In Passing
Miami
Herbert Saffir, structural engineer
Herbert Saffir, an engineer who created the five-category system used to describe hurricane strength and warn millions of an approaching storm’s danger, has died. He was 90.
Saffir died Wednesday of complications from surgery.
A structural engineer, Saffir created his scale in 1969 – laying out for the first time what kind of damage could be expected from an approaching hurricane. It has since become the definitive way to describe intensity for storms that form in the Atlantic and parts of the Pacific. Before the scale, hurricanes were simply described as major or minor.
Saffir’s innovation was ranking storm destruction by type, from Category 1 – where trees and unanchored mobile homes receive the primary damage – to Category 5 – the complete failure of roofs and some structures. The five descriptions of destruction were then matched with the sustained wind speeds that would produce the corresponding damage.
New York
Victor Rabinowitz, radical lawyer
Victor Rabinowitz, a lawyer who represented leftist causes and clients such as Alger Hiss, the Black Panthers, Fidel Castro and Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin, has died. Rabinowitz, 96, died Nov. 17 at his Manhattan home.
In a 1996 memoir, “Unrepentant Leftist,” Rabinowitz said he had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1942 – when the United States and the Soviet Union were wartime allies – until the early 1960s because it seemed the best way to fight for social justice.
Rabinowitz began his career at the firm of Louis Boudin, a labor lawyer involved in radical politics. Rabinowitz opened his own practice in 1944 and Boudin’s nephew, Leonard Boudin, joined him three years later. Rabinowitz eventually represented Leonard Boudin’s daughter Kathy, a member of the student radical group Weather Underground who pleaded guilty to murder for her involvement in a 1981 armored truck heist. She served more than 20 years in prison.
The firm’s other clients included singer Paul Robeson, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, Pentagon Papers figure Daniel Ellsberg and civil rights leader Julian Bond.