by Erik Larson
Doctors have long been tantalized by persistent anecdotal evidence that a sudden, severe drop in atmospheric pressure can trigger premature labor and cause aneurysms to burst. Seismologists have wondered whether such a decline could rupture an already-fragile fault. Early observers of hurricanes often claimed that earthquakes acccompanied the worst storms, but William Redfield and Lieutenant Colonel Reid debunked their accounts, attributing the tremors to the interplay of thunder, wind, and imagination. One later incident, however, has resisted explanation. On September 1, 1923, a severe typhoon struck Japan, coming ashore first at Yokohama, then moving to Tokyo. As the storm raged, an intense earthquake occurred. The quake crumpled buildings and set fires; the typhoon whipped the fires into a firestorm. A Weather Bureau meteorologist, C. F. Brooks, argued that low pressure and high water, acting in concert, might have caused the earthquake. He calculated that a two-inch drop in pressure lessened the load on a single square mile of land by roughly two million tons. At the same time, a ten-foot increase in the depth of the sea caused by the wind pushing water toward shore increased the load by about nine million tons. The sudden differential, he argued, might have been enough to fracture a fault line already stressed to its limits.
The storm and earthquake together killed 99,330 people. Another 43,500 simply disappeared.
No one in Isaac’s time would have believed such low pressures could occur. Until September 1900, any measurement under 29 inches was considered an error until proved otherwise.
IN GALVESTON, THURSDAY, Isaac Cline noted in the station’s Daily Journal the presence of scattered clouds and fresh northerly winds. He noted, too, that at 2:59 P.M. 75th meridian time—1:59 Galveston time—he had received an advisory from Washington stating that the tropical storm was now “central over southern Florida.” He saw no cause for concern.
That evening, he climbed to the roof of the Levy Building and recorded a temperature of 90.5, the highest temperature so far that week. The wind, he saw, was from the north at thirteen to fifteen miles per hour. The barometer read 29.818 inches, just a hair lower than the evening before. He saw scattered clouds. The bureau used a ten-point cloud scale, with ten the maximum. He rated the sky at four.
He checked to make sure all the instruments were secure. He walked down to the office, composed a coded telegram to Washington, and gave this to a messenger. Then Isaac walked home.
Squadrons of fat blue dragonflies zigzagged across his path. He nodded to friends and acquaintances, smiled at casual quips about the heat. The horses especially seemed to move more slowly.
Perhaps he felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. The tropical storm was centered over Florida—that meant soon it would cross to the Atlantic, where it would become the concern of other observers in Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore. He was glad it was gone. Storms brought damage and extra work, and extra work was not something he needed right now.
On the other hand, storms were exciting and gave the bureau a chance to prove its worth. The sight of the red-and-black storm flag raised high over the Levy Building never failed to set Isaac’s heart pounding.
No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forgot the feel of a paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse’s flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burlap.
THE STORM
M Is for Swells
THE HURRICANE HAD begun sculpting the Gulf the moment it left Cuba and now it transmitted storm swells toward Galveston.
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. Other conditions, such as the chance superimposition of two or more waves, can cause waves to grow even bigger. The tallest wave on record was 112 feet, but occurred amid steady winds of only 75 miles an hour.
In a cyclonic system, the wind spirals to the left, but the waves continue forward along their original paths at speeds far faster than the storm’s overall forward velocity. The forward speed of the storm of 1900 was probably no greater than ten miles an hour, but it produced swells that moved at fifty miles an hour, and began reaching the Texas coast fifteen hours after their formation.
Soon after the waves left the cyclone, they changed shape. They retained their energy, but lost much of their height and their jagged crests. They became long, easy undulations, like the grease-smooth swells that Columbus spotted on his first voyage.
As soon as they reached the Texas coast, however, they changed shape again. Whenever a deep-sea swell enters shallow water its leading edge slows. Water piles up behind it. The wave grows again. It is this effect that makes earthquake-spawned tsunamis so deceptive and so deadly. A tsunami travels across the ocean as a small hump of water but at speeds as high as five hundred miles an hour. When it reaches land, it explodes.
