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

by Erik Larson

  At 5:15, the wind destroyed the bureau’s anemometer. By then the instrument had registered a maximum velocity of one hundred miles an hour.

  The wind continued to intensify.

  A FIGURE APPROACHED the Hopkins home, moving against the current. The water was up to his underarms. He dodged pieces of lumber and boxes and telegraph poles. Now and then a square of slate smacked the water around him. Softer things bumped against his legs, then moved on with the current.

  When Mason arrived, a lightness came over the Hopkins household. It was as if the house itself had been holding its breath awaiting his arrival. He was bruised and soaked, but smiling, and Mrs. Hopkins hugged him as she had never hugged anyone before. The storm raged and water burbled up through the holes in the floor and slid in a sheet under the front door, but everyone was home and the unspoken fear that had gripped the place was suddenly gone. “We had a warm feeling of all of us being together, safely, we believed. We went upstairs in the main part of our house … to wait out the storm.”

  ALL OVER GALVESTON, there was a need for light. A craving. People needed light for themselves to ease their fears, but they also needed others to know they were still in their homes and alive. Throughout Galveston, lamps bloomed in a thousand second-floor windows. We’re here, they said. Come for us. Please.

  The same idea came to Louise’s mother. She did not want to use a lamp, however. The house was shaking too badly. She feared the lamp would fall and set fire to the house, and then all would indeed be lost.

  She dragged one of the big drums of lard to the center of the room. She found a carnival flag attached to a stick, and laid the stick across the top of the drum. She saturated a strip of cloth with lard, then draped this over the stick, one end in the lard, for a wick. “When it was lighted it gave off a dim and eerie light,” Louise said. “We sat and watched it flickering and listened to the banging and howling of the storm outside.”

  It was oddly comfortable in the room. Almost cozy.

  Until her sister, Lois, screamed.

  Judson Palmer

  IN THE BLOCKS behind Dr. Young’s house, several families began moving toward the home of Judson Palmer, at 2320 P½. Anyone could see it was one of the strongest houses around. Isaac Cline himself had gauged it a perfectly safe haven against the storm. A neighbor couple, Mr. and Mrs. Boecker, arrived with their two children. Garry Burnett followed with his wife and his two children. Soon afterward another Burnett, George, arrived with his wife, child, and mother. The last couple to arrive was an unidentified black man and his wife who asked if they too might come inside until the storm passed. Palmer now counted seventeen people in his house, including his own wife and his son, Lee. The boy’s dog, Youno, scampered wildly around the house, clearly delighted with the attention of so many big and small human beings.

  At 6:00 P.M., Palmer and the other men rolled up the first-floor carpets and hauled them upstairs. They carried the furniture up next, an effort that caused them all to break a heavy sweat. With all the doors and windows shut and so many moist people inside, the house felt hot, humid, and stale. Once all the furniture was moved, everyone went to the second floor, which had four bedrooms and a large bathroom equipped with a tugboat-sized tub and a shower.

  If a train had crossed the ceiling it could not have made more noise. With most of the slate shingles gone, the rain struck bare wood. Driven by the wind, it penetrated deep into the plaster. It grew cysts in the wallpaper, which popped like firecrackers. At 7:00 P.M., a gust of wind blew out the front door and its frame. The blast effect caused everyone’s ears to pop.

  Palmer estimated the water in the yard to be seven feet deep; in the parlor, two feet. He was downstairs monitoring its progress when the big plate-glass window at the front of the house exploded, along with its frame.

  Palmer lit a kerosene lamp and placed it near the window of the frontmost bedroom. The window shattered; the blinds disintegrated. Everyone retreated to the back of the house. Palmer brought the lamp. Here too the windows shattered. A chunk of plaster fell from the ceiling and crushed the lamp. Palmer closed a pair of big sliding doors. He suggested prayers and hymns. His son said, “I cannot pray,” then reconsidered. “Dear Jesus,” he said, “make the waters recede and give us a pleasant day tomorrow to play, and save my little dog Youno and save Claire Ousley.”

