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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Erik Larson
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January 20 - January 28, 2024
Now and then powerful gusts scraped squares of slate from nearby rooftops and launched them into the air as if they were autumn leaves.
“The water was so high, we just sat in it, the horse was up to his neck in water.”
shattering of windows and blinds in the bedrooms behind the doors they had just closed. “It sounded,” Louisa said, “as if the rooms were filled with a thousand little devils, shrieking and whistling.” She watched quietly as Julia and Jim’s piano slid from one downstairs wall to another, then back.
George Burnett believed no room would be safe if the house collapsed into the sea. He crawled out the bathroom window onto an upended roof that had floated against the house, and persuaded his mother, wife, and child to follow. They sailed off into the storm.
“At this time … the roofs of houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper,”
The fact he saw no waves was ominous, although he did not know it. Behind his house, closer to the beach, the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long. It contained homes and parts of homes and rooftops that floated like the hulls of dismasted ships; it carried landaus, buggies, pianos, privies, red-plush portieres, prisms, photographs, wicker seat-bottoms, and of course corpses, hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. It was so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall and absorbed the direct impact of the breakers lumbering off the Gulf. The
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Something else caught Isaac’s attention, as it did the attention of nearly every other soul in Galveston. “I was standing at my front door, which was partly open, watching the water, which was flowing with great rapidity from east to west,” he said. Suddenly the level of the water rose four feet in just four seconds. This was not a wave, but the sea itself. “The sudden rise of 4 feet brought it above my waist before I could change my position.”
The houses fell gracefully at first. One witness, watching the same thing happen in his neighborhood, said houses fell into the Gulf “as gently as a mother would lay her infant in the cradle.” It was when the current caught them and swept them away that the violence occurred, with bedrooms erupting in a tumult of flying glass and wood, rooftops soaring through the air like monstrous kites.
SOON THE WATER on Isaac’s first floor was over nine feet deep. The wind tore at the house like an immense crowbar. The ridge of debris came closer and closer, destroying homes south and east of Isaac’s house and casting them against his walls. Isaac’s house rocked and trembled, but remained firmly footed on its pilings. Isaac at this point still believed the house strong enough to survive the assault. He did not know, however, that the ridge of debris was now pushing before it a segment of streetcar trestle a quarter-mile long, consisting of tons of cross-ties and timbers held together by
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confident the house can endure anything mere nature can muster, but even more certain that to venture outside would be like stepping in front of a locomotive.
As the peril became greater, so did the crowd’s excitement. Most of them began to sing; some of them were weeping, even wailing; while, again, others knelt in panic-stricken prayer. Many of them were scrambling aimlessly about, seeking what, in their fright, appeared to be vantage points.”
The storm flag was gone, as were the anemometer, rain gauge, and sunshine recorder. The telephone had stopped ringing. There was nothing for Blagden to do but watch the barometer and try to keep himself sane. He estimated the wind at 110 miles an hour.
The hurricane had set a course toward Galveston soon after leaving Cuba, and had stayed on that course ever since, as if it had chosen Galveston as its target. It had a different target, however. The great low-pressure zone that had formed over the Pacific Coast earlier in the week had progressed to where it now covered a broad slice of the nation from Texas to Canada. The hurricane saw this low-pressure zone as a giant open door through which it could at last begin its northward journey.
The pattern in Galveston indicated the eye had passed to the west of the city. This was the worst-possible angle of approach, for it brought the hurricane’s most-powerful right flank directly into the city.
Barometric pressure had fallen all day, but at five o’clock Galveston time it began to fall as if someone had punched a leak into the instrument’s mercury basin. At five, the barometer read 29.05 inches. Nineteen minutes later, 28.95. At 6:40 P.M., 28.73 inches. Eight minutes later, 28.70. An hour later, the barometer read 28.53 inches, and continued falling. It bottomed at 28.48.
At the time, it was the lowest reading ever recorded by a station of the U.S. Weather Bureau.
In the train station, the scientist with the barometer—apparently unaware of his fast-eroding popularity—called out a pressure of 27.50 inches, and announced that against such impossibly low pressures “nothing could endure.”
powerful bursts of wind tore off the fourth floor of a nearby building, the Moody Bank at the Strand and 22nd, as neatly as if it had been sliced off with a delicatessen meat shaver.
knocked horses onto their sides as if they were targets in a shooting gallery.
Slate shingles became whirling scimitars that eviscerated men and horses. Decapitations occurred. Long splinters of wood pierced limbs and eyes. One man tied his shoes to his head as a kind of helmet, then struggled home. The wind threw bricks with such force they traveled parallel to the ground. A survivor identified only as Charlie saw bricks blown from the Tremont Hotel “like they were little feathers.”
All this was nothing, however, compared to what the wind had been doing in the Gulf of Mexico. Ever since leaving Cuba, the storm had piled water along its leading edge, producing a dome of water that twe...