GALVESTON
M Is for Heat
CAPT. J. W. SIMMONS, master of the steamship Pensacola, had just as little regard for weather as the Louisiana’s Captain Halsey. He was a veteran of eight hundred trips across the Gulf and commanded a staunch and sturdy ship, a 1,069-ton steel-hulled screw-driven steam freighter built twelve years earlier in West Hartlepool, England, and now owned by the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company. Friday morning the ship was docked at the north end of 34th Street, in the company of scores of other ships, including the big Mallory liner Alamo, at 2,237 tons, and the usual large complement of British ships, which on Friday included the Comino, Hilarius, Kendal Castle, Mexican, Norna, Red Cross, Taunton, and the stately Roma in from Boston with its Captain Storms. As the Pensacola’s twenty-one-man crew readied the ship for its voyage to the city of Pensacola on Florida’s Gulf Coast, two men came aboard as Captain Simmons’s personal guests: a harbor pilot named R. T. Carroll and Galveston’s Pilot Commissioner J. M. O. Menard, from one of the city’s oldest families.
At 7:00 A.M., Captain Simmons ordered the crew to raise steam and make for the Bolivar Roads, the channel at the east end of Galveston Island that connected the bay to the Gulf. A left turn would have taken him toward Houston. He turned right and entered the Gulf.
The weather was clear but hot. Excessively hot, especially considering the early hour. Simmons pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face. By habit he checked the weather display tower at the island’s east end for a storm flag. He saw nothing.
He did note, however, that the Pensacola was alone in the Roads.
AT 9:35 A.M. Galveston time, two and a half hours after the Pensacola’s departure, Willis Moore telegraphed Isaac with an order to hoist a conventional storm warning. The telegram reached Isaac at 10:30. Five minutes later, Isaac raised the flag.
The bureau’s forecasters in Washington had changed their minds, and now believed the storm would not reach the Atlantic after all. They still considered it a storm of only moderate energy, but now seemed to think it was still in the Gulf, moving toward the northwest.
The Atlantic theory had been a compelling one, however—so much so that a vestige of it survived at the Galveston station well into Saturday morning, despite Isaac’s experience on the beach. Shortly after nine o’clock Saturday morning, Capt. George B. Hix, master of the Alamo, walked to the Levy Building to inquire personally about the weather, as captains often did whenever the atmosphere seemed unsettled. Since dawn, Hix had watched the silvery shaft of mercury in his barometer get shorter and shorter.
In the weather office, an observer told him there was “no cause for uneasiness.” A storm was indeed approaching, but it was only an “offspur” of a storm that had struck the Florida coast a few days earlier.
“Well, young man,” Hix snorted. “It’s going to be the damnedest offspur you ever saw.”
Young man.
Not Isaac, surely
. He was thirty-eight years old, which in 1900 qualified him as middle-aged. More likely the observer was Joseph Cline or the newly arrived John Blagden.
Regardless, it was a telling encounter. It suggests that Isaac had not told his fellow observers about his predawn trip to the beach, or at least had not revealed to them the depth of his concern. Or else he simply was not as worried as he later claimed.
Hix, however, hurried back to the wharf and readied the Alamo for storm.
BY FRIDAY AFTERNOON, a few sea captains and their crews were still the only men who knew the storm’s true secret—that it had grown into a monster. Some lived; some did not. In Tampa earlier, storm flags went up, but the schooner Olive set sail anyway for Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, she was missing. Two ships ran aground off Florida, their crews feared lost. The storm caught other ships as well—the El Dorado out of New Orleans, and the Concho and Hyades, both out of Galveston. Captain Halsey struggled to keep the Louisiana upright in waves whose backs were planed almost smooth by the intense wind.
