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

by Erik Larson

Early in 1900, in the midst of rising anticigarette sentiment that condemned smoking not for killing people but for making them stupid, Moore banished cigarettes from the bureau’s weather stations.

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

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.