by Al Roker
These were challenges posed by nature. In the 1880s, the city’s business leaders had begun grappling with what had seemed Galveston’s biggest challenge: the harbor, too shallow to accommodate the sheer size of the new steamships that were now hauling great volumes of freight about the country’s harbors and across the seas. To rank as a first-class harbor, ships drawing twenty-six feet of water at low tide had to be able to navigate there. In 1875, a sandbar at the entrance to Galveston’s harbor allowed only eight feet of clearance.
Worse: New Orleans was beginning to build jetties that might give it first-class-port levels of clearance. Houston had started dredging a channel that would tempt shippers to avoid Galveston altogether. In the 1800s, it looked as if nature—in the form of the tidal sand at the entrance to Galveston Bay—might stifle the island city’s rise.
By 1900, however, that problem had been solved. Solving it took drastic action, intense political commitment, and ambitious engineering. At the Cotton Exchange, the city’s leading businessmen took on nature. These were heads of the great families of Galveston, owners of astonishingly luxurious mansions on and around Broadway: the Sealys, the Moodys, the Blums, the Kempners, and others.
They formed the Deep Water Committee (DWC). Selling bonds, coaxing federal money from Congress, and even personally lobbying President Cleveland, the big men of Galveston brought in one of the great military engineers of the age, Colonel Henry Martyn Robert, of the elite Army Corps of Engineers. In the Civil War, Robert had worked on fortifications for Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. He had developed river harbors in the upper Midwest and had improved navigation in New York’s Long Island Sound. He’d built locks on the Tennessee River.
He was an engineer of a different kind as well. In 1876, not yet fifty, Colonel Robert had published Robert’s Rules of Order, the standard manual on parliamentary procedure.
In Galveston, Colonel Robert designed jetties, built into the bay to raise the water level. Sand and wreckage were dredged out of the bottom, lowering it. In 1896, when the world’s biggest cargo ship steamed through the channel to a 100-gun cannon salute, Galveston’s sandbar problem had been solved. The city had a world-class harbor.
City leadership addressed another challenge posed by nature. A lack of fresh water was built into the island’s ecosystem. For years, cisterns had caught rainwater, but reliable supply meant carrying water over from the mainland by boat. Sanitation, among other things, suffered. It was hard to imagine a major city so reliant on outside sources for such a vital resource.
By 1895, this problem, too, was solved. A modern system was in place. Water flowed continuously from a site eighteen miles away on the mainland through a pipe, under the water of Galveston Bay, and into a pumping station on the island.
The DWC thus became a kind of permanent partner to elected government in Galveston. Men like John Sealy, William Lewis Moody, Leon Blum, and Harris Kempner adopted the mode of corporate conglomeration that was coming to characterize the nation’s business as a whole. They shrewdly harmonized their business among the wharves, the railroads, and the fleets of sail and steamships. They financed all of those concerns via their own banks. The 1890s saw further civic triumphs for Galveston over nature: another railroad bridge, as well as a wooden wagon bridge to free carting from reliance on the railroad. People now passed easily from the booming island city to less sophisticated mainland haunts. In overcoming natural adversity, Galveston had bested all of its neighbors.
But nature gave Galveston another problem: storms. Some might have seen this one as the biggest problem of all. In 1887, a letter to the Galveston Daily News put it this way:
There are today untold millions of Northern capital looking southward for investment, of which Galveston would receive her legitimate proportion if we could offer a reasonable argument that the island will not one day be washed away.
“Washed away”: stark words. It was glaringly obvious that the entire city lay at sea level—directly in the path of wild gulf storms. The rail, the bridges, the port, the water and electricity, the ships, the entire cotton trade—all of it seemed to offer a bright future. But gaining Wall Street money depended on convincing investors that Galveston had nothing to fear from the weather.
So Galvestonians came up with a solution to that problem too. They took any suggestion that the city might one day wash away as a slur, an insult to civic pride. Regarding the many storms that did, in fact, periodically knock their city and the whole Gulf Coast around, they took an attitude of defiance, even amusement.
Yes, those storms caused problems. But they had led to very few deaths so far, and there had been no irreversible loss of property. The jovial tone was summed up in a Galveston newspaper story after a wild 1886 storm: “The town got a pretty thorough drenching and a good shaking up,” the paper reported, “but is doing business at the old stand, as gay as a lark and as spruce as a grass widow.” Later that year, the paper reported on another “squall” that “frightened a good many people of Galveston at first and subsequently entertained them.”
