Howell's Storm

New York City's Official Rainmaker and the 1950 Drought

Jim Leeke

• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780912777955
• eBook ISBN: 9780912777979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

More than half a century ago, New York City suffered from a drought that lasted through 1949 and into 1950. By February, the desperate city had to try something different. Mayor William O'Dwyer hired a municipal rainmaker.
Dr. Wallace E. Howell was an inspired choice. The handsome, thirty-five-year-old Harvard-educated meteorologist was the ideal scientist—soft spoken, modest, and articulate. No fast-talking prairie huckster, he took credit for nothing he couldn't prove with sound empirical data. Howell's meticulous nature often baffled jaded New Yorkers.
Over the next year, his leadership of a small ground and air armada, and his unprecedented scientific campaign to replenish the city's upstate reservoirs in the Catskills, captured the imagination of the world. New York's cloud seeding and rainmaking efforts would remain the stuff of legend—and controversy—for decades.
Howell's Storm is the first in-depth look at New York City's only official rainmaker—an unintentional celebrity, dedicated scientist, and climate entrepreneur, whose activities stirred controversy among government officials, meteorologists, theologians, farmers, and resort owners alike.
 

1

Drought

New York City began 1949 both wet and dry. Recent rain and snow had helped to ease a long dry spell that took hold the previous year. But the Kensico Reservoir, thirty miles northeast of Times Square, from which the city drew much of its water, was at its lowest January level ever. “Colonial roads, stone walls and remnants of buildings that lay in the valley before Kensico Dam formed the reservoir came to view again as they did last autumn,” the New York Times reported. The water level had fallen nearly eleven feet below the spillway, “and a parched perimeter of rocks made it seem even lower.”1

Winter gave way to a dry spring across much of the state. On Thursday, May 26, as New Yorkers looked forward to a cool but sunny Memorial Day weekend, measurable rain fell on the city. Except for 0.01 inches that would moisten the city before dawn on June 19, no meaningful precipitation fell for another forty-one days. New York’s Central Park historically averages nearly 50 inches of rain per year. This year, it would receive 36.25 inches, a shortfall of more than one-quarter.

City parks, rooftops, and pavements began baking in the sunshine. By mid-June, most of New York State was scorching. Temperatures in many places were already edging toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Before it ended, 1949 would become the “warmest year in the recorded meteorological history of New York” to that point, with the mean temperature nearly 4.5 degrees above normal.2 A dozen forest fires burned in the Adirondacks, with little likelihood of rainstorms to douse them. “At Ithaca, the State College of Agriculture warned that a ‘first class drought-emergency’ was in prospect over the state unless rains came soon.”3 An editorial in the Times could have been written by dozens of small-town editors upstate: “Every fisherman and camper, every motorist, every smoker who strolls along the highway should be on guard against the careless spark and the hot ash. Watchfulness is the duty of every citizen while he waits for the reviving rain.”4

Humidity topped 90 percent in the city but brought no storms. Two million people flocked to the beaches one rainless but “disgustingly damp” Sunday.5 Even the most jaded New Yorkers began to take notice, perhaps remembering John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl novel The Grapes of Wrath, published ten years earlier, in which stoic men “stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust.”6 Noted the Brooklyn Eagle, “Drought ordinarily is something that happens to other people. Farmers, maybe, and poor folk out in Oklahoma. . . . But when almost five weeks go by with scarcely a drop of rain, something begins to disturb even the city man.”7

By the Fourth of July, the New York State canal system had restricted boat movements in upstate canals because of low water. Barge traffic on important industrial canals faced delays. Water levels in upstate reservoirs steadily declined, while anxieties steadily rose. Rain finally dampened the five boroughs again on the morning of July 6, dropping temperatures 8 degrees in two hours. “A sudden, short-lived thunder shower descended on the New York metropolitan area, bringing brief respite to New Yorkers suffering from seven weeks of heat and drought,” the Eagle reported.8 A bolt of lightning struck a house on Shore Parkway, causing a woman to faint in her kitchen. The storm was otherwise unremarkable, delivering less than 0.25 inches of rain. It was merely a respite, a reminder of blessedly normal summers. “The first few drops make the dust jump. It seems impossible that drops of water could raise a dust cloud in a garden, but they do,” the New York Times observed.9

