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

by Erik Larson

But he conceded he too had underestimated the storm. “I did not foresee the magnitude of the damage it would do.”

MOORE CONTINUED TO portray the bureau as having expertly forecast and tracked the hurricane, and credited in particular the West Indies Service.

Few asked the obvious question: If the bureau had done such a great job, why did so many people die? More people perished in Galveston than in any previous U.S. natural disaster—at least three times as many as in the Johnstown Flood.

In the wake of the Galveston storm, Gangoite and Cuba’s editors saw the remarks as highly ironic.

Six days after the storm, the War Department, apparently fed up with Stockman and Colonel Dunwoody, revoked the ban on Cuban weather cables. Moore was furious.

Freud said, “The dreams of young children are pure wish-fulfillments and are for that reason quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no problems for solution.”

None of it fazed her. The same thing occurred at every disaster she attended. “It is,” she wrote, “an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.”

As the days passed, identification became impossible, unless the dead happened to wear some clearly distinctive piece of jewelry or clothing.

This time Galveston built the wall. It rose seventeen feet above the beach, and stood behind an advance barrier of granite boulders twenty-seven feet in width.

But the city’s engineers, among them Colonel Robert, knew a seawall alone was not enough. They raised the altitude of the entire city. In a monumental effort, legions of workmen using manual screw jacks lifted two thousand buildings, even a cathedral, then filled the resulting canyon with eleven million pounds of fill. The task, completed in 1910, had an unintended benefit: It ensured that all corpses still buried within the city remained well interred.

But the great hurricane—call it Isaac’s Storm—had struck with abysmal bad timing. Just four months later, an event occurred nearby that changed the history of the nation, arguably the world. The ranchers of Beaumont, Texas, had long heard how gas and greasy water sometimes bubbled to the surface of a strange knoll in the prairie outside town. A few men hunted oil there and gave up, but others followed, drawn by the stories. On January 10, 1901, a crew working for an Italian immigrant named Antonio Francisco Lucich, self-named Tony Lucas, ran for their lives as thunder roared from their drill tower. Oil had already made a few fortunes in America, but this was different. The place was Spindletop. Lucas had punctured a vast underground basin of oil. The rig spouted America’s new gold—but showered the wealth on Houston, not Galveston.

Moore, he believed, had other motives. “The object,” Isaac wrote, “was to give my station a bad record in dealing with personal problems.”

“Time lost can never be recovered,” he said, “and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.”

The single most valuable trove of documents on the hurricane, however, lies in Galveston’s Rosenberg Library, God’s gift to any student of the great hurricane. The library has hundreds of letters and personal accounts that describe the storm, and over four thousand photographs, some quite macabre.