Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm

The basis for Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm is not only the devastating and preternatural hurricane that struck and demolished the island of Galveston on the Texas coast on September 8, 1900, but also the more intimate details of family relationships and the workings of the city itself. Larson pays strict attention to detail from the daily measurements of Isaac Cline (the chief meteorologist on the island) and his staff with the Weather Bureau to the daily routines of local businesses in this thriving city, and the businessmen who frequent them.

At the beginning of the book, all seems well as Galveston is literally booming and on the verge of greatness at the turn of the century. "The New York Herald had already dubbed the city the New York of the Gulf. But city leaders also knew there was only room on the Texas coast for one great city, and that they were in a winner-take-all race against Houston, just fifty miles to the north"(pg. 12). Galveston seemed to have taken the lead and was likely the biggest cotton port in the country. The population was also growing fast. "On Friday, September 7, Isaac had read in the News the first brief report on the Galveston count of the 1900 census, which found that the city had grown 30 percent in only 10 years"(pg. 13). Galveston now had electricity and telephone service, many elegant hotels, and even "its own electric-power plant."

Isaac soon began to sense a lingering ominous feeling hanging over the city. He observed, but did not understand the meaning of "the great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach"(pg. 8). The swells came slowly, at intervals of one to five minutes. To lay-observers, this slow pace might have seemed reassuring. In fact, the slowness made the swells far more ominous. Many years later, Isaac would write, "if we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells...told us in unerring language was coming" "(pg. 14). Meanwhile, as Isaac began his slow trek back towards his office that Friday, September 7 morning, one hundred miles out to sea, "Capt. J.W. Simmons, master of the steamship Pensacola, prayed softly to himself as horizontal spheres of rain exploded against the bridge with such force they luminesced in a billion pinpoints of light, like fireworks in green-black sky. He had stumbled into the deadliest storm ever to target America. Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives"(pg. 16).

Isaac had, himself, been a scientist, particularly a meteorologist, at heart since he was a young man. "Gen. William B. Hazen, in charge of the U.S. Signal Corps since 1880, wanted only the best men for his new weather service. Smart men, moral men, scientific men, but above all, strong men capable of wading against a mounting sea of skepticism about the corps' ability to report and forecast the weather. He wrote to college presidents asking them to recommend likely candidates from their graduating classes. The president of Hiwassee College, J.H. Bruner, recommended Isaac"(pgs. 29-30). Isaac was twenty years old and had never even really been to a city, as he had spent the majority of his life in the hollows of Tennessee. Following an examination by an Army surgeon, Isaac began his trek to Fort Myer in Arlington Heights, where he would work with telegraphs and learn the ways of the weather service.

The storm moved slowly. "Eight miles an hour, maybe ten. It moved west and slightly north and covered about two hundred miles a day, roiling the seas and erecting an electric wall of clouds visible to ships far outside its arc of influence"(pg. 36). The storm was first formally sighted on Monday, August 27 with recorded winds from east-northeast at Force 4, a "moderate breeze" of thirteen to eighteen miles an hour." It was dismissed as a distant squall.

Isaac had studied the works of Henry Piddington, a countryman infamous for reconstructing cyclones, and it was this information that would come back to him years later on the beach at Galveston. "To help ensure that the best men got deployed to the field, the weather service gave its Fort Myer trainees a rigorous examination. The top scorers won immediate assignment as assistant observers to posts throughout the country. Isaac scored in sixteenth position, and the service promptly assigned him to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he would record temperatures and barometric pressures, and investigate how climate shaped the behavior of Rocky Mountain locusts, said to be swarming the countryside"(pgs. 54-55).

"On Tuesday, August 28, the storm overtook a ship located about three hundred nautical miles southeast of Monday's first sighting. Winds were from south-southwest and the wind was stronger, Force 6, twenty-five to thirty-one miles an hour"(pg. 56).

Not finding any locusts, Isaac found other means of filling his time. He decided that he could attend the University of Arkansas's medical school and study how weather and climate affected people. "Isaac graduated from medical school on March 29, 1885. Five days later, General Hazen placed him in charge of a weather station at Fort Concho, Texas. It was in nearby Abilene that Isaac attended the city's Baptist church and met the young organist there, Cora May Bellew, the niece of the pastor. He wooed her, and on March 17, 1887, married her. On December 10, 1887, after just eight and a half months of marriage, Cora May gave birth to a daughter. The Clines named her Allie May"(pg. 63).

Being wholly disgusted with the conditions at the time of the Galveston station under the charge of Private E.D. Chase, "General Greely saw in Isaac the salvation of the failing Galveston station and at once ordered him to Galveston to establish the first Texas-wide weather service"(pg. 66). Isaac promptly transferred, and "on August 24, 1889, his second daughter arrived. He and Cora named her Rosemary." "In 1893, Isaac joined the faculty of the University of Texas medical school as an instructor in medical climatology, and during the year delivered thirty lectures on a range of topics. He also enrolled in Add-Ran Male and Female College and began studying toward a doctorate in philosophy and sociology"(pg. 68). By this time, Isaac's brother, Joseph had joined the bureau. Unlike Isaac, Joseph had drifted towards weather. In September 1893, the bureau's new chief, Mark W. Harrington launched a competition to find the best forecasters in the bureau. The grand prize was a coveted professor's position in Washington. Three judges selected Isaac from among the top ten entrees, and a man named Willis L. Moore as the winner, who received the Washington professorship.

The year 1894 brought Isaac a third daughter, Esther Bellew, his baby, and in 1895, Willis L. Moore, only thirty-nine years old, but already a veteran of nearly two decades of service within the Signal Corps and the Weather Bureau, took over as chief of the Weather Bureau.

