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

by Erik Larson

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.

“Considered as a whole, the month of August, 1900, was the warmest August on record generally from the upper Mississippi Valley over the Lake region, Ohio Valley, and Middle Atlantic States.”

It was Piddington who coined the word cyclone, from the Greek for “coils of a snake,”

Backergunge cyclone of October 31, 1876, which caused an unprecedented storm tide ranging in depth from 10 feet to nearly 50 feet over the eastern edge of the delta of the Ganges, and drowned at the lowest estimates 100,000 persons.”

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.

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 generates forward momentum of over two million pounds, so much force, in fact, that at this point during the storm the incoming swells had begun destroying the brand-new artillery emplacements at Fort Crockett, which had been designed to withstand Spanish bombardment.