. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography Reprinted from ESSA WORLD, April 1968 IN LATE August 1966, Hurricane Faith lathered the Atlantic, north of Haiti, sending powerful waves far beyond her circumscribed violence. To some — such as the swimmers who were to drown in rip currents coursing through the surf at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina — these waves held an ominous promise. To others — like the scientists and technicians of the Land and Sea Interaction Laboratory, of ESSA's Atlanti
. Collected reprints / Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratories [and] Pacific Oceanographic Laboratories. Oceanography Reprinted from ESSA WORLD, April 1968 IN LATE August 1966, Hurricane Faith lathered the Atlantic, north of Haiti, sending powerful waves far beyond her circumscribed violence. To some — such as the swimmers who were to drown in rip currents coursing through the surf at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina — these waves held an ominous promise. To others — like the scientists and technicians of the Land and Sea Interaction Laboratory, of ESSA's Atlantic Oceanographic Laboratories — they provided a rare opportunity for the study of excep- tional breakers and their forceful effects on beaches. On August 29, when the first waves of Hurricane Faith began to crash in on the beach at Virginia Beach, Virginia, swimmingsuit clad LASILites, led by laboratory director Dr. Wyman Harrison, were poised for action, ready to struggle into the churning surf on an around-the-clock schedule of observations that would numb them for 20 straight days. Their objective would be to amass data on winds, waves, tides, currents, and sea-water properties — enough data to permit them to explain the dramatic shift from significant beach deposition to radical beach erosion as a hurricane ap- proaches shore. On September 1, far to the north of Cape Cod, LASIL oceanographer Dr. Robert Byrne,* was waiting with time- lapse cameras and a series of wave gages to make photo- graphs and electrical traces of the giant breakers that would come hulking over the outer bar near Truro, Massachusetts. Once the mighty waves had subsided, the cast of swim- mingsuit players would return to its offices for the drudgery of preparing thousands of bits of data for computer analysis. It would be nearly a year after Faith had blown through the North Atlantic that an ESSA computer would grind out an equation which would — in just one line of cryptic symbols — give a
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