By noon, the Pensacola was well into the Gulf. Captain Simmons checked his barometer and saw the mercury at 29.9. Over the next two hours, pressure fell nearly an inch. The wind reached gale force.
Captain Simmons stayed on course, the ship’s bow aimed roughly toward the Mississippi Delta, where the state of Louisiana bulged into the Gulf.
Why he did not run can never be known, but it is likely his failure to do so was the product of those eight hundred previous voyages, his own ornery temperament, and the technological arrogance of the time—hell, the Pensacola was made of steel and weighed two million pounds.
Plus, he had an audience. At one point, in a show of bravado, Simmons called his guests to the barometer. “Menard,” Simmons said. “Look at that glass. Twenty-eight point fifty-five. I have never seen it that low. You never have and will in all probability never see it again.”
Simmons ordered all hatches sealed. The waves grew; the wind accelerated. Simmons gauged the wind at one hundred miles an hour.
Foam covered the sea. Spindrift blew in long luminous tentacles that seemed to reach for the bridge. Simmons stopped the engine. He ordered the anchor dropped, along with one hundred fathoms of chain cable, or six hundred feet.
When the anchor caught, the ship swung so that its bow faced head-on into the wind like a kite tethered to a child’s wrist. It “labored heavily,” Menard said, “rising off one tremendous sea and dropping on another, which jarred the vessel and made her tremble all over.” Steel seams howled. The wild tumbling shattered crockery and lamps. Fragments slid in noisy herds back and forth across the deck. The captain’s dog got seasick.
“It looked as if the good ship could not stand such a thumping,” Menard recalled. “It was feared she would strain her plates or break some bolts, if the vessel did not break in two.”
This two-million-pound steel-hulled screw-driven marvel of marine technology was in trouble—suddenly no better off than a square-rigged barkentine. Worse off, in some respects. Steamships could not broach-to the way the old wooden sailing ships could. If knocked on her side, the Pensacola would have sunk like a steel bearing. The pounding was the biggest worry. A ruptured seam, Menard guessed, would drive her to the bottom in five minutes.
Things like this were not supposed to happen. Not anymore. Whether the ship survived or not was now only a matter of luck.
Luck, and maybe a little quiet prayer.
FRIDAY NIGHT, DR. Samuel O. Young, the secretary of the Cotton Exchange, walked from his house to the beach. He lived at the corner of P½ and 25th, one block north of Isaac Cline’s home, in a large two-story house mounted on brick pillars four feet high. On stormy nights, as lightning flashed, Young could see Dr. Cline standing on his second-floor balcony, keeping an eye on the weather. Dr. Cline, no doubt, could also see him.
As Young walked past the weatherman’s house, he saw children outside, leaping about unmindful of the mosquitoes beginning to emerge from the gutters and the moist places left by Tuesday’s thunderstorms.
His own children and his wife were at that moment in the sleeping car of a Southern Pacific train speeding toward Texas from the west, where they had spent the summer away from the heat and mosquitoes.
Ahead, Murdoch’s pier blazed with light. The crests of incoming waves seemed nearly to touch the lamps suspended over the surf. There would be no nude bathing tonight—unlike other nights, when as many as two hundred men would gather in the waves beyond the reach of the lamps and swim frog-naked in the warm water. The thought of joining them had crossed Young’s mind now and then, but he quickly put those inclinations out of his skull. He could see it now: a two-inch item in the next morning’s News about the secretary of the Cotton Exchange tumbling naked among the waves.
The Gulf had grown angrier since Wednesday, when Young first had noticed the unusual height of the waves and the absence of any wind to explain their growth. “Thursday afternoon,” he wrote, “the tide was again high and the water very rough, while the atmosphere had that peculiar hazy appearance that generally precedes a storm.” Now it was Friday night. A robust wind raced past Young toward the Gulf, but did little to dispel the heat. The surf was rough, the tide unusually high, “though as a rule with a north wind the tide is low and the gulf as smooth as the bay.”
