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

by Erik Larson

  Joseph enciphered the message, then fought his way to the Strand. “The entire pavement of wooden blocks throughout the business section was afloat and up to the level of the raised sidewalks, bobbing up and down like a carpet of corks.” In places, he said, the water was knee-deep. He went first to the Western Union office, but learned its wires had been down for two hours. He walked to the nearby Postal Telegraph office, and heard the same news. “I made my way painfully back again, through the top crust of wooden blocks, to the weather bureau.”

  It suddenly dawned on him to use the telephone. He called the telephone company and asked for a direct long-distance connection to the Western Union office in Houston, “at the utmost speed.”

  The operator refused. She had four thousand calls ahead of his, she told him. He tried to convince her this was urgent government business. She stood her ground.

  Joseph asked for the manager, Tom Powell, whom he knew. Joseph explained the situation and its urgency. But why, if Isaac had so widely sounded the alarm, did Joseph have to explain anything at all? And why did the operator refuse his request?

  Powell came through. Joseph got his direct connection to Western Union in Houston. He dictated the telegram. It was truly a transitional moment: There he was, at the cusp of the twentieth century, using the telephone to send a telegram.

  He told Western Union the message was to be kept absolutely confidential. “The two cities,” Joseph explained, “were traditional rivals.” He did not want Houston to learn yet that its arch-rival in the race for deep-water dominance now lay under the converging waters of the Gulf and bay. “I explained that the facts in the message were the property of the Weather Bureau and of the Government, and were not for public release except from Washington.”

  Isaac, meanwhile, was on his way home. Along the way he encountered Anthony Credo, who lived near the beach in a big two-story house with his wife and nine children.

  Credo had eleven children in all, but two daughters now had families of their own and lived elsewhere. Neither was at the Credo house on Saturday. A son, William, was also absent, spending the day at the home of his fiancée.

  Credo was headed for his own home, and walked part of the way alongside Isaac.

  Isaac seemed worried. He told Credo he was afraid he had underestimated the storm. “Dr. Cline told Papa that this storm would be more dangerous than any of the others we had had before,” said Credo’s daughter Ruby. “Dr. Cline didn’t like the way the water was rising; the winds from the northeast had increased in a matter of minutes.”

  Credo walked quickly to his house and gathered his family together. His conversation with Isaac had left him deeply troubled. He told his family to get ready to leave as quickly as possible. Then he and his wife did something that to Ruby’s young eyes was positively extraordinary: They began chopping holes into the parlor floor.

  SOON ISAAC’S ROUTE took him past the home of Judson Palmer, the YMCA secretary. Just then Palmer happened to be looking out the door to see how much higher the waters had risen.

  Palmer hailed Isaac, who waded toward him. Apparently Palmer was having second thoughts about staying in the house. He asked Isaac his opinion as to the safest course—move downtown, or stay?

  Stay put, Isaac said. He told Palmer his house seemed well built and sturdy and would do fine and that his family would be safer there than anywhere else. Isaac said he was on his way to his own house, and planned to stay there until the storm was over.

  For Palmer, this must have been especially reassuring.

  Later, with mournful clarity, Isaac wrote in his official report, “Those who lived in large strong buildings, a few blocks from the beach, one of whom was the writer of this report, thought they could weather the wind and tide.”

  But Isaac wasn’t alone in seeing his own house as a fortress. Apparently the Cline house was considered among the staunchest in the neighborhood. “Many went to his house for safety as it was the strongest-built of any in that part of town,” John Blagden said.

  By the time Isaac got home, the water in his yard was waist deep. And wherever an object protruded from the water, there were toads. Tiny ones. Dozens. “Every little board, every little splinter, had about twenty or fifty toad-frogs on it,” one witness remembered. “I never seen so many toad-frogs in all the days of my life.”

  JOSEPH LEFT FOR the house an hour or so after Isaac, and arrived about 5:30 P.M. The water was by then waist deep, Joseph said.

  Neck deep, Isaac said.

  Joseph was amazed to find that fifty people from the neighborhood had taken shelter in the house, including whole familes and the contractor who had built the house. “He knew better than anyone,” Joseph said, “that its construction was of the finest and strongest materials, as my brother intended it to withstand the worst wind that ever blew.”

  Even so, Joseph did not trust it. The storm was worse than anything Galveston had ever experienced.

  Evacuate, Joseph urged.

  Stay, Isaac insisted.

  PART IV

  Cataclysm

  TELEGRAM

  Houston, Texas

  7:37 P.M.

  Sept. 9, 1900

  To: Willis Moore,

  Chief, U.S. Weather Bureau

  Washington, D.C.

  We have been absolutely unable to hear a word from Galveston since 4 P.M. yesterday.…

  G. L. Vaughan,

  Manager

  Western Union, Houston

  THE EAST SIDE

  Louisa Rollfing

  AUGUST ROLLFING FOUGHT his way back into the city. With each step the water seemed to rise higher up his legs, but that was impossible—nothing could make the sea rise so quickly. The storm was much worse than it had been on his way home. Now and then powerful gusts scraped squares of slate from nearby rooftops and launched them into the air as if they were autumn leaves. He saw whole families moving slowly toward the center of the city, everyone leaning against the wind. Broadway was a river of refugees. Suddenly Louisa’s desire to escape the beach did not seem so crazy.