  Rain poured into the room. More plaster fell.

  GARRY BURNETT RECOMMENDED everyone squeeze into the bathroom, arguing it was the strongest, safest place in the house. George Burnett believed no room would be safe if the house collapsed into the sea. He crawled out the bathroom window onto an upended roof that had floated against the house, and persuaded his mother, wife, and child to follow. They sailed off into the storm. The Palmers joined Garry Burnett in the bathroom. The Boecker family stayed behind in the bedroom. What the black couple did is unknown.

  The water rose high onto the second floor. Gusts of wind moving at speeds possibly as great as 150 miles an hour—perhaps much higher—penetrated deep into the house. Palmer held tight to his son and braced his back against the bathroom door. His wife, Mae, hugged his neck with all her strength.

  Beams fractured. Glass broke. Lumber ricocheted among the walls of the hallway outside the bath. The front half of the house tore loose. The Boeckers stood in their bedroom holding each other close as the wind peeled the house away. The bedroom disintegrated.

  The water rose. The Palmers climbed onto the lip of the bathtub. Judson clamped his left hand to the shower rod and held Lee circled in his right arm. Youno was gone. Mrs. Palmer grabbed the rod with her right hand, and with her left held on to her husband and son.

  The house trembled, and eased off its elevated foundation. It settled in deeper water. The water was up to Palmer’s neck. He fought to keep Lee’s head clear.

  And Lee asked, “Papa, are we safe?”

  Judson could not even see his son, for the darkness. He felt the boy’s small hands holding tight. His hands were cold. Maybe Judson did have time to offer his son some reassuring lie; more likely he could not speak for the great heave of sorrow that welled up within him after his son’s question. He drew his son close, but could not draw him close enough.

  The roof stood up and fell upon the family. They went under the water together. Palmer came up alone. He had swallowed a great volume of water. He coughed, vomited. He saw nothing of Lee or Mae. There was no light, only motion. He could not think. His mind dimmed, came back.

  And he was outside, free of the house. Treading water. He felt what seemed to be ground beneath his feet but could not get purchase. A wave threw him onto a mass of floating wreckage. Window shutters—many of them, all tied together. Someone else’s raft, but it was empty now.

  He called for his son and wife.

  25TH AND Q

  Isaac Cline

  THEY ARGUED. JOSEPH wanted everyone to leave at once and head for the center of town. Isaac had faith in his house, but also argued that conditions outside had grown too dangerous, certainly for his wife, who was pregnant and ill in bed. “At this time … the roofs of houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper,” Isaac said, “and it appeared suicidal to attempt a journey through the flying timbers.” Water now covered the first floor of his home to a depth of eight inches.

  At 6:30 P.M., Isaac, ever the observer, walked to the front door to take a look outside. He opened his door upon a fantastic landscape. Where once there had been streets neatly lined with houses there was open sea, punctured here and there by telegraph poles, second stories, and rooftops. He saw no waves, however. The sea was strangely flat, its surface blown smooth by the wind. The Neville house across the way now looked so odd. It had been a lovely house: three stories sided in an intricate pattern of fish-scale shingles and shiplap boards and painted four different colors. Now only the top two-thirds protruded from the water. Every slate had been stripped from its roof.

  The fact he saw no waves was ominous, although he did no
t know it. Behind his house, closer to the beach, the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long. It contained homes and parts of homes and rooftops that floated like the hulls of dismasted ships; it carried landaus, buggies, pianos, privies, red-plush portieres, prisms, photographs, wicker seat-bottoms, and of course corpses, hundreds of them. Perhaps thousands. It was so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall and absorbed the direct impact of the breakers lumbering off the Gulf. The waves shoved the ridge forward, toward the north and west. It moved slowly, but with irresistible momentum, and wherever it passed, it scraped the city clean of all structures and all life. If not for the wind, Isaac would have heard it coming as a horrendous blend of screams and exploding wood. It shoved before it immense sections of the streetcar trestle that once had snaked over the Gulf.

