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

by Erik Larson

  It was during this Mexican venture that Isaac encountered his first hurricane—at sea, no less. For many people, it would have been the defining event of a lifetime, the story told and retold every Thanksgiving until the waves were taller than Pikes Peak, the winds strong enough to knock a man clear to Halifax.

  For Isaac, however, it had a different effect.

  THE WEATHER WAS hot and still, the Gulf smooth as mica, but now and then despite the lack of wind a great hill of water slid silently under the ship and levered it high above mean sea level.

  The sky at the horizon turned copper. Isaac had never seen such color in the atmosphere. Could this, he wondered, be the “brick-dust” sky he had read about in mariners’ accounts of tropical cyclones?

  His fellow passengers were unconcerned. At breakfast, one hundred men, women, and children crowded the ship’s dining room, “all in a jolly mood.”

  Soon the sky darkened. Rain hammered the deck. The wind, by Isaac’s reckoning, accelerated to hurricane force. The ship rocked and pitched in heavy seas. At lunchtime, Isaac found himself alone in the ship’s dining room. Seasickness and fear had felled everyone else. He prided himself on his resilience. He made a show of it, no doubt, just as he had at Fort Myer, where he had raced his horse as fast as he possibly could while the city boys hugged their mounts and cursed his soul.

  The storm continued through the day. At dinnertime not even Isaac appeared in the dining room. “I was so sick,” he wrote, “that I did not care if the ship went to the bottom of the Bay of Campeche.”

  The ship survived. Isaac survived. He had met the most feared of all meteorological phenomena, yet had lived through it with only a case of seasickness. The experience had to have influenced his appraisal of the survivability of hurricanes. On some level, perhaps, he came to believe that hurricanes were not quite as awful as Piddington, Redfield, and Dampier had depicted. Or he assumed that technology—in this case, the modern steamship—had stripped hurricanes of their power to surprise and destroy. Indeed, in that same hurricane season of 1898 a naval architect from Pleasantville, New Jersey, named Simon Lake survived a particularly intense cyclone off Florida by submerging his submarine to a depth below the influence of the waves, exactly as Captain Nemo had done thirty years earlier in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Jules Verne,” Lake wrote, “was the director-general of my life.”

  Against the hubris of the age, what was a mere hurricane?

  As THE YEARS passed, Galveston got bigger and more glamorous. Its future as a deep-water port seemed assured. In May 1900, the Galveston News published a plan for the “Improvement of Galveston,” devised by Col. H. M. Robert, divisional engineer, U.S. Army. Robert, famous by now for his Rules of Order, proposed an elaborate plan that would fill in the wetlands surrounding Pelican Island in Galveston Bay to produce an expanse of land eight feet above sea level called Pelican Territory. A harbor channel was then to be dredged between the territory and Galveston Island, and this was to serve as a portal to a new harbor basin with a surface area of seven thousand acres. The plan promised sure victory over Houston in the race to dominate the Gulf.

  It did not include a seawall.

  STRANGE WEATHER CAME and went. One episode revealed an unusual characteristic of Galveston Bay, but its true significance was lost among the more obvious phenomena of the moment.

  The winter of 1898–99 proved a savage one. On November 26, just ten years after the awful Blizzard of ’88, a powerful gale, known ever since as the Portland Gale, blew off the Atlantic and brought another surprise blizzard to New York. It destroyed 150 vessels off New England and caused the deaths of 450 men, women, and children, including all 200 passengers of the 291-foot paddle steamer Portland, whose captain had believed he could outrun the storm. Two months later, a blizzard swept much of the South. Icebergs ten feet high flowed down the Mississippi past New Orleans. The sudden cold killed participants in the Mardi Gras parade. The blizzard even struck Galveston and piled snow on its beaches. Snowmen populated the Garten Verein.

  At the Levy Building, the temperature sank to 8 degrees, by Isaac’s measure.

  Seven-point-five, by Joseph’s.