  Rollfing walked to a livery stable, Malloy’s, and there hired a driver and buggy and sent them to his address with orders to pick up Louisa and the children and take them to his mother’s house in the city’s West End. He believed it a far safer neighborhood, perhaps because it was many blocks from the ocean beaches at the east and south edges of the city. Apparently he did not take into account the fact that the bay was only ten blocks north of his mother’s home. The wind was still blowing from the north over the long fetch of Galveston Bay, and with each increase in velocity drove more water into the city. Rollfing went to his shop.

  At one o’clock, the buggy pulled up in front of the family’s house at 18th and Avenue O½. Louisa was overjoyed. She raced through the house collecting shoes and a change of clothing for everyone, and packed these in a large hamper, but once the driver and her children and she had all climbed aboard, she realized there simply was no room left. She had to leave the hamper behind.

  She held Atlanta Anna in her arms. The driver set off for the West End, no doubt first driving north toward the slightly higher ground at the center of the city, then due west. “It was a terrible trip,” Louisa said. “We could only go slowly for the electric wires were down everywhere, which made it dangerous.… The rain was icy cold and hurt our faces like glass splinters, and little ‘Lanta’ cried all along the way. I pressed her little face hard against my breast, so she would not be hurt so badly. August and Helen didn’t cry, they never said a word.”

  The driver dodged other storm refugees and great masses of floating wreckage. Judging by the quantity, whole houses must have come apart. The sky was so dark, it looked as if dusk had arrived half a day early.

  “We got as far as 40th Street and Ave. H, just one block from Grandma,” Louisa said. “The water was so high, we just sat in it, the horse was up to his neck in water.”

  The driver turned onto 40th Street. Someone shouted for the buggy to stop. �
�Don’t go! You can’t go through.” The water was too deep, the caller said—there was a large hole ahead filled with water.

  The driver turned the buggy around, and asked Louisa, “Where shall I go now?”

  Louisa, in a nearly submerged carriage with three young children, was at a loss. “I don’t know,” she said.

  It came to her then: August’s sister, Julia, and her husband, Jim, lived in a house at 36th and Broadway, just six blocks back toward the city. The driver gently eased his horse back along Avenue H, against the flow of water and refugees.

  When Julia saw Louisa and the children, drenched and windblown, she was shocked. “My God, Louisa, what is the matter?”

  Clearly Julia knew nothing of the damage along the beach. Louisa quickly described conditions in the East End and how the West End too was underwater. She paid the Mallory’s driver a dollar and made him promise to tell his boss, Mr. Mallory, their new destination so that Mallory could pass the message on to August.

  “I was so confident that August would go there,” she said, “but he didn’t.”

  AT ABOUT TWO O’CLOCK Galveston time, in the midst of Louisa’s drive, the wind shifted. Until then the wind had blown consistently from the north, the weaker left flank of the hurricane. Now the wind circled to the northeast and gained intensity. Isaac noticed the change, but most people, including Louisa, did not. They were too busy seeking shelter or had battened themselves within their homes. The stories Louisa told her hosts of what she had seen on her journey frightened them. With Louisa’s help, they began bracing the windows and doors. They nailed an ironing board across a window. A neighbor came over with her two children seeking shelter or company and brought the total number of people in the house to ten. They closed all the upstairs doors and gathered on the stairway. They had a pitcher of water and a lantern. Soon they heard the shattering of windows and blinds in the bedrooms behind the doors they had just closed. “It sounded,” Louisa said, “as if the rooms were filled with a thousand little devils, shrieking and whistling.”

  She watched quietly as Julia and Jim’s piano slid from one downstairs wall to another, then back.

  AVENUE P½

  Parents and Their Choices

  SAM YOUNG

  AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon, Dr. Young started back to his house at the northeast corner of Bath and P½, one block north of Isaac Cline’s house and adjacent to the Bath Avenue Public School. Thinking his family safe in San Antonio, he prepared for the storm’s arrival—prepared, that is, to enjoy it, and savor every destructive impulse. Young was a member of that class of mostly landlocked men who believed God put storms on earth expressly for their entertainment.

  Young’s yard was a plateau of land five feet above sea level, yet by the time he got home he found the yard under two feet of water. This did not trouble him, for he had seen high water before. He took a chair on his gallery and watched the storm. The water rose gradually and soon began to climb the stairs toward him. Even this did not worry him. “My house, a large two-story frame building, stood on brick pillars about four feet high,” he said, “so I had no fear of the water coming into my house.”

  A young black boy worked for Young as a valet. Young sent him home, then began closing shutters and windows and securing doors, intent mainly on getting these tasks done before nightfall.

