b'Once we were safely relocated on the sixth floor of the courthouse, looking down on the fury raging below, we were aghast at what had already occurred and was still occurring, Simpson wrote a lifetime later. Not only was there vast wreckage everywhere but houses, still intact, were afloat, many with refugees clinging to them.The storm that would motivate the career of the father of hurricane meteorol-ogy eventually took an estimated 800 lives in Corpus Christi and Portland, two of those lost souls making a life-long impression on Simpson. We saw a man desperately balancing himself atop of home as it floated down the street, while clutching an infant in his arms, recalled Simpson. The raging waters caused him to fall, dropping the baby into the water. He dove in to find the child, but we never saw either of them resurface.Traumatized but forever inspired, Simpson pursued a career in weather research by first earning a bachelors degree in physics from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, after graduating with honors from Corpus Christi High School in 1929. He then earned masters degrees in physics and mathematics from Emory University in Atlanta and went to work for the U.S. Weather Bureau in 1940 as a junior observer at the Brownsville station.After the attack on Pearl Harbor and Americas entry into World War II, Simpson was promoted to chief forecaster at the New Orleans weather station and was soon thereafter assigned major Weather Bureau projects like assisting in the creation of the Army Air Force weather school in Panama. It was there where Simpson took his first flight into a tropical typhoon aboard a specially-equipped hurricane hunter plane operated by the Army Air Force. A few years later in 1951, while managing the consolidation of Weather Bureau assets in the Pacific, Simpson flew on the first official hurricane hunter mission into Typhoon Marge. After the devastating 1954 Atlantic hurricane season, the U.S. Congress ap-proved funding for hurricane research, and Simpson was chosen to head the newly formed National Hurricane Research Project.Over the following two decades, Simpson led the effort to develop government infrastructure for studying hurricanes and mitigating their damage, even while taking a couple of years off to earn a PhD in meteorology from the University of Chicago. There he met his future wife, Joanne Malkus, the first women in the U.S. to earn a doctorate in meteorologythey would go on to work together at the U.S. Weather Bureau where she led Project Stormfury, an experimental storm-seeding program that was an effort to lessen the intensity of tropical cyclones by dropping silver iodide into the eyes of storms.Ultimately, Simpson concluded that the single most important factor in reducing the kind of hurricane destruction that he survived as a child was the simplest of allan effective, understandable way of warning the public of potential hurricane destructive power. Herbert Saffir was a civil engineer in Florida who was commissioned by the United Nations to study the destructive impact of hurricanes on poor communities living in low-lying areas. He devised a system of rating hurricane strength based on wind speed only, akin to the Richter Scale that is used to rate the strength of earthquakesbut Saffirs wind-based scale did not consider storm surge and flooding, which Robert Simpson knew from a lifetime of experience are most often the deadliest characteristics of hurricanes.After 34 years as a hurricane researcher, in his last year as director of the National Hurricane Center, the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale was officially released to the public by Dr. Robert H. Simpsonthe culmination of a lifes work that has now served for almost 50 years as the primary public advisory tool for hurricane preparedness in the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately, the Saffir-Simpson Scale has saved the lives of thousands and saved millions of people the terror and trauma that Simpson himself experienced as a young Corpus Christi boy in 1919. Dr. Simpson died in 2014 at age 102.78 THE COASTAL BEND GUIDE TheCoastalBend.com'