  The wind blew from the north at up to eighty miles an hour, with so much power it literally drove water out of Galveston Bay into the Gulf, to the point where portions of the bay bottom lay exposed. Joseph, out hunting geese, claimed he was able to wade a channel ordinarily traversed by ocean-going ships.

  No one, however, seemed to grasp the implications of this: that so vast a body of water could be blown from its basin. There were many distractions, however. There was snow on the beach. Icicles jutted from the underside of the Pagoda. Galveston residents filled rowboats with benumbed fish. Thousands of other fish accumulated along the bay shore in a blue-silver fringe four feet wide and half a foot thick.

  The fish died. As the air warmed, the scent of death became overpowering.

  THE STORM

  Thursday, August 30, 1900:

  17 N, 59.3 W

  ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 1900, the storm was just off the eastern coast of Antigua, where Francis Watts, an agricultural chemist with the government laboratory in St. Johns, observed a falling barometer and curiously shifty winds. At 9:00 A.M., the lab’s barometer recorded pressure of 29.96 inches, still in the normal range. By midafternoon, the pressure had fallen to 29.84.

  “About 10 P.M.,” Watts reported, “a thunderstorm sprung up to the S.W. and came up over the land, appearing to be most severe over the region S.W. of St. Johns Harbor and generally within a radius of 3 miles of St. Johns. It died away after midnight. While it lasted it was very severe; the lightning was brilliant and almost continuous, while the flashes were very quickly followed by loud peals of thunder.”

  Shortly before the storm’s arrival, strange weather had settled on the island. The day was intensely hot, the sky rimmed with a reddish-yellow light. There was, according to the Antigua Standard, an “ominous” stillness.

  GALVESTON

  An Absurd Delusion

  IN JANUARY 1900, a self-styled weather prophet, Prof. Andrew Jackson DeVoe of Chattanooga, Tennessee, issued a long-range forecast for the year in his Ladies’ Birthday Almanac. He predicted that September would be hot and dry throughout the northern states. “On the 9th,” he wrote, “a great cyclone will form over the Gulf of Mexico and move up the Atlantic coast, causing very heavy rains from Florida to Maine from 10th to 12th.”

  It was the kind of prophecy Isaac Cline loathed. He was a scientist. He believed he understood weather in ways others did not. He did not know there was such a thing as the jet stream, or that easterly waves marched from the coast of West Africa every summer, or that a massive flow within the Atlantic Ocean ferried heat around the globe. Nor had he heard of a phenomenon called El Niño. But for his time, he knew everything. Or thought he did.

  On July 15, 1891, the Galveston News published an article Isaac wrote on hurricanes. It is a troublesome document, for it abrades the body of convenient truth that has accumulated over the last century regarding Isaac’s role in preparing Galveston for the hurricane of 1900. It tells worlds about what Isaac must have been thinking that Saturday morning and about how accurately he appraised the signs of approaching danger.

  Isaac was only twenty-nine, but the article read as if it were written by a much older man. Clearly Isaac already considered himself a weather sage. He wrote the article in response to a tropical storm that ten days earlier had come ashore near Matagorda about 120 miles southwest of Galveston along the downward arc of the Texas Gulf Coast. Hubris infused the text just as it infused the age. He wrote with absolute certainty about a phenomenon no one really understood. He called the storm “an excellent type” of cyclone.

  He explained first how the earth’s rotation, the equatorial trades, and the midlatitude westerlies combined to give the storm a parabolic track that began near the equator, arced toward the northwest, then curved back toward the northeast. This last turn “nearly a
lways” occurred between the 75th and 85th meridians of longitude, he wrote. (The 85th meridian passes through Havana, the 75th through the Bahamas.) Thus, he argued, hurricanes could not as a rule strike Texas. To buttress this observation he noted that during the two preceding decades, some twenty West Indies hurricanes had crossed the southern coast of the United States, but only two had actually reached Texas. “The coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to causes known in meteorology as accidental.”