  Something else caught Isaac’s attention, as it did the attention of nearly every other soul in Galveston.

  “I was standing at my front door, which was partly open, watching the water, which was flowing with great rapidity from east to west,” he said. Suddenly the level of the water rose four feet in just four seconds. This was not a wave, but the sea itself. “The sudden rise of 4 feet brought it above my waist before I could change my position.”

  For those inside the house, it was a moment of profound terror. (Joseph claims to have been utterly calm. He says the rise occurred just after he had called his brother outside to try to persuade him, privately, that the best course was to evacuate for the center of town.) Four feet was taller than most of the children in the house. Throughout the city, parents rushed to their children. They lifted them from the water and propped them on tables, dressers, and pianos. People in single-story homes had nowhere to go. In Isaac’s house, everyone hurried to the second floor. The brothers herded the refugees into a bedroom on the windward side, reasoning that if the house fell over, they would all be on top, not crushed underneath.

  Isaac judged the depth of the water by its position in his house. His yard, he knew, was 5.2 feet above sea level. The water was ten feet above the ground. That meant the tide was now 15.2 feet deep in his neighborhood—and still rising. “These observations,” he noted later, for the benefit of skeptics, “were carefully taken and represent to within a few tenths of a foot the true conditions.” It was, he acknowledged, incredible. “No one ever dreamed that the water would reach the height observed in the present case.”

  ONE BLOCK NORTH, Dr. Young observed the same impossible increase. Since five o’clock he had noted a change in the direction of the wind. It had begun circling to the east and gained velocity, as did the current. “The debris fairly flew past, so rapid had the tide become,” he said. At 5:40 P.M., he observed a sudden acceleration of the wind. He knew the time exactly because his clock had stopped and he had just finished resetting it by his watch. (Clocks began to stop throughout Galveston, as wind burst into homes and buffeted the pendulums that drove them.) He looked out a west window at a fence he had been using to gauge the depth of the water. “And while I was looking, I saw the tide suddenly rise fully four feet at one bound.”

  Moments later, he saw houses on the south side of P½ between 25th and 26th—half a block north of Isaac’s house—collapse into the water, among them the pretty one-story home of a man named Alexander Coddou, the father of five children whose wife happened to be off the island. The houses fell gracefully at first. One witness, watching the same thing happen in his neighborhood, said houses fell into the Gulf “as gently as a mother would lay her infant in the cradle.” It was when the current caught them and swept them away that the violence occurred, with bedrooms erupting in a tumult of flying glass and wood, rooftops soaring through the air like monstrous kites.

  Dr. Cline’s house, Young saw, was still standing, although floating debris had torn away his first and second-floor galleries.

  SOON THE WATER on Isaac’s first floor was over nine feet deep. The wind tore at the house like an immense crowbar. The ridge of debris came closer and closer, destroying homes south and east of Isaac’s house and casting them against his walls. Isaac’s house rocked and trembled, but remained firmly footed on its pilings. Isaac at this point still believed the house strong enough to survive the assault. He did not know, however, that the ridge of debris was now pushing before it a segment of streetcar trestle a quarter-mile long, consisting of tons of cross-ties and timbers held together by rails.

  Joseph knew nothing of this either. He believed the house would fail simply because the storm was too powerful.

  “Strangely enough,” Joseph wrote, “amid the seething turmoil, I did not feel unduly excited. In fact, I was almost calm. I was convinced that, in some way or another, I should come out of it alive. I kept thinking of an uncle of ours, who, alone of all those aboard a sinking ship, saved himself by getting on a plank when the vessel went under and [by] drifting upon this frail support five miles to shore.”

  Joseph may have been calm, but he was not helping anyone else achieve such peace. “Again, as strongly as I could, I warned my relatives and friends that the house was about to collapse.”

