re: What did people do before accurate hurricane tracking?

Here's a good look at how things were done back around the turn of the 20th century.

They had barometers. Air pressure was a good indicator of an incoming storm. Maybe a doc on the Galveston Hurricane would be were I got this from.

Smithsonian article on Last Island Hurricane of 1856

The first major one that I went through was Betsy in 1965. Back then you just boarded up the windows and hunkered down in the house. If the electricity was off for weeks, you just sat in the heat and ate out of cans until it came back on.

Back in the 60's we listened to Tex Carpenter and then in the 70's it was a skinny guy named Mike, can't remember his last name. The forecasting today thanks to computers and history is so much better. Back then we watched them all and most people I knew had those "hurricane tracking charts" and put down the coordinates on them. After Betsy did that dipsy doodle off the eastern coast of Florida nobody trusted anything.

I remember now, guy's name was Mike Graham. I left home in the late 70's for the military so no idea who was after him.

If you didn’t have the official Nash Roberts/K&B hurricane tracking map, you weren’t sh!t!

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The first major one that I went through was Betsy in 1965. Back then you just boarded up the windows and hunkered down in the house. If the electricity was off for weeks,

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My Dad worked for GSU, that was before Entergy. He would ride by the subdivision, tell us, power will be back on within the hour. An it was, within the hour.
We had a travel trailer, we would cook most of the frozen food in our freezer and refrigerator, feed most of the folks in the neighborhood.

A good friend of mine goes into the Atchafalaya swamp, he lifts sinker Cypress logs. The logs have been there for over 100 years, from the cutting. He was wading through a small bayou cut, felt something under the water, it was a wooden hull of a boat. He went back the next day found an old musket, onboard the boat. No telling how long it has been submerged. He's found numerous items back in the swamp during his trips.

We plotted them on a little grid using lat and long positions from a newspaper report that was at least a day or two old.

Good times.

Or listened to shortwave.

They drowned...see hurricane Audrey, and that was in th 20th century

flew kites for a little while until...........

The lack of decent weather forecasting also made farming a hell of a lot more risky. Papa Ingalls might plant his crop on a beautiful day, not knowing that a massive storm was coming tomorrow that would wash all his seeds away. Or he may have a great crop in the field and decide to wait another day or two to start harvesting, but if Al Roker was around he'd tell him to get it done now before approaching thunderstorm/tornado activity destroys it all.