Published Tuesday, July 4, 2000, in the San
Jose Mercury News

The Perfect Storm

Towering waves are not just the stuff
of Hollywood films -- many have
splashed their way toward the coast of
California, often with tragic results

BY GLENNDA CHUI
Mercury News

You don't have to prowl the Atlantic in a
swordfishing boat to find a monster wave.

Four days before Halloween last year, a buoy 600
miles west of Eureka recorded some of the biggest
waves ever measured on the government's
network of sensors -- 54 feet high on average,
with the tallest estimated to reach nearly 110 feet.

The next day a freakish surf pounded Monterey
Bay. It washed over roads, flooded buildings,
slammed into the Capitola wharf, ripped boats from
their moorings in Santa Cruz harbor and swept two
people to their deaths.

What happened here last fall was not immortalized
in a blockbuster movie like ``The Perfect Storm,''
which is based on the true story of a horrific 1991
storm that pummeled a wide swath of the East
Coast and doomed the fishing boat Andrea Gail
with its six-member crew.

But in some ways it was just as dramatic. Far out at
sea, unobserved by human eyes, the storm's
waves towered even higher than the 100-footers
recorded in the Perfect Storm.

It was typical of the West Coast's wildest storm
patterns, according to researchers who study the
complex interaction of wind and water that builds
humongous waves. In contrast, the combination of
events that destroyed the Andrea Gail was
something of a fluke.

Off the East Coast, a 100-foot wave is a rare
event, said David Gilhousen, a meteorologist with
the National Data Buoy Center in Mississippi. And
what happened in 1991 was unusual, something
that might develop only a few times in a century:
Two storms combined with the remnants of a dying
hurricane to produce a powerful cyclone, dubbed
the perfect storm'' because it could not have been
any worse.

But in the North Pacific, Gilhousen said, ``sea
waves of that magnitude are something you would
see every other year -- maybe every year.''

When it comes to big waves, the West Coast is
both blessed and cursed. Because our storms form
far out in the Pacific, they have plenty of time to
pick up steam and push waves higher and higher as
they blow toward shore.

The highest waves ever recorded by the data
center's network of 67 buoys were on Jan. 19,
1991, south of the Aleutian Islands. They averaged
55 feet; based on theories of wave behavior, the
tallest ones would have been about twice that high,
at 110 feet, Gilhousen said. For comparison, waves
measured during the Perfect Storm by a Canadian
buoy were up to 100 feet tall.

On the positive side, the grand sweep of storms
across the Pacific means that forecasters can see
them coming from a long way out.

Advances in technology are making their job easier
still. In the nine years since the Andrea Gail went
down, computer models have improved to the
point where forecasters can give people at sea five
days' warning of severe wind and waves,
compared with two days in 1991, said Joe
Sienkiewicz, a senior forecaster with the National
Weather Service's Marine Prediction Center in
Camp Springs, Md.

Satellites now sweep their radar and microwave
eyes over the ocean surface, taking in swaths 930
miles wide, and beam back information on wind
speed and direction. ``It allows us to look inside a
storm, which we could not do before,'' Sienkiewicz
said.

He was one of the forecasters on duty in 1991
when the Perfect Storm hit. Back then, he said,
forecasters had to rely on scattered readings from
buoys or ship crews to gauge the state of the wind
and seas. And the computer graphics that help
them quickly grasp and interpret weather data were
not as advanced.

``We were in a sea of paper. That alone limited the
amount of information forecasters could process,''
Sienkiewicz said. ``I remember during this storm
having piles of paper all over the place -- I had
them on the floor -- and trying to wade through
them and make decisions'' about what the storm
was likely to do next.

Today, virtually all commercial ships and boats --
and many pleasure craft -- are equipped to
receive weather updates every six hours by fax,
including charts that show the thumbprint-shaped
outlines of storms in the making. Crews can log
onto shipboard computers and look up weather
data on the Internet.

Science can help

But those at sea often ignore warnings

Researchers are working to make those forecasts
even more useful -- probing the physics of how
waves work and trying to predict weather on a
more local scale.

But their warnings are not always heeded.

Commercial fishermen sometimes decide to stick
out a storm in the hope of increasing their catch or
getting it to market at the most favorable time.

