Isaac’s Storm, by Erik Larson (1999)
Isaac’s Storm has been on my “to be read” list for a long time. I finally picked it up to read just as Hurricane Michael stormed through the Florida panhandle. In September 1900, when a massive hurricane demolished Galveston, Texas, the art of predicting storms was in its infancy. Somewhere between 8,000 to 10,000 people were killed in the storm. Weather forecasting has advanced in the past 118 years, and as I write this review, the death toll in Hurricane Michael is still in the single digits.
Erik Larson outlines the history of weather and hurricane forecasting. He suggests that Christopher Columbus was the first European to have observed hurricanes on his many voyages across the Atlantic.
Isaac Cline wanted to make his mark in the scientific field. He joined the Signal Corps Weather Service, a precursor to the national Weather Bureau. He observed weather patterns. When he was assigned to Galveston, he was still a young man, with a wife and young children.
Very little was known about the dynamics of hurricanes. Isaac had seen only one hurricane and the common idea was that no major storm would ever hit the coastline of Texas.
By 1900, Galveston was an up-and-coming city with a rivalry with Houston. It was a very cosmopolitan city with an opera house, public gardens and a lot of wealth. Nothing could damage its reputation. A storm was unthinkable.
Isaac loved his job and took meticulous notes on weather patterns that he telegraphed to Washington. Unbeknownst to him, however, was the bureaucratic snarl and egos that directed the course of the weather service. Washington was convinced that the “natives” in Cuba did not understand proper weather forecasting, thus imposed a ban on all Cuban communications with respect to a growing storm in late August 1900. The Cubans believed the storm was headed across the Gulf of Mexico towards Texas. The weather services’ employees in Cuba pooh-poohed this idea and assured Washington that the pending storm was insignificant.
As a result, no warnings were issued to Isaac in his Galveston post. Additionally, Washington had explicitly forbade use of the word “hurricane” so as not to falsely alarm the citizens of coastal areas.
When the hurricane struck on September 8, 1900 the city was almost completely destroyed. The after effects of the hurricane’s remnants were felt as far as Chicago, New England and the Maritime Provinces.
This book follows the days before the storm, describes the horrors of living through the storm and the days immediately following. So many people were killed that the streets were literally covered in corpses. There were so many bodies that many were simply burned for quick disposal. The heat following the storm accelerated the decomposition of bodies, adding to the horrendous remains of the city.
The city tried to rebuild, but in 1901, oil was discovered just outside of Houston, making that city outshine Galveston.
As with many of Erik Larson’s books, I found this to be a fascinating insight into a this period of American history.
Read: October 12, 2018
4 Stars
