hurricanes in general. Since Category Five was about the kind of devastation New Orleans was experiencing, would I be willing to do radio shows as a hurricane expert?
When you’re asked to do this by the publicist of the company that has published your novel, you don’t say no. You say, “Sure, of course, great,” and then frantically gather your information and hope you don’t come off sounding like an idiot.
In the next several days, I was on so many radio shows that it began to feel like a part-time job. Some of the hosts were hostile about my theories that the frenzied construction along the U.S. coastlines and the eradication of mangroves, nature’s natural buffers against hurricanes, had contributed to the massive destruction along the Gulf coast. Other hosts laughed when I mentioned climate change and derided me for saying that humanity was partially to blame.
Now it’s 16 years later. What have we learned?
