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

by Erik Larson

“If a storm runs over the Loop,” Willoughby said, “it’s got essentially an infinite source of heat.”

AT THE VERY center of the eye, the air is often utterly calm. Sailors throughout history have reported seeing stars at night, blue sky during the day. Often, however, the eye is neither clear nor cloudy, but filled with a liquid light that amplifies the stillness, as if the world were suddenly fused in wax. The sea, however, is anything but calm. Freed abruptly from the wind, waves from all quadrants of the eyewall converge at the center, where they collide and compound to form sudden mountains of undirected energy.

The eyewall is an impossibly hostile realm where air flowing toward the center reaches its highest velocity. Observers trapped in a cyclone’s eye consistently reported hearing a great roar as the calm passed and the opposite eyewall approached.

the most important feature of the eye, its plummeting pressure. Normal pressure at sea level is 29.92126 inches, or 14.6969 pounds per square inch. In the wall of the eye, spiraling and ascending winds lift air at over a million tons per second. As the air soars, pressure at the surface falls. Air within the eyewall rises with so much force it literally lifts the surface of the sea, one foot for each one inch of barometric decline. The lowest barometric reading ever recorded was 26.22 inches, during Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. Gilbert raised the level of the sea by over three feet.

The storm and earthquake together killed 99,330 people. Another 43,500 simply disappeared.

No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forgot the feel of a paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse’s flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.

THE HURRICANE HAD begun sculpting the Gulf the moment it left Cuba and now it transmitted storm swells toward Galveston.

Waves form by absorbing energy from the wind. The longer the “fetch,” or the expanse of sea over which the wind can blow without obstruction, the taller a wave gets. The taller it gets, the more efficiently it absorbs additional energy. Generally, its maximum height will equal half the speed of the wind. Thus a wind of 150 miles an hour can produce waves up to 75 feet tall. Other conditions, such as the chance superimposition of two or more waves, can cause waves to grow even bigger. The tallest wave on record was 112 feet, but occurred amid steady winds of only 75 miles an hour.

In a cyclonic system, the wind spirals to the left, but the waves continue forward along their original paths at speeds far faster than...

The forward speed of the storm of 1900 was probably no greater than ten miles an hour, but it produced swells that moved at fifty miles an hour, and began reaching the T...

Whenever a deep-sea swell enters shallow water its leading edge slows. Water piles up behind it. The wave grows again. It is this effect that makes earthquake-spawned tsunamis so deceptive and so deadly. A tsunami travels across the ocean as a small hump of water but at speeds as high as five hundred miles an hour. When it reaches land, it explodes.

Things like this were not supposed to happen. Not anymore. Whether the ship survived or not was now only a matter of luck. Luck, and maybe a little quiet prayer.

A fan dangled from the high ceiling. The air was like a moist sweater.

He saw a large and persistent halo around the moon, which indicated the presence of the high, thin clouds first identified by Father Vines as signs of a hurricane.

“The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl; gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Never had I seen such a beautiful sky.”

The storm seemed to be shoving the Pensacola directly toward the city. If Simmons was right, then Galveston lay directly in the great storm’s path. It would arrive, he knew, without warning, and there was nothing he could do to sound the alarm.

Waves now crashed over the rails and exploded against the pilings in vertical geysers of arctic-white spray.

He conceded, later, “The storm was more severe than we expected.”

“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 Moore himself. It was also the fault, however, of the city’s newspapers and the editorial customs of the time.

In just a few hours, these reports of Friday’s arrivals and departures would take on an entirely different cast, and be seen instead as stories of miraculous escape and tragic bad timing.

If there were a Pulitzer for bleak irony, however, it would go to the News for its Saturday-morning report on one of the most important local stories of the year—the Galveston count of the 1900 U.S. census, which the newspaper had first announced on Friday. The news was excellent: Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, the city’s population had increased by 29.93 percent, the highest growth rate of any southern city counted so far. “Galveston has cause to feel proud in having grown 30 percent in ten years,” the News reported. “That is a good record to start out with on the new decade, when the prospects are bright even to surpass it.”

He struck a reassuring note: “An inundation might be wasteful and damaging, to be sure, but there is no possibility of serious loss of life.”

The surf rocketing into the sky off the streetcar trestle was easily as good as a fireworks display.

huge mosquitoes that blew in through the open windows in clouds as thick as dust.

The high curbs along the street formed a shallow canyon through which the water ran like a broad brown river, full of all kinds of interesting things.

“As we watched from the porch we were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good,’ we thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.’ ”

Water raced in from the Gulf and from the bay, the former propelled by the sea, the latter by the powerful north wind. It seemed as if Galveston were a gigantic ship sinking beneath the sea.

