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

by Erik Larson

  Blagden knew nothing of the storm’s track. What he did know was that the first shift in wind direction, from north to northeast, had brought a sudden acceleration in wind speed. And now he sensed the wind beginning to shift again, toward the east. Impossibly, the change seemed to bring another increase in velocity. Gusts struck the building like cannonballs.

  Barometric pressure had fallen all day, but at five o’clock Galveston time it began to fall as if someone had punched a leak into the instrument’s mercury basin. At five, the barometer read 29.05 inches.

  Nineteen minutes later, 28.95.

  At 6:40 P.M., 28.73 inches.

  Eight minutes later, 28.70.

  An hour later, the barometer read 28.53 inches, and continued falling. It bottomed at 28.48.

  Blagden had never seen it that low. Few people had. At the time, it was the lowest reading ever recorded by a station of the U.S. Weather Bureau.

  In fact, the storm drove the pressure even lower, although just how far will always be a mystery. The bureau’s instruments in the Levy Building captured pressures well away from the center of the eye, where the pressure would have been lowest.

  Barometers elsewhere in the city got widely varied readings. In Galveston harbor, the first mate of the English steamer Comino, moored at Pier 14, recorded in the ship’s log a pressure of 28.30 inches, and noted: “Wind blowing terrific, and steamer bombarded with large pieces of timber, shells, and all manner of flying debris from the surrounding buildings.” At one point the wind picked up a board measuring four feet by six inches and hurled it with such velocity it pierced the Comino’s hull. The hull was built of iron plates one inch thick. In the train station, the scientist with the barometer—apparently unaware of his fast-eroding popularity—called out a pressure of 27.50 inches, and announced that against such impossibly low pressures “nothing could endure.”

  Years later, scientists with NOAA put the lowest pressure of the storm a notch lower, at 27.49.

  In 1900, however, even Blagden’s reading of 28.48 stretched credibility. “Assuming that the reading of the barometer reported at Galveston the evening of the 8th was approximately correct,” wrote one of Moore’s professors, carefully hedging for error, “the hurricane at that point was of almost unparalleled severity.”

  The highest speed recorded by the Galveston station’s anemometer before it blew away was 100 miles per hour. The bureau later estimated that between 5:15 P.M. and 7 P.M. Galveston time, the wind reached a sustained velocity of “at least” 120 miles per hour.

  Most likely the true velocity was far greater, especially within the eyewall itself. Gusts of two hundred miles an hour may have raked Galveston. Each would generate pressure of 152 pounds per square foot, or more than sixty thousand pounds against a house wall. Thirty tons.

  As John Blagden sat in his office, powerful bursts of wind tore off the fourth floor of a nearby building, the Moody Bank at the Strand and 22nd, as neatly as if it had been sliced off with a delicatessen meat shaver. Captain Storms of the Roma had practically bolted his ship to its pier, but the wind tore the ship loose and sent it on a wild journey through Galveston’s harbor, during which it destroyed all three railroad causeways over the bay. The wind hurtled grown men across streets and knocked horses onto their sides as if they were targets in a shooting gallery. Slate shingles became whirling scimitars that eviscerated men and horses. Decapitations occurred. Long splinters of wood pierced limbs and eyes. One man tied his shoes to his head as a kind of helmet, then struggled home. The wind threw bricks with such force they traveled parallel to the ground. A survivor identified only as Charlie saw bricks blown from the Tremont Hotel “like they were little feathers.”

  All this was nothing, however, compared to what the wind had been doing in the Gulf of Mexico. Ever since leaving Cuba, the storm had piled water along its leading edge, producing a dome of water that twentieth-century meteorologists would call a storm surge.

  Early scientists believed that reduced pressure alone accounted for storm tides. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, they came to understand that a one-inch decline in pressure raised the sea only a foot. Thus even a pressure as low as 27.49 inches would cause the sea to rise only two and a half feet. Yet the Galveston storm shoved before it a surge that was over fifteen feet deep.

