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

by Erik Larson

winched himself forward from doorknob to doorknob. At the door, he fastened his hands around the frame and hauled himself outside. “The scene,” he said, “was the grandest I ever witnessed.” It was as if he were aboard a ship in a storm. Waves swept through his neighborhood. One witness said the waves looked like the “sides of huge elephants.” Each embodied a destructive power nearly beyond measure. A single cubic yard of water weighs about fifteen hundred pounds. A wave fifty feet long and ten feet high has a static weight of over eighty thousand pounds. Moving at thirty miles an hour, it generates forward momentum of over two million pounds, so much force, in fact, that at this point during the storm the incoming swells had begun destroying the brand-new artillery emplacements at Fort Crockett, which had been designed to withstand Spanish bombardment. Debris made the waves especially dangerous. Each wave propelled huge pieces of wreckage that did to houses what the reinforced prow of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus did to great warships. One man reported dodging a giant piano embedded in the crest of a wave, “its white keys gleaming even in the darkness.”