  Imagine it, the atmosphere in this house. Fifty terrified men, women, and children packed into one room, Isaac’s wife in bed, his three daughters petrified but snuggling close to their mother for comfort. The room is insufferably hot and moist. The walls drip condensation. Now and then rain spits through the ceiling; a pocket in the wallpaper explodes. Beside the bed stands Dr. Isaac Monroe Cline, thirty-eight years old, bearded, confident the house can endure anything mere nature can muster, but even more certain that to venture outside would be like stepping in front of a locomotive. Nearby, perhaps at the other side of the bed, stands Joseph, the earnest younger brother, apprentice-for-life, who has always always always resented Isaac’s insufferable pose—that he, not Joseph, was the man who knew weather, he knew when the rain would fall, he knew when true danger loomed. The conversation starts quietly but soon, partly because their tempers rise, partly just to be heard over the wind, rain, and barrage of debris, they start shouting. “Are you deaf, Isaac?” Joseph perhaps cries. “What do you think that is, for God’s sake? An evening breeze? This house will not stand. Out there at least we have a chance.”

  Isaac prevailed. Joseph, frustrated, began offering advice for how best to survive the coming collapse. “I urged them, if possible, to get on top of the drift and float upon it when the dangerous moment came. As the peril became greater, so did the crowd’s excitement. Most of them began to sing; some of them were weeping, even wailing; while, again, others knelt in panic-stricken prayer. Many of them were scrambling aimlessly about, seeking what, in their fright, appeared to be vantage points.”

  The battering continued. By now all four galleries had been torn from Isaac’s house, all slate stripped from its roof.

  The trestle was a yard away.

  IN DALLAS, THREE hundred miles north, the telegraph operator at the Dallas News, sister to the Galveston News, realized the steady flow of cables from the Galveston paper had ceased. The two newspapers maintained a leased telegraph line that ran directly between their editorial offices. The telegrapher at the Dallas paper keyed off an inquiry, but got no response. He tried again. Again nothing. He then tried raising Galveston over public lines by relay through Beaumont, and next by sending a message to Vera Cruz, Mexico, for relay to Galveston via the Mexican Cable Company (whose Galveston agent had only a few hours to live).

  Again he failed.

  At that moment, City Editor William O’Leary was in the office of the Dallas paper’s manager, G. B. Dealey, showing Dealey a passage in Matthew Fontaine Maury’s best-selling Physical Geography of the Sea that seemed to show “that destruction of Galveston by tropical storm could not happen.”

  The wires remained dead.

  THE LEVY BUILDING

  Vital Signs

  SATURDAY EVENING, JOHN Blagden, the new man temporarily assigned to Galveston, found himself alone in the office. He ha
d been in the city all of two weeks and here he was alone in the dark, facing a storm whose intensity seemed to place it in the realm of the supernatural.

  The Levy Building was four stories tall and made of brick but in some gusts, Blagden said, it “rocked frightfully.” Bornkessell, the station’s printer, had left for home first thing in the morning. Isaac had gone home next, followed by Joseph. Ernest Kuhnel, a clerk, was supposed to be in the office but had fled the building in terror.

  The storm flag was gone, as were the anemometer, rain gauge, and sunshine recorder. The telephone had stopped ringing. There was nothing for Blagden to do but watch the barometer and try to keep himself sane. He estimated the wind at 110 miles an hour.

  The hurricane had set a course toward Galveston soon after leaving Cuba, and had stayed on that course ever since, as if it had chosen Galveston as its target. It had a different target, however. The great low-pressure zone that had formed over the Pacific Coast earlier in the week had progressed to where it now covered a broad slice of the nation from Texas to Canada. The hurricane saw this low-pressure zone as a giant open door through which it could at last begin its northward journey.

  The storm’s track intersected Galveston’s coastline at a ninety-degree angle, with the eye passing about forty miles west of the city somewhere between Galveston and the Brazos River. Meteorologists discovered this later when officers aboard an Army tug stationed at the mouth of the Brazos reported a pattern of winds that showed the eye had passed somewhere east of their position. The pattern in Galveston indicated the eye had passed to the west of the city. This was the worst-possible angle of approach, for it brought the hurricane’s most-powerful right flank directly into the city.