  The single most important force needed to build a storm surge is wind. A strong wind will develop a surge in any body of water. A fan blowing across a water-filled container will cause the water to swell at the downwind side. Strong winds blowing over some of Minnesota’s biggest northern lakes will pile ice to the height of a McDonald’s sign. One of the deadliest storm surges in American history occurred on Lake Okeechobee in Florida, in 1928, when hurricane winds blowing across the long fetch of the lake raised a storm surge that killed 1,835 people.

  Another ingredient is geography. In 1876 Henry Blanford, a meteorologist in India, proposed that the configuration of the Bay of Bengal contributed greatly to the immense storm tides that came ashore during typhoons. Blanford thought of these tides as great waves. Every cyclone raised them, “but it is only when the wave thus formed reaches a low coast, with a shallow shelving foreshore, such as are the coasts of Bengal and Orissa, that, like the tidal wave, it is retarded and piled up to a height which enables it to inundate the flats of the maritime belt, over which it sweeps with an irresistible onset.”

  Despite such reports, Isaac and his colleagues in the bureau believed that a hurricane’s most lethal weapon was the wind. They did not see the parallels. Isaac, like the famous Commodore Maury, believed the shallow slope of the seabed off Galveston would wear down incoming seas before they struck the city, and had argued in his 1891 News article that mainland areas north of Galveston Bay would serve as basins to capture whatever floodwaters a storm did manage to drive ashore.

  The hurricane of 1900 would cause a hasty reevaluation. In October, in the Weather Bureau’s Monthly Weather Review, one of the bureau’s leading lights, Prof. E. B. Garriott, belatedly observed that Galveston’s geography and topography in fact “render it, in the presence of severe storms, peculiarly subject to inundation.”

  A storm’s trajectory can also increase the destructive power of a surge. If a hurricane strikes at an oblique angle, it spreads its storm surge over a broader swath of coast, thereby dissipating the surge’s depth and energy. The Galveston hurricane struck the Texas coast head-on, at a nearly perfect ninety-degree angle, after traveling a long, unobstructed fetch of some eight hundred miles. The track focused the onshore flow directly into the city.

  The track produced another lethal effect, however. It brought north winds to Galveston Bay twenty-four hours before landfall. Throughout most of Saturday, these intensified to gale force and finally to hurricane force. Due north of Galveston Island, the bay offers an unobstructed fetch of about thirty-five miles (about the same fetch as presented by Lake Okeechobee). And just as in the freak Galveston blizzard of February 1899, the wind blew the water out of Galveston Bay—this time into the city itself.

  In effect, the storm’s trajectory made Galveston the victim of two storm surges, the first from the bay, the second from the Gulf, and ensured moreover that the Gulf portion would be exceptionally severe. Throughout the morning, the north winds kept the leading edge of the Gulf surge out at sea, banking the water and transforming the Gulf into a compressed spring, ready to leap forward the moment the winds shifted.

  The first shift, from north to east, began at about two o’clock Saturday afternoon, Galveston time. This allowed some of the Gulf surge to come ashore. Water flowed over the Bolivar Peninsula and began rising within the shaft of the Bolivar Light. It flowed too over Fort San Jacinto and Galveston’s East Side, where it met the floodwater already driven into the city from the bay. The reason so many men and women in Galveston began furiously chopping holes in their beloved parlor floors was to admit the water and, they hoped, anchor their homes in place.

  At 7:30 P.M., the wind shifted again,
this time from east to south. And again it accelerated. It moved through the city like a mailman delivering dynamite. Sustained winds must have reached 150 miles an hour, gusts perhaps 200 or more.

  The sea followed.

  Galveston became Atlantis.

  AVENUE P½

  The Wind and Dr. Young

  ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK, Dr. Young heard a heavy thumping that seemed to come from a downstairs bedroom on the east side of his house. He lit the candle that he had held in reserve and walked toward the hall stairwell, the candle throwing only a shallow arc of light on the floor around him. Pistol-shot drafts penetrated deep within the house and caused the candle’s flame to twist, but did nothing to cool the rooms. At the Levy Building about then John Blagden was recording a temperature of 84.2 degrees. The shock of each thump vibrated through the floor of Young’s house. It was as if someone were standing in the downstairs bedroom striking the ceiling with a railroad mallet.