To Young, this was additional evidence: “I was then confident that a cyclone was approaching us and accounted for the high tide by assuming that the storm was moving toward the northwest or against the gulf stream, thus piling up the water in the gulf.”
The cyclone’s exact location was anyone’s guess. The Weather Bureau was no help. About all one could really tell from the bureau’s advisories was that a storm of some sort did exist. The bureau had not yet acknowledged that the storm was a tropical cyclone. But it had to be, Young believed.
“For my own satisfaction, and at the request of friends, I constructed a chart, outlining roughly the origin, development and probable course of the cyclone.”
He based his estimate of the storm’s track on what he had seen in the Tuesday-morning weather map and on subsequent maps and advisories from the Weather Bureau’s Central Office, copies of which came to the Cotton Exchange because of its obvious interest in weather. He placed the storm’s origin somewhere south of Cuba, but assumed it would behave like most tropical storms—that it would travel northwest for a time “as cyclones always do,” then curve toward the northeast for an exit into the Atlantic. He estimated the storm would strike the U.S. mainland somewhere near the mouth of the Mississippi.
“The error I made,” he wrote, “was in placing the course too far to the east.”
THAT EVENING, AT precisely 6:41 P.M. Galveston time, Joseph Cline took the necessary readings for the eight o’clock 75th meridian-time national observation.
Much of the day had been clear and hot, but now clouds filled the sky from horizon to horizon. Joseph rated the cloud cover at ten, the maximum. It was still hot, however. At 4:00 P.M. the temperature had been 90 degrees. Now, nearly three hours later, the thermometer still showed 90.
The barometer stood at 29.637, and rising. At midnight, when Joseph climbed to the Levy Building roof to take his last reading, he found the barometer had risen to 29.72.
CUBA
“Who Is Right?”
IN HAVANA, FRIDAY afternoon, William Stockman dried his fingers on a towel that he kept beside his desk. He wound another piece of paper into his typewriter. A fan dangled from the high ceiling. The air was like a moist sweater.
He typed a page number at the top. Seventeen.
It was the last page of his reply to Col. H. H. C. Dunwoody’s letter of Wednesday, September 5, in which Dunwoody had shown himself uncharacteristically perturbed by the Cubans and their rather pathetic cries of outrage over the bureau’s telegraph ban. Dunwoody had written, “I think it would also be well for you to give me a copy of the statement of the mistakes which Jover made last year, and to which at one time you called my attention.
… I may need this in defending my position.”
Stockman believed he had more than fulfilled the colonel’s request. In these seventeen pages he had given Dunwoody example after example of forecasts in which the Cubans had made alarming declarations that later proved baseless. No one could accuse Stockman of manipulating the record. Stockman had typed the Cuban forecasts and the corresponding U.S. advisories verbatim, with dates and times, so Dunwoody and his critics could see for themselves.
Stockman typed his last paragraph, and his closing—“Very respectfully,”—and pulled the page from the typewriter.
His shirt cuffs were moist. He aligned the pages of his letter in a satisfying stack. Seventeen pages. Eighteen, once he attached a chart of rainfall and wind. He tapped the bottom of the stack against the green felt blotter on his desk. Dunwoody wanted a defense. This was a defense.
There was nothing like a nice thick letter to make a man feel he had put in a good day’s work. Out of prudence and pride, Stockman began rereading his own letter.
“Colonel:” it began.
Now, was that respectful enough? Should Stockman have written, “My dear Colonel,” or the more formal “Sir,” required in all correspondence with His Highness, Willis Moore?
No, he decided. “Colonel” was fine. A jot more familiar than “Sir,” perhaps, but after all, he and Dunwoody were allies. Partners. Almost friends. Dunwoody had begun his letter “My dear Stockman.”
Examples of Cuban errors comprised the bulk of the letter. The Cubans loved to dash off alarming forecasts. It seemed to Stockman that a big part of his job was simply to counter the panic their forecasts produced.