``I've seen people make those kinds of mistakes
before,'' said Tony West, owner of the fishing boat
Steel Fin II out of San Pedro, who has been fishing
off the West Coast for 50 years.

``Greed is an easy way to say it,'' he said. ``But it's a
combination of things. They're up against it, making
house payments, or their crew has problems.
They've gone too far out on a limb. They think,
`We'll roll the dice on this one. It's gonna be OK.
On the other hand, you can't make a living out
there if every time it threatens to blow you head for
the beach.''

And forecasts themselves are imperfect.

At the most basic level, scientists know that winds
create waves by pushing water into mounds, said
Paul Wittmann, an oceanographer with the Fleet
Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center
in Monterey. The center produces forecasts for the
military, using sophisticated models run on Cray
C-90 supercomputers that predict wave heights
and directions every 12 hours, up to 144 hours in
advance.

A wave's height depends on three factors: how
long and hard the wind blows and how big a patch
of ocean it contacts.

But there's a lot that scientists don't understand
about the physics of waves. And some waves build
much higher than theory would predict -- the
so-called ``rogue waves,'' monstrous rollers that
can strike from unexpected directions rather than
following the prevailing swell. By some accounts,
they can be accompanied by troughs so deep that
to sail into one might seem like sailing off the edge
of the Earth.

``They've been well-documented. They're not
figments of peoples' imaginations,'' Wittmann said.
``I've read many accounts of encounters with rogue
waves. It's not a Loch Ness monster type of
phenomenon.''

Although rogue waves are poorly understood,
experts have some thoughts about how they might
form.

On any given day there are typically several storms
out at sea, each producing swells that travel for
thousands of miles, Sienkiewicz said.

In some cases, he said, ``it just so happens that one
wave is going along, and another wave is going
along from a different direction, and the two
combine and add to each other,'' leading to a wave
of unusual height and trajectory.

Sometimes waves plow head-on into currents,
which are like rivers of water flowing through the
ocean. This can compress the waves into higher
mounds, with deeper troughs in between,
Sienkiewicz said. The Agulhas current off South
Africa and the Gulf Stream off the Atlantic Coast
are notorious for this kind of pileup.

Wendell Nuss, a professor of meteorology at the
Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, said that
in rare instances a storm moves along at exactly
the same speed, and in exactly the same direction,
as the waves are headed. It tracks the swells as if it
were the faithful cloud of dirt hovering over the
head of Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoon strip.

This allows the wind to pound the same set of
waves again and again, driving more energy into
them and increasing their height, until ``you actually
extract all the energy out of the wind that you can,''
Nuss said. If the wind is strong enough, you could
end up with a 100-foot wave.

A fisherman's view

An ocean veteran tells of close calls

Tony West, who has been fishing since the age of
13, said he's never encountered a wave he would
consider a rogue. But he has piloted his boat
through exceedingly rough conditions, including a
storm off San Diego that sank five boats and killed
nine crewmen.

``I tell you, it was amazing,'' he said. ``It was flat,
greasy, slick, calm, warm.'' It was hard to believe
the forecast that said a storm was coming on;
nevertheless, he headed into shore from a position
about 80 miles out.

He got into port OK. But out at sea, where 80- to
90-knot winds were howling, others were not so
lucky. When one of West's friends stopped to help
another boat a wave broke over his own boat,
breaking the windows, flooding the cabin and
shorting out the electrical systems, leaving him with
no way to communicate or navigate.

The friend cautiously angled toward the coast and
wound up near Ensenada, West said.

Another boat, 90 feet long and ``a big heavy-duty
Goliath kind of thing,'' disappeared. ``What they
found of that boat was segments of it,'' West said.
The storm ``literally ripped it apart.''

West said his wife gave him a copy of ``The Perfect
Storm,'' the bestselling book by Sebastian Junger
that was the basis for the movie. But he could not
bring himself to finish it.

``I started reading it and I started becoming
nauseous,'' he said. ``I thought, I don't need
something like this. I need something uplifting.''

Now, he said, ``there's a lot of hype with that
movie. But I tell you, it's so realistic. It's so
terrifying to me. I told my wife, `We're not going to
go see it.' It's too close to home.''

Contact Glennda Chui at gchui@sjmercury.com or
(408) 920-5453