  The stairwell appeared ahead as a large black rectangle stamped from the floor, and the closer Young got, the deeper the candlelight traveled. It should have shown him stairs and the wood slats of the banister, but he saw neither, only an orange glow undulating on the opposite wall like sunlight off a floating mirror.

  Water, he realized. The sea had risen within his house nearly to the top step. The heavy thudding from the bedroom had to be furniture. A bureau, perhaps, bumping against the ceiling as the water rose and fell.

  Young set the candle on the floor and walked to the door that led to his second-floor gallery. He opened it. “In a second I was blown back into the hall.”

  The wind snuffed the flame, then blew the candle and its holder to the far reaches of the house. From within the darkness of the hall, the doorway appeared as a rectangle of wild gray air. The power of the wind shocked Young; it also inflamed his curiosity. Another man might have sought shelter in one of the second-floor bedrooms, but Young, drawn by the sheer power of the storm, fought his way back toward the door.

  He kept close to the wall. He winched himself forward from doorknob to doorknob. At the door, he fastened his hands around the frame and hauled himself outside. “The scene,” he said, “was the grandest I ever witnessed.”

  It was as if he were aboard a ship in a storm. Waves swept through his neighborhood. One witness said the waves looked like the “sides of huge elephants.” Each embodied a destructive power nearly beyond measure. A single cubic yard of water weighs about fifteen hundred pounds. A wave fifty feet long and ten feet high has a static weight of over eighty thousand pounds. Moving at thirty miles an hour, it generates forward momentum of over two million pounds, so much force, in fact, that at this point during the storm the incoming swells had begun destroying the brand-new artillery emplacements at Fort Crockett, which had been designed to withstand Spanish bombardment. Debris made the waves especially dangerous. Each wave propelled huge pieces of wreckage that did to houses what the reinforced prow of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus did to great warships. One man reported dodging a giant piano embedded in the crest of a wave, “its white keys gleaming even in the darkness.”

  The only other house still standing belonged to a family named Youens, with the mother, father, son, and daughter still inside. Two minutes later, Young saw the Youens house begin a slow pirouette. “It turned partly around and then seemed to hang as if suspended.”

  At about the same time, the wind changed direction from east to southeast, and again intensified. Young felt himself compressed against the wall of his gallery. “Mr. Youens’ house rose like a huge steamboat, was swept back and suddenly disappeared,” Young said. He thought of the family inside. “My feelings were indescribable as I saw them go.”

  Now he was alone, his house an atoll in a typhoon. The water continued to rise. “At one bound it reached my second story and poured in my door, which was exactly thirty-three feet above the street. The wind again increased. It did not come in gusts, but was more like the steady downpour of Niagara than anything I can think of.”

  The wind tore loose one of the posts that supported the gallery roof. The post struck Young, gashed his head, and left him dazed, but he did not fall. The wind held him in place. The door seemed about to tear loose. If the house fell, he resolved, he would grab the door, rip it free, and use it as a raft.

  Slats from the gallery rail blew away “like straws.” The remaining posts cartwheeled into the sea. The gallery roof lifted upward as if hinged, then blew away over the top of the house. With a shriek of wood and iron the gallery floor wrenched away and barged west.

  Young remained pinned to the wall, one foot inside the doorway. He could not move. “It was an easy thing to stay there for the wind held me as firmly as if I had been screwed to the house.”

  The wind grew even stronger. Young estimated it reached 125 miles an hour. “The wind at 125 miles an hour is something awful,” he said. “I could neither hear nor see.”

  He turned his head against the rain until he was looking inside the house. The rain slammed against the interior walls with such force it exploded in pixels of light. “The drops of rain became luminous,” he said. It looked “like a display of miniature fireworks.”