Davis watched, transfixed, until he realized the water had topped the sidewalk itself and was now rippling past the soles of his shoes. It was then, he wrote in his unschooled way, “I became to be nervous.”

On the way they saw nothing out of place—provided they chose to overlook the twelve inches of water that filled every street, and the occasional boy floating past on a homemade raft.

Soon, though, he did leave for home, and quickly understood why his wife had sounded so anxious. This was nothing like the other storms he had experienced in Galveston. The wind was blowing at about fifty miles an hour, he guessed. Water covered every street. He caught a ride on a passing delivery wagon.

But the Gulf was far more peaceful. More like a very big lake, really, than a mighty ocean.

At last her husband did arrive—“And was surprised there wasn’t any dinner.” She did not kill him, but it is likely the thought crossed her mind. Dinner. She had not even thought about cooking. She was furious. He was furious. She was being such a woman. What was there to be afraid of? This was nothing special. Some wind, some water. So what? He shouted that she should go upstairs with the children, that he was going back to town to pay his men, and would then—and only then—return to the house. “That was more than I could stand,” Louisa said. “I stamped my foot and said some terrible thing: I told him, if he didn’t go immediately and get a carriage to take us away, and we in the meantime drowned, it would be his fault and he would never have any peace.” Which made him angrier. August went back downtown.

He saw whole families and noticed many carrying hampers of clothing and food and stained-glass lamps and framed photographs, like refugees from a military bombardment—except that the children all seemed delighted. And very muddy.

the heavy rains of the past month and the fresh downpours of the morning had turned the esplanade into a wonderfully slippery flume of mud, through which the children stomped and slid despite stern shouts from parents on the adjacent sidewalks.

Cohen realized these were indeed refugees. They had left their homes for safer ground. It was a shock. There had been floods before, but no one seemed to get terribly upset. That’s why most houses, his included, were raised on posts, and why the curbs in some places were three feet high.

With cinematic timing, a sledgehammer of wind struck the house with so much force it knocked plaster from the walls.

The wind grew louder. Gusts came at shorter intervals, with progressively greater power. Each brought a fresh squall of plaster.

Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived. They were aware of the storm, and knew it was getting stronger.

Word of the collapse spread quickly. No one believed it. Crowds of businessmen converged on Mechanic Street to see for themselves. Isaac came, no doubt—his office was a block and a half away. Witnesses took the story back to their offices. Messenger boys from Western Union carried the news on their rounds. Ritter’s Café was gone. Men were dead. It was the thing that at last brought fear to Galveston.

Even in the best weather, the trestles looked fragile. In a storm, with water nearly washing over the track and gusts of wind jostling the cars, they looked deadly.

Rain coursed down the windows on the north side of the train; the south windows were nearly dry and provided passengers with a perfect if rather disconcerting view of huge breakers crashing onto the none-too-distant beach.

Houses soon appeared beside the tracks, but now they looked more like houseboats. Nearly all were on pilings or brick pillars, which held them well above the water, but it was clear to Kellogg that the water had gotten deeper just in the time since the relief train’s arrival.

One elderly man, believed to be some sort of scientist, carried a barometer in his baggage and now propped the device on the floor. “Every few minutes,” according to one account, “he would examine it by the flickering railroad lantern and tell the people that the atmospheric pressure was still falling and that the worst was yet to come.” This did not endear him to the other passengers. Later, some would express an interest in dashing the barometer against the floor.

The first “intimation” of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, “came when the body of a child floated into the station.”

Except for the lighthouse and the cottages of its keepers and the crown of an occasional live oak, all he saw was water. The rain sounded as if a hundred men with ball peen hammers had stationed themselves along the north side of the coach.

By afternoon, the Gulf and the bay seemed about to converge. Clearly something extraordinary was happening—and yet there had been so little clear warning. Friday night the barometer had actually risen, and he had seen nothing of the brick-red sky that was thought to herald a hurricane. The only true sign of danger lay in the great swells, which in the few hours since his dawn visit to the beach had grown to even greater size.

a strange inundation of tiny frogs—thousands of them.

By 2:30 P.M., Galveston time—the time Isaac says he recognized “that an awful disaster was upon us”—the streets within three blocks of the beach were already impassable.

wherever an object protruded from the water, there were toads. Tiny ones. Dozens. “Every little board, every little splinter, had about twenty or fifty toad-frogs on it,” one witness remembered. “I never seen so many toad-frogs in all the days of my life.”

Joseph was amazed to find that fifty people from the neighborhood had taken shelter in the house, including whole familes and the contractor who had built the house. “He knew better than anyone,” Joseph said, “that its construction was of the finest and strongest materials, as my brother intended it to withstand the worst wind that ever blew.”