  Around four o’clock, he began to see that he had been wrong about the water. Two feet now covered his ground floor, and the level was still rising—not gradually, anymore, but rapidly. Visibly. Like water flowing into a bathtub.

  Young had noticed the change in wind direction. “The wind had hauled further to the east and was blowing at a terrific rate.” The shift accounted for the more-rapid increase in depth, Young knew. Galveston sat astride a portion of Texas coastline canted forty-five degrees toward the northeast. All morning the north wind had impeded the progress of the incoming storm tide, causing water literally to pile up in the Gulf. Now, with the wind blowing from the northeast, a portion of that pent-up tide—but by no means the bulk of it—began to come ashore. The wind blowing southwest along the Texas coast pushed the sea into Galveston’s East Side.

  More fascinated than appalled, Young moved a chair to a second-floor window and watched the water as it flowed along Avenue P½. (He makes no mention of seeing Isaac Cline or Joseph struggling home, although the last block of their journeys would have been within his view.) The water moved fastest at the center of the street where the high curbs channeled the water and vastly increased its velocity, just like the narrow pipes used by city water systems to increase water pressure. The street had become a causeway for wreckage. Young saw boxes, barrels, carriages, cisterns, outhouses, and small shacks. He watched one barrel hold its course all the way down the street. “The flow,” he saw, “was almost exactly east to west.”

  What he did not realize, apparently, was that the flow now included corpses.

  Most likely he had stationed himself at a window that faced west or south; otherwise he would have been aware of the great damage now being done to the beach neighborhoods behind his house, where immense breakers slid over the surface of the tide and broke against second-floor windows.

  It was getting dark. He found a candle, lit it, then thought better—he might need the candle later on. He blew it out. There was nothing to do, he decided, but wait out the storm. He still felt unafraid. “I found a comfortable armchair and made myself as comfortable as possible.” He was very glad, however, that his family soon would be snug and dry in the train station at San Antonio. “Being entirely alone, with no responsibility on me, I felt satisfied and very complacent, for I was fool enough not to be the least afraid of wind or water.”

  FOR OTHER FATHERS in homes not far from his the afternoon was playing out in rather different fashion. Suddenly the prospect of watching their children die became very real.

  Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk ultimately of saving none? Did you save a daughter or a son? The youngest or your firstborn? Did you save that sun-kissed child who gave you delight every morning, or the benighted adolescent who made your day a torment—save him, because every piece of you screamed to save the sweet one?

  And if you saved none, what then?

  How did you go on?

  Mrs. Hopkins

  AS LOUISE HOPKINS and her friend Martha played in the yard, they saw more strange things come floating past in the street. There were boxes and boards and bits of clothing, and now children’s toys. Martha went home, fearing that soon the water would be too deep to cross, and indeed soon afterward the level rose to where water flowed into Louise’s yard and into her mother’s treasured garden. The sight of all that brown water destroying her mother’s lovely flowers brought Louise the day’s first sadness.

  When Louise went inside, she saw for the first time that her mother was worried about the storm. Mrs. Hopkins was moving her great trove of cooking supplies to the second floor—her sacks of sugar, coffee, and flour (one of the most popular brands was Tidal Wave Flour). Between trips Mrs. Hopkins went to the window to watch for Louise’s two brothers, who that morning had ridden their bicycles to their jobs. “She knew now with the water rising it would be impossible for them to come home the same way,” Louise recalled.

  Louise noticed that her kitten, a Maltese, was behaving strangely. The little thing “was restless and kept following me. I believe he was more aware of the approaching danger than I.”

  Her brother John arrived safely, and quickly went to work helping his mother transport the supplies to the second floor. Louise helped with the smaller things. Her brother Mason, fourteen years old, was still not home.

  Once all the big sacks had been hauled upstairs, Louise’s mother found the family ax and did something that just about took Louise’s breath away forever. Her mother had always been so careful about the house. The house was everything. A home, an income. She kept it spotless, and polished and dusted the floors until they
gleamed like the beacon of the Bolivar Light, and if you tracked mud onto these floors you knew you would not see the sunlight for the rest of your living days.

  Right there, no warning, her mother lifted the ax over her shoulder and slammed it into the floor. She kept chopping until the holes were big enough to see through.

  “I was amazed to see how fast the water came in under the front door and through the holes my mother had cut in the floor,” Louise said. “How quickly the house was filling with water, and how difficult it was for my mother to keep her head out of the water as she reached down into the lower cabinets for the last of the groceries to be taken upstairs.”

  Louise looked out an upstairs window and saw that water now covered the porch rail of the house next door. Until then, she had felt mostly excitement. The morning had been full of wonders: water racing down the street, toads all over the place, her mother chopping holes in the floor, and water even inside the house. But there was something about the water so deep around her neighbor’s house that took all the excitement away. “I thought of all the things that had to be left behind, and I was sad and afraid.”

  Her mother watched for Mason.

  AT PRECISELY 2:30 P.M. Galveston time a gust of wind lifted the Weather Bureau’s rain gauge from the roof of the Levy Building and carried it off toward the southwest. It had captured 1.27 inches of rain.