More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
Read between
January 20 - January 28, 2024
In this new age, nature itself seemed no great obstacle.
the Port of Galveston, known to many as the Western Ellis Island.
By 1900, the city was reputed to have more millionaires per square mile than Newport, Rhode Island.
ornate mansions and lush gardens of Broadway, the city’s premier street.
Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him. 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.
Frigate birds wheeled in the cantaloupe dawn.
The wind hurled roof tiles like cannon shot.
tangle of rigging and tackle lay over all as if a giant spiderweb had settled upon the wreckage.
the more squeamish members of the audience raising their hands to cover their eyes but peeking of course through the latticework of fingers.… Thwump. Silence.
No navy could have made such short work of the military might of the world’s greatest powers.
The stage arrived clotted with mud, then set off again in a great jangle of energy, pulled by four horses and rocking on its springs like a bark in heavy swells.
Under ordinary circumstances, the process of rain production depletes clouds. The “sink rate,” or the rate at which water leaves a cloud, exceeds the supply of moisture arriving from the air and sea below, causing clouds to dissipate like ghosts returning to the afterworld. But hurricanes defeat this cycle. They use wind to harvest moisture and deliver it to their centers. As the wind races along the surface of the sea, it increases the rate of evaporation and captures spindrift and foam. The faster the wind blows, the more vapor it picks up and the more energy it transfers to the storm. The
...more
In 1979 a tropical storm named Claudette blew off the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston and deluged the town of Alvin, Texas, with forty-two inches of rain in twenty-four hours, still the U.S. record for sheer intensity. A Philippine typhoon holds the world’s record, dropping 73.62 inches in twenty-four hours. Total accumulations have been higher, however. Ninety-six and a half inches of rain once fell on Silver Hill, Jamaica, over four days. That’s eight feet. In 1899 a hurricane dropped an estimated 2.6 billion tons of water on Puerto Rico. Hurricane Camille, which came ashore on the Gulf Coast
...more
There was no specific symbol on the map that indicated a tropical cyclone. Young deduced its presence from the unusual pattern of pressure and wind. He noted also the high-pressure zones that still lingered over the Midwest and Northeast. To him, the play of isobars and wind suggested a cyclone might be churning in the sea somewhere south of Florida, perhaps Cuba, and he said as much to the mapmaker. “He agreed with me,” Young wrote, “but said his office had received no notice of anything of the kind.”
Through Dunwoody, Moore persuaded the War Department to ban from Cuba’s government-owned telegraph lines all cables about the weather, no matter how innocent, except those from officials of the U.S. Weather Bureau—this at the peak of hurricane season. It was an absurd action. Cuba’s meteorologists had pioneered the art of hurricane prediction; its best weathermen were revered by the Cuban public.
It was he who discovered that high veils of cirrus clouds—rabos de gallo, or “cock’s tails”—often foretold the arrival of a hurricane.
Eventually Belen’s Father Gangoite discovered Stockman’s remarks. By then, however, the corpses floating in the hot seas off Galveston had freighted Stockman’s words with a brutal, unintended irony.
Stockman was a ponderous bureaucrat, given to writing immense reports about tiny things. When he filed his second annual report on July 31, 1900, even the professors and clerks at the Central Office rebelled, and these were men accustomed to levels of tedium that would have driven ordinary men to suicide.
In the Indies service, however, this concern took on a colonial cast. The poor, ignorant natives were too easily panicked. Restraint was the white weatherman’s burden. It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing “unnecessary alarm among the natives.” He saw conspiracy everywhere.
trying to steal the bureau’s weather observations to improve their own forecasts.
Moore instituted the ban on Cuban weather telegrams and halted all direct transmission of West Indies storm reports from the bureau’s Havana office to its New Orleans station.
president of Western Union. “The United States Weather Bureau in Cuba has been greatly annoyed by independent observatories securing a few scattered reports and then attempting to make weather predictions and issue hurricane warnings to the detriment of commerce and the embarrassment of the Government service.”
“I have reason to believe that they are copying, or contemplate doing so, data from our daily weather maps in New Orleans and cabling the same to Havana.”
To the Cubans, the cable ban was an outrage. “This conduct,” wrote the Tribuna in Cienfuegos, “is inconceivable.” Especially at the peak of hurricane season,
The cable ban, it cried, represented “an extraordinary contempt for the public.”
as the storm of 1900 moved toward Havana, Dunwoody wrote to Stockman: “A very bitter opposition is being made both officially and through the newspapers, to the order prohibiting the transmission of weather bureau dispatches, by cranks on the island.