People began comparing 1949 to other great drought years. “An archivist, writing of the water famine of 1910, said it was a condition ‘that was without parallel in the City’s history and which it is certain will never happen again.’”10 Conditions were equally bad all across the Northeast. An official in Middlesex County, New Jersey, began talking about a new approach to drought relief, turning to an emerging field that scientists were beginning to call experimental meteorology. “He said he had prepared a plan to seed clouds over Middlesex County with dry ice, a rain-making strategy developed by scientists.”11 Seeding the clouds opposite southern Staten Island likely wouldn’t have accomplished much even if it had worked, since most of the rainfall would have run off into Raritan Bay. But the idea perhaps got other politicians thinking.

In late September, the US Department of Agriculture designated twelve New York counties as disaster areas because of drought damage during the summer. A month later, New York City was “teetering on the brink of water rationing—only .1 of an inch of rain has fallen so far this month against a normal 3.53 inches.” The Kensico Reservoir was less than half full, “the lowest level since it was added to the city water system in 1916. The shore line has receded 175 yards from the dam, leaving a barren expanse of cracked, sandy soil. Other reservoirs look like receding oases in the desert.”12

All the while, water consumption in New York City climbed. Officials said residents needed to reduce consumption by at least 200 million gallons a day. Some steps were simple, such as taking shorter showers, letting the car stay dirty a while, and not watering lawns once the weather warmed. Even small things could help: fixing leaky faucets, turning off a running tap while washing dishes, not flushing ashes or cigarette butts. As winter approached, city hall threatened to cut pressure in water mains by New Year’s Day if the drain continued. “This would divide New Yorkers into two classes—the people downstairs with water, and the people upstairs without,” the Associated Press reported December 3. “Only two things—rain and rationing—can stave off the cut, city Water Commissioner Stephen J. Carney warned today.”13

Carney headed the city’s grandly named Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity. His department began cooperating with others, assigning funds and nearly five hundred city inspectors to help cut water wastage. Health inspectors had the power to issue summons to people wasting water “on the ground that it was a menace to health.” The fire commissioner even ordered a check of fire equipment to eliminate leaks “and is considering the use of river water for fighting fires near the waterfront.”14 Three days after Carney’s comment about water rationing, his chief engineer issued a warning that was even more dire. Unless plentiful rainfall replenished upstate reservoirs, Edward J. Clark said in an interview on WJZ radio, New York could become a “ghost city, with no power, no health facilities and no fire protection.” He added that while “we don’t expect nature to treat us that badly” and only a “cataclysmic change of nature could bring this about,” the water situation nonetheless was becoming critical.15

---

The root of the problem was simple: in more than three hundred years, Manhattan had never drawn drinking water from the great river on its western banks. Residents for generations had called it the North River, but most knew it now as the Hudson. It is the largest and most majestic of several interconnected waterways that surround the city and empty into the Atlantic Ocean. Together, they constitute an estuary—a semi-enclosed ecosystem where sea tides meet freshwater.

Estuary water is too salty to drink. Even well upriver, north of the Tappan Zee Bridge at Tarrytown, the Hudson is “normally an estuary and typically has more ocean water than river water in the mix,” a modern ocean-engineering expert writes. “Brackish water can actually work its way about 70 miles north of NYC to Poughkeepsie in droughts.”16

Early European settlers on Manhattan Island took their drinking water from streams, springs, and ponds. But human waste draining into gutters and industrial pollution later made that water less than potable. Consequently, New Yorkers have long depended on a complex municipal water system, the history of which is sprinkled with familiar names stretching all the way back to the first Dutch settlers. Director-General Peter Stuyvesant, for example, approved the digging of the city’s first public well in 1658, along a street that is today called Broadway. Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, unsurprisingly, clashed over a proposed dam and canal system in 1799. Nor should we omit William M. “Boss” Tweed, head of the infamous Tammany Hall political machine, who was appointed New York’s first commissioner of public works in 1870.

