COLUMN: When destruction has a human name

From Vinyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99 From Vinyamin Appelbaum's, "Carving Marble," Fall '99A hurricane came to Philadelphia yesterday, bringing with it record rainfall and substantial flooding. But not just a nameless hurricane. Floyd. A natural disaster with a human name. Andrew? We name things for any number of reasons -- as a means of identification, of categorization, even of affection. Your average hurricane, however, seems an unlikely candidate for naming. Even the desire to remember a storm like Andrew seems amply served by "the hurricane of 1992." And yet we name tropical storms. Chalk it up to charisma; chalk it to the fact that we are drawn to hurricanes, awed by them, and left more than a little terrified by their incongruous potency. The power of a tornado makes sense -- it is an out-of-the-ordinary sight and its visual effect seems to corroborate its power. Earthquakes are equally plausible; once the ground under our feet starts splitting and rolling, only survival seems miraculous. But hurricanes are deceptive. Wind and rain. We see both every day, and it never occurs to us to blink. As a woman put it on television on Wednesday, "You're talking to a girl from Buffalo. A little rain doesn't scare me." If she was from Florida, it might. That state -- a little more experienced when it comes to hurricanes than upstate New York is ever likely to be -- conducted the largest evacuation in its history on the mere chance, eventually unrealized, that Floyd would come ashore. And there, in a nutshell, are both sides of our relationship with storms like Floyd -- they are composed of comfortably familiar parts and they use them to wreak almost unbelievable havoc and destruction. Hurricanes are a sort of traveling circus of meteorological effects, all performing simultaneously -- tornados, flood tides, torrential rains and the trademark gusting winds -- under a gray sky canopy with the likes of you and me for an audience. And watch we do. The Weather Channel drew the highest ratings in its history this past week and the rest of the media was quick to fill the front pages and the evening news with Floyd watches and weather updates. And each and every one of those viewers was in for a treat. No pundits. Meteorologists forced to admit that the best they could do was offer viewers three possible directions the storm might take. News anchors going entire minutes without once giving voice to an opinion or assigning causes to effects, because there were none to assign. Hurricanes transcend all of the mechanisms we have developed for understanding why things happen. And that means there is no one to blame for the ravaged Carolina coastline, no one to send the bill for flooding damage to roads up and down the east coast. Therein lies the source of our fascination. We can measure a hurricane's power, assign it a name, attempt to talk of storms as if they were rational or possessed of defined characteristics. And none of it changes their fundamental reality -- we have no idea where a hurricane will go or how strong a storm it will be when it gets there. There is powerful testimony to this capricious power in a walk outside while the storm is overhead. Rain drops dance up and down, swirl in wonderful chaos, obey no apparent pattern. Tree branches lie scattered, some planted through random windshields. Power lines drape over cars and torrents race down riverbeds created from city streets. It is enough to strike a strange mixture of fear and curious awe into those caught in a hurricane's path. It is enough to make some children play in newfound creeks while others are being evacuated by the National Guard. Enough to send some teenagers on hours-long drives just to slip into the eye of a hurricane while half of South Carolina drives for hours to get away. Enough to leave adults calmly sipping beers on North Carolina porches because, as one put it: "I'd worry about my roof, 'cept that the last storm took it." Not just any storm. Bonnie.