"On Thursday, August 30, 1900, the storm was just off the coast of Antigua. Shortly before the storm's arrival, strange weather had settled on the island. The day was intensely hot, the sky rimmed with a reddish-yellow light. There was, according to the Antigua Standard, an "ominous" stillness"(pg. 78). "The storm entered the Caribbean Sea early on Friday morning, August 31, in a confetti of sparks and thunder, with increased winds that raised from the sea patches of dense foam and streaks of spindrift"(pg. 87).

At 3 o'clock in the morning, Tuesday, September 4, a lightning strike knocked out the incandescent-lamp dynamo at the Brush Electric Powerplant in Galveston. Isaac heard the first clap of thunder at 3:48 am, and noted the time in the station's daily journal. The storm was now crossing over Cuba, dropping over 10 inches of rain between noon and 8 pm.

The first signs of complacency now begin to appear as meteorologists across America decide that it is not possible for a storm on this path to reach Texas, much less Galveston. On the morning of Thursday, September 6, the bureau placed the storm incorrectly 150 miles north, by east, of Key West. Of course, these were the days long before weather satellites, so all forecasts were based upon only what was known of hurricane characteristics. In reality, the hurricane had left Cuba and now, of course, transmitted storm swells toward Galveston. "By Friday afternoon, a few sea captains and their crews were still the only men who knew the storm's true secret - that it had grown into a monster. Some lived; some did not"(pg. 128).

Flooding began Saturday morning as the water rose at an alarming rate. Reported by a civil engineer aboard a railroad bridge, the level was two feet below the track. Another train halted as the track in front of it began heavily flooding, and one passenger, John H. Poe, a member of the Louisiana State Board of Education, along with nine others, abandoned the train to take refuge inside a nearby lighthouse. Eighty-five passengers decided to stay aboard the train, believing it to be heavy enough to withstand the storm, and by Sunday morning, all eighty-five were dead. "Over the din of the storm, Poe and others heard what sounded like an artillery bombardment. They soon realized the soldiers at Fort San Jacinto on Galveston Island, just across the channel, had begun firing the fort's heavy guns. "It was the poor soldiers, crying for help" "(pg. 166).

Isaac Cline claimed to have driven from one end of the beach to the other issuing warnings to citizens. "I warned the people that great danger threatened them, and advised some 6,000 persons, from the interior of the State, who were summering along the beach to go home immediately"(pg. 168).

The water now was rising at an alarming rate, up to second floors on buildings now, and wind gusts were possibly 150 miles an hour - perhaps much higher - as the station's anemometer had disappeared. The streetcar trestle, which had been over the Gulf, now was pushing along in the current, along with houses and other debris, making an enormous battering ram for anything in its path. Between 5:15 pm and 7 pm, the wind again increased. "Gusts of two hundred miles an hour may have raked Galveston. Each would generate pressure of 152 pounds per square foot, or more than sixty thousand pounds against a house wall. Thirty tons"(pg. 195). The water continued to rise. "At one bound, it reached my second story and poured in my door, which was exactly thirty-three feet above the street. The wind again increased. It did not come in gusts, but was more like the steady downpour of Niagara than anything I can think of", said Dr. Young(pg. 201).

People drowned, scores of people. Some after taking refuge in trees, were bitten by snakes that were also taking refuge in these trees. Some were simply crushed by toppling buildings.

Isaac, after his house collapsed, found himself alone in the water. He soon saw a child and began to swim towards it. He was elated to discover his Esther, his six-year-old. "Isaac and his baby drifted. There was more lightning. In the next flare, he saw three figures hanging tight to floating wreckage. He soon discovered his brother, Joseph, with his other daughters, Allie May and Rosemary. They soon came to rest at 28th and Avenue P, four blocks from where they once had lived"(pg. 217-219).

Once the storm passed, the only thing left was to search for missing family members. "Throughout Galveston, men and women stepped from their homes to find corpses at their doorsteps. Bodies lay everywhere. A gentleman aboard a small sailboat claimed, "we kept running into so many dead bodies that I had to go forward with a pike and shove the dead out of the way. There was never such a sight. Men, women, children, babies, all floating along with the tide. Hundreds of bodies, going bump-bump, hitting the boat." The scent of putrefaction and human waste was at once sickening and heartbreaking"(pg. 231-232).

Isaac knew Cora was dead, but needed to find her to prove once and for all to himself and his children. Her body was eventually found near the spot where he and the children had floated to safety. Isaac recognized the ring she wore, kept it, enlarged it, and wore it himself. It was this ring that gleamed like a beacon from his popular photographic portrait. He also wore it on December 31, 1900, when Galveston prepared to enter the twentieth century. "That night, New Year's Eve 1900, a piece of very strange news flashed over the submarine cables from England. A wind had risen so freakishly strong it had toppled one of the great pillars of Stonehenge that no wind had budged for ten thousand years. The twentieth century had begun"(pg. 259).

The city of Galveston reported a tally of 3,406 confirmed deaths. Early in 1901, the Morrison and Fourmy Company, who published the city directory, found an overall loss in population of 8,124. "The main reason the storm had killed so many people was not from direct wind damage, as bureau dogma held, but its wind-driven tide. People seem to believe nowdays that technology has stripped hurricanes of their power to kill. No hurricane expert endorsed this view. The more they studied hurricanes, the more they realized how little they knew of their origins and forces that governed their travels"(pg. 270-273).

Bibliography

*Isaac's Storm; Larson, Erik; Vintage Books, New York; 1999.