“there was no talk of the storm.” Partly this was the fault of the Weather Bureau—its forecasters had failed to identify the storm as a hurricane and to recognize that it was not following the rules. The bureau’s West Indies service was so busy trying to downplay the danger and show up the Cubans that it apparently missed whatever signs the Cubans saw that convinced them the storm had suddenly become more violent. And Willis Moore’s obsession with control and public image guaranteed that no one in the Galveston office would even whisper the word hurricane without a formal authorization from
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