Dunwoody stood firm, and for the moment prevailed. The War Department allowed the ban to continue.
Barometric pressure had begun to rise, he noted—but he saw no comfort in the fact: “This, far from proving to us that the indications of a cyclone are vanished, reaffirms our opinion of the unstable equilibrium of the atmosphere, and therefore of the increase in energy of the center of low [pressure] which is over the Caribbean Sea.”
“a cyclonic disturbance in its incipiency.… This kind of storm sometimes produces heavy rain over this island, and acquires greater energy as it moves out over the Atlantic.” Father Gangoite was right about the rain— Between noon and 8:00 P.M., Monday, September 3, Santiago received over 10 inches. The rain kept coming. By Friday, the total reached 24.34 inches, enough vertical flow to fill a claw-foot bathtub. —but Gangoite was right, too, about the energy.
The Weather Bureau’s reluctance to use words like hurricane and cyclone inadvertently reinforced the bravado of sea captains like Halsey. Many mariners still believed that whether a ship encountered a storm or not was largely a matter of chance, so why worry?
Steel and steam produced ever-stouter ships. Engines reduced the worst storm hazards—the loss of control after sails were furled, the imbalance imparted by suspending tons of timber, canvas, brass, and rope high above a ship’s deck. Technology was an elixir for last-minute qualms.
his ship now lay directly in the cyclone’s path.
Stockman saw Jover’s report as further justification for the telegraph ban—it was another example of alarmist forecasting by the Cubans, who seemed to care more about drama and passion than science. Stockman did not consider the storm worthy of much further attention.
THE STORM AND its expanding cyclonic system now influenced a territory covering a million square miles of ocean and began to shape the weather in the southern United States. In Tampa, telegraph wires whistled. Winds reached twenty-eight miles per hour. In Key West, the barometer fell to 29.42 inches, the lowest level yet reported. The wind came from the northeast and accelerated to forty miles an hour, a true Beaufort gale.
Once again, they tailored fact to suit their expectations. They knew just enough to believe they had nothing to fear.
The bureau had missed the true meaning of the wind shift at Key West. Here was an area of calm immediately adjacent to a zone of gale-force wind, in a storm that had just crossed the great mass of Cuba without losing any of its size or energy or its ability to produce biblical volumes of rain. No one knew it at the time, but the conditions at Key West provided the clearest evidence yet that the storm’s architecture was changing.
At the storm’s center, centrifugal force had come to play—the
Where the inrushing and outpushing forces balanced, the winds began to form a circle, a gigantic carousel over the ocean. This storm was about to open its eye.
THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, at 6:00 A.M., William Stockman sent a dispatch that placed the storm 150 miles north, by east, of Key West. It was a grave mistake, for it colored the expectations and perceptions of the bureau’s Central Office at a critical point in the storm’s journey.
The Weather Bureau transmitted the map and its notes via the impossibly intricate web of telegraph wires that ran along every railroad right-of-way in the nation.
Many shippers, railroad agents, and cotton traders had grown as dependent on the bureau as the Galveston police had on electricity.
the bureau was still convinced the storm was barreling north, bound ultimately for the Atlantic.
The bureau had few hard facts about the storm, yet what is remarkable about its cables that day is the complete absence of doubt or qualification.
a cyclone has just occurred in Galveston which no meteorologist predicted.” Jover, incredulous, paused a moment. He said, slowly, as one might address the inmate of an asylum: “That cyclone is the same one which passed over Cuba.” “No sir,” Dunwoody snapped. “It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.”
The sky was clear and blue. Such fair weather must have been reassuring to Joseph and Isaac—the best evidence yet that the tropical storm was at that moment racing toward the Atlantic. Only much later, as meteorologists came to understand the strange physics of hurricanes, would such intervals of fair weather in the path of a tropical cyclone take on a more menacing cast.
A brief notation on the map read: “The tropical storm has moved from Key West to Tampa, Florida.”
never did pass directly over southern Florida. Blocked by one of the high-pressure zones, it executed an abnormal left turn that put it on a course directly toward Galveston, eight hundred miles away across the superheated Gulf. The high pressure had caused a change in the seasonal pattern of winds sweeping off the Atlantic. Instead of blowing toward the northwest, these winds now blew mainly west, and carried the storm toward the Texas coast.
Only the storm’s outer bands reac...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
A few passengers did not see the storm flag. They were seasick and already considered death an attractive option.
The storm had undergone an intensification known to late-twentieth-century hurricanologists as explosive deepening, but the Weather Bureau of Isaac’s time had no idea such a dramatic change could occur.
