Roger Crombie

Winds of hurricane force visiting Bermuda's general neighborhood is a once-in 16.4-years event, apparently. The island, 22 square miles of volcanic outcropping in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, is so tiny in comparison to the water surrounding it that direct hits are less frequent, more like 40- or 50-year events. But Bermuda knows more about strong winds than its experience might suggest. No community in the world is as focused on storms and their effects.

Much global wind insurance and reinsurance, more than $10 billion worth annually, is written here. Our best-known insurers are continually improving sophisticated catastrophe models as part of a national risk-prediction initiative. Our interest hi the wind, of course, is intellectual and commercial, rather than experiential. Reviewing data from other hurricanes is a dry business, conducted in largely sterile office surroundings, with the strongest winds often blowing in from the corner office. Being hit by a hurricane is, in contrast, a wet business, conducted largely in dark, dank buildings.

A hurricane, nicknamed Fabian by national weather experts, was expected to deliver a punch of category three, on a scale from one to five, when it reached us in late August. As I waited in the darkening gloom, cup of coffee in hand, my mind drifted, ironically, to a world far removed from the capitalist obsessions of the insurance industry's favorite tax shelter. I read that Fabianism was a form of socialism that flowered in Britain in the 1890s. The Fabian Society had been founded in the 1880s by young radical intellectuals, among them Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. Fabianism has had a lasting influence on the labor movement in Britain and has become synonymous with gradualness. Fabians believed in redistributing the wealth; Hurricane Fabian was redistributing the building materials in the town of St. George's, just a few miles away.

After several hours, the noise level began to subside, a mercy after the wall of sound that had been battering the eardrums of residents. My house was pitch black, as was the outside. The only sound was the ticking of a battery-powered clock. I once before made the mistake of celebrating at this point and stranded myself on a garage roof when the ladder blew away. This time, I knew better. The silence was ominous. We were in the eye of the storm. It was halftime.

In the wall of a hurricane's eye, a meteorologist friend later explained, odd manifestations occur. Cyclones, tornadoes, waterspouts, thunderstorms and vortices are not unusual; nor are mini-vortices, counter-rotating against the vortex in which they live. This has a grinding effect on anything underneath it. A house that finds itself below such a formation looks afterward as if it has been jammed roof-first into a giant cosmic pencil sharpener. The wall of the eye was over Bermuda for five hours, the weatherman said, an extraordinary amount of time. We're built tough, I thought to myself.

The highlight of the second half of the storm was when the wind tore my neighbor's boat engine off the vessel and bounced its mighty horsepower around the parking lot for a while. The cowling came off and whirled madly with it, before taking off in pieces in all directions. The engine finally jammed down by the water tank at the gatekeeper's cottage.

In St. George's, the original capital of Bermuda, stunning damage was visible. Spaces existed where concrete docks had stood for years. They were vaporized, simply vanished, tarmac, concrete and all, making it look as if God had taken a bite out of the world of man. Boats lay in waterfront houses and trees. Four people were confirmed dead, taken with the causeway.

A few days later, still unable to reach my father by phone or any other means, I asked for help at the police station. An officer telephoned him for me. "Mr. Crombie?" he asked my father. "It's the St. George's police. We've got your son here."

In the end, Bermuda survived Fabian, which is more than can be said of Connie Francis.

Roger Crombie contributes regularly to Risk & Insurance magazine. He can be reached at crombie@northrock.bm.

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