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the Galveston storm shoved before it a surge that was over fifteen feet deep.
The single most important force needed to build a storm surge is wind. A strong wind will develop a surge in any body of water. A fan blowing across a water-filled container will cause the water to swell at the downwind side. Strong winds blowing over some of Minnesota’s biggest northern lakes will pile ice to the height of a McDonald’s sign. One of the deadliest storm surges in American history occurred on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, in 1928, when hurricane winds blowing across the long fetch of the lake raised a storm surge that killed 1,835 people.
The hurricane of 1900 would cause a hasty reevaluation. In October, in the Weather Bureau’s Monthly Weather Review, one of the bureau’s leading lights, Prof. E. B. Garriott, belatedly observed that Galveston’s geography and topography in fact “render it, in the presence of severe storms, peculiarly subject to inundation.”
The Galveston hurricane struck the Texas coast head-on, at a nearly perfect ninety-degree angle, after traveling a long, unobstructed fetch of some eight hundred miles. The track focused the onshore flow directly into the city.
The reason so many men and women in Galveston began furiously chopping holes in their beloved parlor floors was to admit the water and, they hoped, anchor their homes in place.
And again it accelerated. It moved through the city like a mailman delivering dynamite. Sustained winds must have reached 150 miles an hour, gusts perhaps 200 or more. The sea followed. Galveston became Atlantis.
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
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The wind again increased. It did not come in gusts, but was more like the steady downpour of Niagara than anything I can think of.”
He gripped the facing of the door. He waited. He planned to kick his raft free of the house at the first sign of collapse. He did not have long to wait.
ALL OVER GALVESTON freakish things occurred. Slate fractured skulls and removed limbs. Venomous snakes spiraled upward into trees occupied by people. A rocket of timber killed a horse in midgallop.
Anyone watching from outside would have seen the lights of candles and lanterns move from room to room toward the back of the orphanage as the frontmost portions of the building collapsed into the sea like icebergs calved from a glacier.
The storm advanced through the building quickly and systematically, as if hunting the children. The chapel disappeared. Windows shattered. Hallways rose and fell like drawbridges. The children sang. The sea and wind burst into the dormitory. In seconds, the building failed. Ninety children and all ten sisters died. Only Will, Albert, and Francis survived, all by catching hold of the same floating tree.
Later, a rescuer found one toddler’s corpse on the beach. He tried lifting the child. A length of clothesline leaped from the sand, then tightened. He pulled the line. Another child emerged. The line continued into the sand. He uncovered eight children and a nun. Sister Camillus had hoped the clothesline would save the children, but it was the clothesline, rescuers saw, that caused so many to die, tangling them in submerged wreckage.
now he was outside in darkness, in wind so fast it planed the water smooth.
No one worried much about the loss of physical property, Menard said, “but our anxiety about the loss of life was terrible.”
What made the silence at Galveston so troubling was its duration. The last telegram had come on Saturday afternoon. Now it was Tuesday morning and the lines were still down.
Here and there a house rose from the grass at a cockeyed angle, its curtains blowing free through jaws of fractured glass.
“I am an old soldier,” General McKibben said later. “I have seen many battlefields, but let me tell you that since I rode across the bay the other night and helped the man at the boat to steer to keep clear of the floating bodies of dead women and little children, I have not slept one single moment.” As the schooner approached Galveston, the scent of death became overpowering.
ISAAC STEPPED OUTSIDE into a gorgeous dawn, the sky like shattered china.
Throughout Galveston, men and women stepped from their homes to find corpses at their doorsteps. Bodies lay everywhere. Parents ordered their children to stay inside.
EVERY DAY, THE editors of the Galveston News removed a few people from the list of the dead and placed them on a much shorter list titled “Not Dead.”
The scent of burning hair and flesh, the latter like burnt sugar, suffused the air.
The dead gangs worked thirty-minute shifts, and in between were allowed all the whiskey they needed to keep going. “The stench from dead people and animals was so great that they couldn’t work longer,” one witness said.
These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now.
As the city had fallen, so had the neat compartments of his life.
His house had disappeared, along with everything that described his past—all his photographs, letters, his beloved Bible, and the manuscript of his nearly finished book on climate and health, the second time the book had been destroyed.
Isaac struggled also with how to tell the story in a dispassionate, scientific way, and bleach it of his personal experience. He found this impossible. This was his storm. What he knew of it came from living through it.
He had never written an official document in the first person before, only in the passive voice of a bureaucrat; certainly he had never mentioned his family. It was risky. He was violating an unwritten tenet of bureau culture as it had evolved under Willis Moore: Do not ever let your own star shine more brightly than the chief’s.
The editorial then quoted the forecasts for Texas that had been wired from the bureau’s Central Office just before the storm. “With the weather bureau saying that Saturday would be ‘fair; fresh, possibly brisk, northerly winds on the coast’ of East Texas, who would have looked for the most destructive hurricane of modern times on that coast on that date?”
