Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Dead­liest Hur­ri­cane in His­tory A Man, a Time, and the Dead­liest Hur­ri­cane in His­toryErik Lar­son
Vin­tage Books 2000World­Cat • Library­Thing • Google Books • Book­Finder 

At the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, sci­en­tific weather fore­cast­ing was in its infancy. The U.S. Weather Bureau, then about twenty years old, did not have the ben­e­fit of large-scale obser­va­tion tools like satel­lites or Doppler radar. Instead, the Bureau’s fore­cast­ers — a hand­ful of men in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. — relied on weather data col­lected by observers sta­tioned through­out the coun­try. This sys­tem allowed large storms to be tracked over land, but could not track those over the open ocean. This inabil­ity, cou­pled with a very poor under­stand­ing of hur­ri­canes and the Bureau’s insti­tu­tional arro­gance, led to com­plete unpre­pared­ness for one of this country’s worst weather-related disasters.

Dur­ing the first week of Sep­tem­ber, 1900, a trop­i­cal storm passed just north of Cuba, drench­ing the island in rain. The Weather Bureau’s observers, in place on the island since the end of the Spanish-American War, pre­dicted that the storm would move north, even­tu­ally pass­ing over Florida and back into the Atlantic, with­out ever gain­ing much strength. In this, they dif­fered from more expe­ri­enced native Cuban mete­o­rol­o­gists, who guessed that the storm would con­tinue along its north­west­erly course and become much more intense. The Bureau worked to silence the pre­dic­tions of the Cubans, believ­ing that their own guesses were far more accurate.

Isaac Cline, direc­tor of the Weather Bureau’s Galve­ston sta­tion, began to note pecu­liar­i­ties of wind and water on the sev­enth of Sep­tem­ber. But, he was lulled into a false sense of secu­rity by reports from the Bureau’s main office. He knew a storm was com­ing, but assumed it would be a minor one, and no cause for seri­ous alarm. The city’s res­i­dents, with no rea­son to do oth­er­wise, ini­tially paid lit­tle atten­tion to the approach­ing storm. When water began to rise over most of the island of Galve­ston, peo­ple started to worry. When high winds caused a down­town cafe to col­lapse, killing five men, peo­ple became truly afraid.

As the water con­tin­ued to rise and more and more build­ings suc­cumbed to the wind and waves, the city’s res­i­dents tried to find the high­est, most sta­ble struc­tures in which to take refuge. Some were forced to move from place to place as build­ing after build­ing became unsta­ble. Even some of the most solidly built homes and busi­nesses even­tu­ally col­lapsed under the hurricane’s onslaught, killing or injur­ing those inside. A quarter-mile long sec­tion of street­car tres­tle, backed by tons of other debris, razed a path across the island, pro­pelled by the storm surge.
When the first out­siders reached Galve­ston after the storm had passed, they were greeted with hor­ri­ble sights — and smells. Thou­sands were dead, so many that sur­vivors began sim­ply burn­ing corpses where they lay. The process of clean­ing up was a long one; it took nearly a decade to rebuild the city (with stronger hur­ri­cane protection).

Erik Lar­son tells the story of the Galve­ston hur­ri­cane largely through the eyes of Isaac Cline, the city’s chief mete­o­rol­o­gist. He com­pares Cline’s own mem­oirs with offi­cial records and accounts writ­ten by other sur­vivors of the storm; these don’t always agree. Most pre-storm Galveston-related doc­u­ments — includ­ing all of Cline’s papers — were destroyed by the hur­ri­cane. But, Lar­son does an admirable job of piec­ing together details from what did survive.

Some­times though, in the pur­suit of a com­pelling nar­ra­tive, he pro­vides a dubi­ous level of detail regard­ing people’s thoughts, words, or actions. I had the same com­plaint about Larson’s The Devil in the White City, a book about the 1893 World’s Columbian Expo­si­tion in Chicago and the ser­ial killer known as Dr. H. H. Holmes. Lar­son makes up for this (in my eyes, at least) with a wealth of more ver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion. He pro­vides accounts of peo­ple out­side Galve­ston who expe­ri­enced the storm and those of vol­un­teers who helped to clean up the city, along with a great deal of weather-related his­tor­i­cal context.

This book was pub­lished before Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina dev­as­tated New Orleans, and I read it before Hur­ri­cane Ike defeated Galveston’s extra defenses and wreaked havoc on the city again. It per­haps should have served as a reminder of the awe­some power of the weather and the dan­ger of the com­pla­cency of many some coastal communities.