![]() ![]() Pretty soon, reports about the B-17’s actions began circulating in southern newspapers. Gathering momentum, it barreled toward the Atlantic coast and slammed ashore near Savannah, Georgia, where it chewed up terrain for miles inland, causing $23 million in damage ($220 million today) and killing a few people. The storm, which had been drifting to the northeast, executed a full pivot, as if tracing a “7” from the bottom up. For reasons as obscure as they were controversial, the hurricane followed. The airplane circled for a while, then turned for home. Air Force B-17 rendezvoused with the storm and climbed 500 feet above its dark upper clouds, where the crew sprinkled it with a few thousand white peas of dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide). Two days earlier a hurricane had wreaked havoc in Miami, but had since been treading water 350 miles off Jacksonville, where it seemed ready to wind down. On the morning of October 13, 1947, a Boeing B-17 loaded with 180 pounds of crushed dry ice took off from MacDill Field in Tampa, Florida. Indeed, Homeland Security would be wise to revisit the efforts of a Nobel Prize winner who once sought to tame the weather. ![]() ![]() Since the middle of the last century, the government has spent millions of dollars on weather modification-and the only thing the scientists really had to show for it was some wild stories. Some, like dyeing hurricanes with soot, are a little out there. Some of the ideas it looked at, like seeding hurricanes, are conventional. Department of Homeland Security began studying how to quell hurricanes. Three years after the brutal 2005 season that brought Katrina and other storms, the U.S. ![]()
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