Water consumption in New York City doubled three times between 1850 and 1950. By the mid-twentieth century its water system was vast and complex, ranging from sparkling upstate reservoirs to lowland water wells on Staten Island and Long Island. The scale was staggering. When the system was constructed in the early 1900s, it was considered “one of the most notable engineering enterprises ever undertaken.” The Catskill Aqueduct alone—a ninety-two-mile-long underground conduit tying the mountains’ watershed to city water pipes—was a construction feat “probably second only to the Panama Canal.”17

Needed expansion into the Delaware River watershed west of the Catskills, however, stalled during World War II for lack of building materials. Watershed and aqueduct systems expected to be available in the mid-1940s wouldn’t be completed now until the mid-1950s. By 1946 water use had surpassed the existing system’s safe minimum yield. Water Commissioner Carney assured New Yorkers that once construction of the $170 million Delaware Water System was finished “some time in 1952, the city will have a ‘safe’ supply until 1970—if use of water remains ‘normal.’”18 Until then, however, the city’s five boroughs largely relied on what experts called surface water supplies, from the Catskill and Croton watersheds.

Those two sources lay within New York State but seventy-five miles apart, on opposite sides of the Hudson River. The Croton watershed lay nearer to the city, in portions of Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties, east of the Hudson and west of the Connecticut state line. Croton River water first reached New York City by aqueduct in 1842, decades before the city tapped the Catskills’ resources. By 1950 the Croton watershed covered 375 square miles and had a capacity of more than 100 billion gallons, stored in various lakes and basins, including the Kensico Reservoir (elevation 357 feet) and the New Croton Reservoir (200 feet), both in Westchester County.

The Catskill watershed originated west of the Hudson a hundred miles above Manhattan and covered 571 square miles of mountains and valleys. It had two reservoirs: the Schoharie (elevation 1,130 feet) and the Ashokan (590 feet). They were connected via the eighteen-mile Shandaken Tunnel, which began at the Schoharie and fed into Esopus Creek a dozen miles above the Ashokan. The Shandaken Tunnel, too, was an engineering marvel, considered “one of the wonders of the world” thirty years earlier.19 Together, the two Catskill reservoirs provided a storage capacity of 150 billion gallons of freshwater. Its good mountain water filtered mainly through bluestone, with very little limestone to add bitter-tasting calcium. “As a result,” says the New York Times, “New York has delicious bagels and pizza crust.”20

The Ashokan Reservoir in 1916, soon after its construction. Courtesy of New York Public Library Digital Collections

The Catskill watershed was connected to the Croton via the Catskill Aqueduct, which ran from the Ashokan to the Kensico Reservoir, then south to Yonkers, where it tied into the city mains. When conditions warranted, engineers could draw Catskill water into the Croton system or pump it from the Croton into the Catskill. At full capacity, the two watersheds together stored slightly more than 253 billion gallons. “It is therefore evident that the Catskill and Croton systems are really o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Drought
• 2 Snow
• 3 Mount Greylock
• 4 Possibilities
• 5 Crackerjack
• 6 Headquarters
• 7 Hurricane King
• 8 The Goose
• 9 Who Owns the Clouds?
• 10 Achilles’ Heel
• 11 Mystified City
• 12 Jupiter Pluvius
• 13 Combined Operations
• 14 Marksman’s Nightmare
• 15 Cloud Pirates
• 16 Weather Headaches
• 17 Summertime
• 18 Señor O’Dwyer
• 19 Autumn
• 20 Thanksgiving
• 21 Winter
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index