Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

by Erik Larson

He heard the susurrus of curtains luffed by the breeze.

This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

It rapidly regained power and roared north, much to the dismay of A. I. Root, president of a Medina, Ohio, company that sold beekeeping supplies. As early as Monday he watched his personal barometer begin to drop “in a very unusual way,” yet all he saw from the Weather Bureau were telegrams forecasting fair skies for Monday and Tuesday, partly cloudy conditions on Wednesday. Instead he got a destructive windstorm that tore his company apart. He wrote to Moore, “Now wasn’t it a mistake that there wasn’t anything said about the big blow?”

The Storm: Monday, August 27, 1900 Here, and in subsequent chapters, I relied on an unpublished report by Jose Fernandez-Partagas, a late-twentieth-century meteorologist who re-created for the National Hurricane Center the tracks of many historical hurricanes, among them the Galveston hurricane. He was a meticulous researcher given to long hours in the library of the University of Miami, where he died on August 25, 1997, in his favorite couch. He had no money, no family, no friends—only hurricanes. The hurricane center claimed his body, had him cremated, and on August 31, 1998, launched his ashes through the drop-port of a P-3 Orion hurricane-hunter into the heart of Hurricane Danielle. His remains entered the atmosphere at 28 N, 74.2 W, about three hundred miles due east of Daytona Beach.