  The article exudes an unmistakable scent of boosterism reminiscent of the immigrant come-ons published by the railroads. Clearly he understood how much was at stake in the race between Galveston and Houston, and that Galveston’s promoters would not be pleased to read that the city lay in harm’s way. He argued that if anything the coast was “much less susceptible” to hostile weather. “No greater damage may be expected here from meteorological disturbances than in any other portions of the country.” In fact, he wrote, the “liability of loss” was much lower.

  When storms did break the rules, he argued, they tended to be weak creatures. “The damage from the storm of July 5, 1891, aggregated less than $2,000, and yet was of much greater intensity than the average of these storms; and in fact no damage worthy of notice has been experienced along the Texas coast from any of these storms except those of 1875 and 1886 and in each of these two cases the loss of property aggregated less than that which often results from a single tornado in the central states.”

  These two exceptions were hurricanes that struck the town of Indianola, a prosperous port 150 miles southwest of Galveston on Matagorda Bay. By Isaac’s analysis, the two hurricanes were accidents. Atmospheric freaks. But Isaac failed to grasp, or deliberately ignored, the true significance of the hurricanes, and what they did to Indianola. He focused on property damage. “The single tornado which struck Louisville, Ky., March 27, 1890, destroyed property of greater value than the aggregate of all the property which has been destroyed by wind and water along the Texas coast during the past twenty years.”

  Isaac had to have recognized the misleading impression this argument would conjure in readers’ minds, unless of course he simply did not know what really happened in Indianola during those two storms.

  For nowhere does he mention lost lives.

  THE FIRST STORM struck Indianola on September 16, 1875. Gale-force winds had come ashore the previous day and gained velocity throughout the night. By 5:00 P.M. on the sixteenth the wind was blowing at eighty-two miles an hour. The wind continued to strengthen until by midnight, according to Sgt. C. A. Smith, the Signal Corps observer on duty, “it must have been fully 100 miles an hour.”

  The storm raised an immense dome of water and shoved it through Indianola, pushing the waters of the Gulf and Matagorda Bay inland “until for 20 miles the back country of prairie was an open sea.” Residents fled their homes in boats and gathered in the town’s strongest buildings. Shortly after midnight, Smith reported, the tide changed. The survivors believed the worst was over. “This evidence of abatement was hailed with shouts of joy, and was confirmed in a few minutes by the action of the wind, which gradually backed to the north and northwest.”

  Their joy was premature. The wind again began shoveling water, this time back toward Matagorda Bay, and created an “ebb surge,” a mesoscale version of what happens on any beach when water brought ashore by a wave rushes back out to sea, undermining anything in its way. “The tide now swept out toward the bay with terrific force, the wind having but slightly abated, and it was at this time that the greatest destruction to life and property occurred. The buildings remaining had been so loosened and racked by northeast wind and tide that the moment the tremendous force was changed in a cross-direction dozens of them toppled in ruins and were swept into the bay.”

  The initial storm surge had poured into Matagorda Bay over the course of eighteen hours. It exited in six.

  The devastation was stunning. “Fully three-fourths of all the buildings had entirely disappeared from the scene, and of those remaining, a large part were in utter ruins,” Smith wrote. “Many of those remaining had been swept from their original foundation—some but a few yards, others several blocks.”

  The storm killed 176 people. Compared with the death tolls of the great Bay of Bengal typhoons, this raw total did not seem like much. But Gen. Adolphus Greely, who visited Indianola six months after the storm, estimated the death toll amounted to one-fifth the city’s population. The storm left a schooner high and dry five miles inland and killed fifteen thousand sheep and cattle. All this, Greely observed, despite the fact that Indianola occupied a sheltered niche on the Texas coast fourteen miles from the Gulf and behind a broken plume of barrier lands that might have been expected to blunt the force of any oncoming storm. Even six months afterward, the damage was obvious and vivid. The hurricane had destroyed not only the superficial structures made by men, Greely found, but also God’s own topography. “The striking physical changes were the formation of a large lake in the rear of the town and the plowing of numerous bayous inland, five connecting across the solid land of an elevation ranging between 10 and 20 feet above the level of Matagorda Bay, on which the town was built. One of these bayous was nearly 20 feet deep at the time of my visit.”