  The wind grew so strong it planed the sea. “The surface of the water was almost flat. The wind beat it down so that there was not even a suspicion of a wave.”

  He could not open his eyes. A lion roared at his ears. That his house still stood seemed impossible. “I began to think my house would never go.”

  He gripped the facing of the door. He waited. He planned to kick his raft free of the house at the first sign of collapse. He did not have long to wait.

  ALL OVER GALVESTON freakish things occurred. Slate fractured skulls and removed limbs. Venomous snakes spiraled upward into trees occupied by people. A rocket of timber killed a horse in midgallop.

  At the expensive Lucas Terrace apartment building, Edward Quayle of Liverpool, England, who had arrived in Galveston with his wife three days earlier, happened to walk past a window just as the room underwent a catastrophic depressurization. The window exploded outward into the storm along with Mr. Quayle, who rocketed to his death trailing a slipstream of screams from his wife.

  At another address, Mrs. William Henry Heideman, eight months pregnant, saw her house collapse and apparently kill her husband and three-year-old son. She climbed onto a floating roof. When the roof collided with something else, the shock sent her sliding down into a floating trunk, which then sailed right to the upper windows of the city’s Ursuline convent. The sisters hauled her inside, dressed her in warm clothes, and put her to bed in one of the convent cells. She went into labor. Meanwhile, a man stranded in a tree in the convent courtyard heard the cry of a small child and plucked him from the current. A heartbeat later, he saw that the child was his own nephew—Mrs. Heideman’s three-year-old son.

  Mrs. Heideman had her baby. She was reunited with her son. She never saw her husband again.

  THE HOUSE SHUDDERED, shifted, became buoyant. For a few queasy moments, Dr. Young felt himself exempt from gravity’s effect. The time had come. He tore the gallery door loose and dove for the sea. Like the survivor of a sinking liner, he kicked hard to put distance between himself and the house. “The house rose out of the water several feet, was caught by the wind and whisped away like a railway train, and I was left in perfect security, free from all floating timber or debris, to follow more slowly.”

  The current drew him over the city. He saw few landmarks but believed he soon passed over the Garten Verein. Moments later he too careened toward the Ursuline convent, but his door got caught in a large whirlpool of water and wreckage. “I was carried round and round until I lost my bearings completely.”

  When the whirlpool dissipated, the inflowing sea again captured his raft. It swept him northwest for fifteen blocks until his door docked itself against a mound of wreckage. “It was very dark, but I could see the tops of some houses barely above the water; could see others totally wrecked, and others h
alf submerged.” He saw no lights, however. And no people. “I concluded that the whole of that part of town had been destroyed and that I was the only survivor.”

  He remained in that place aboard his door for the next eight hours. The wind rippled over his clothing. Porcupine rain jabbed his scalp and hands. Blood seeped from the gash in his head. In all that time he heard only one human voice, that of a woman somewhere in the distance crying for help. He had never been so cold in his life.

  25TH AND Q

  What Joseph Saw

  SOMETHING STRUCK THE house with terrific force. The house moved. It slid from its foundation and began to list. Joseph was standing near a window beside Isaac’s oldest children, Allie May and Rosemary. “As the house capsized, I seized the hand of each of my brother’s two children, turned my back toward the window, and, lunging from my heels, smashed through the glass and the wooden storm shutters, still gripping the hands of the two youngsters. The momentum hurled us all through the window as the building, with seeming deliberation, settled far over. It rocked a bit and then rose fairly level on the surface of the flood.”

  Joseph and the two girls found themselves on top of an outside wall. They saw no one else. “All the other occupants of that room, nearly fifty men, women and children, it appeared, were still trapped inside, for the house had not yet broken up.”

  The only exit from the house was the now-horizontal window through which Joseph and the children had passed. Joseph lowered the top half of his body through the window and shouted, “Come here! Come here!”

  No one came. No one called out. The space below the window was utterly black. Periodically the house rose with the current, then settled, raising the water within to the level where the window glass had been. Anyone still inside would be completely submerged.