  Indianola was proud of its port and believed it could be restored to its former prosperity. Its residents chose to rebuild.

  THE SECOND HURRICANE arrived on August 20, 1886. “The water in the bay commenced to rise rapidly,” according to the Signal Corps account of the storm. The wind destroyed the service’s weather station, where falling timbers killed the resident observer, I. A. Reed, as he tried to escape. “A lamp in the office set fire to the building and, although rain was falling heavily, it was burned, and also more than a block of buildings on both sides of the street.”

  The wind raised storm and ebb surges even more destructive than those of 1875. “The appearance of the town after the storm was one of universal wreck. Not a house remained uninjured, and most of those that were left standing were in unsafe condition. Many were washed away completely and scattered over the plains back of the town; others were lifted from their foundations and moved bodily over considerable distances.”

  The storm caused such thorough destruction, and killed so many residents, the survivors abandoned the town forever.

  AT FIRST, GALVESTON’S leading men seemed to grasp the significance of the Indianola storms. Anyone who looked at a map could see that Galveston was even more vulnerable to destruction than Indianola. It had no picket of barrier islands to shelter it, no buffer of mainland prairie. The city faced the Gulf head-on.

  Six weeks after the second Indianola storm, a group of thirty prominent Galveston residents calling themselves the Progressive Association met and resolved to build a seawall. This was the same group that led the fight for federal money to turn Galveston into a deep-water port. The city’s engineer, E. M. Hartrick, went so far as to draft plans for the wall. He proposed “a dike ten feet high extending completely around the island, except for the north side. There, the wharves were to be raised to form the dike.” The city’s Evening Tribune endorsed the plan. “When men such as these say that work on seawall protection should be commenced at once and pushed to completion, the public can depend upon it that something tangible will be done—and that without unnecessary delay.”

  The state eventually did authorize a bond to pay for the work. “But,” engineer Hartrick wrote, “this was some months after the flood, and by then the attitude was, Oh, we’ll never get another one—and they didn’t build.”

  If Galveston had any lingering anxiety about its failure to erect a seawall, Isaac’s 1891 article would have eased them. It was here that he belittled hurricane fears as the artifacts of “an absurd delusion.” He was especially confident about storm surges. Galveston would escape harm, he argued, bec
ause the incoming water would spread first over the vast lowlands behind Galveston, on the Texas mainland north of the bay where the land was even closer to sea level.

  “It would be impossible,” he wrote, “for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city.”

  PART II

  The Serpent’s Coil

  THE STORM

  Spiderwebs and Ice

  THE STORM ENTERED the Caribbean Sea early on Friday morning, August 31, in a confetti of sparks and thunder, with increased winds that raised from the sea patches of dense foam and streaks of spindrift. In the cloudlight of morning the sea was a dead gray scabbed with green. Rain began falling on St. Kitts, an island west by northwest of Antigua. What made this rain unusual was the fact it did not deplete the clouds overhead. The storm only got bigger.

  As vapor rose through the clouds and began to condense, it deposited its moisture on tiny bits of airborne debris, ranging from submicroscopic “Aitken” nuclei to pollen, spiderwebs, volcanic ash, steamship exhaust, Saharan dust, even the pulverized ferrous salts of meteors disintegrated in the atmosphere. Somewhere over St. Kitts, a giant plume of water, ice, and aerosol debris rocketed through the troposphere getting colder and colder until it penetrated the stratosphere, where it entered a realm of new warmth caused by direct radiation from the sun. Suddenly the plume was colder than the air around it. It lost buoyancy. It arced against the hard blue of the stratosphere and fell back toward the earth.

  This descending air met air still rising from below. Falling droplets met ascending droplets. The collisions formed bigger drops and the bigger they grew, the faster they fell. Now they overtook other falling droplets and grew bigger still. A raindrop four-hundredths of an inch in diameter falls at nine miles an hour; a droplet six times as large falls at twenty. Billions of droplets now got bigger and bigger until they achieved terminal velocities capable of propelling them all the way to the ground.