Storms were real, everybody knew that. But at the same time, they were nothing to worry about. In that “squall” of 1886, Indianola, Texas, on the nearby mainland, was demolished—yet again. Indianola’s citizens had taken enough. They finally abandoned Indianola as a city.
Far from seeing in that town’s fate a lesson for themselves, Galvestonians took comfort in it. What happened to Indianola proved something Galvestonians had long believed. Because Galveston was an island, with a bay between it and the mainland, the city was buffered from the worst havoc of storms. The bay would always absorb the shock of a hurricane. That idea got new support when a renowned national weather authority, Matthew F. Maury, stated that laws of physics were such that storm waves simply could not hit Galveston Island with direct force. Galveston was specially blessed. Thanks to the shallowness of the bay waters and the sandbars that ran parallel to it, the city existed in a “cove of safety,” as people called it.
What the letter writer of 1887 had said was quite specific. Investment would not come, he noted, without “a reasonable argument” that the island was safe. That argument was now in place.
Galveston’s solutions to other challenges posed by nature involved an amazing combination of political and financial clout, civic and business vision, and technological enterprise. The solution to this final problem, however—hurricanes, the problem with the deadliest potential—was sheer denial.
CHAPTER 4
STORM WATCHER
UNLIKE MANY OF HIS FELLOW GALVESTONIANS, ISAAC CLINE wasn’t given to bravado. His attitude toward weather, and the damage it could cause, was anything but cavalier. On the roof of the E. S. Levy Building, where Galveston’s weather instruments were installed, Cline was watching the sky over the gulf during that first week of September 1900.
The sky was big, blue, and windless. Cline observed it and read the instruments with his usual keen interest. He did this many times a day, every day. Little had ever escaped his attention.
And in that early part of the first week of September, Isaac Cline felt no alarm. He was Galveston’s chief meteorologist, head of the entire Texas section of the U.S. Weather Bureau. His weather station was on the top floor of the Levy Building. It was up to Isaac Cline to know—and sometimes to sense—developing trouble, to report it, and to manage it.
But right now, he had nothing out of the ordinary to report or consider. Like those captains at sea making early sightings of the developing storm, Isaac Cline saw in his immediate surroundings nothing that weathermen hadn’t seen before, nothing to suggest imminent disaster.
Isaac Cline wasn’t just any weatherman. He was one of the nation’s top authorities on storms. Nor was he fearful of making bold predictions. Fastidious and exacting, yes: every good weather observer and forecaster was that. But more than once since coming to Galveston, Cline had risked the wrath of his bosses at the Weather Bureau in Washington, D.C., by forecasting disaster on his own
authority.
So Cline, at thirty-nine, was a hero in Texas. His forecasting from the weather station at the Levy Building had saved a lot of lives. People often mocked the Weather Bureau: its reliability in making forecasts struck many as sketchy. But people in Galveston, and throughout Texas, placed their trust in Isaac Cline.
Cline, in turn, placed his faith in his own exacting standards of professional conduct. And he trusted the deductive talents that inspired him to save lives with such bold and accurate predictions. He trusted, most of all, in the laws revealed by modern science, especially meteorology.
He was highly trained in that science, and he’d already contributed to it. His professional climb had tracked with the rise of the science of meteorology itself, and with the rise of the U.S. Weather Bureau, which handled that science for the booming young nation. By advancing the science of meteorology, Cline believed, he and others could work wonders in improving life for people around the world. The United States, he believed, would lead the way.
He didn’t begin life in Galveston. Isaac Cline was yet another outsider making the island city and the biggest state what they were. His weather career had begun in July 1882, when he was twenty years old and stepped off the train at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station at Sixth and B Streets NW, in Washington, D.C. The first thing he saw was the marker where President Garfield had been fatally shot the year before.
For that and other reasons, the young man found arriving in the capital at once daunting and thrilling. Cline’s ambitions for serving his big, booming nation were always high. Washington was, to him, the most important place in the world, and from here he would take up the task of bettering the world through reason and modern science.
So he was delighted to have been accepted into the meteorology training program of the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia. To begin his training, he was to report promptly to the Office of the Chief Signal Officer of the U.S. Army, for the Weather Service was then under the aegis of the Army Signal Corps.
It made sense. The connection between weather forecasting and military operations is natural on many levels, and the main idea behind the Weather Service was to ensure that during wartime, a handpicked set of young scientists, fully trained in meteorology, could be quickly attached to the Signal Corps to make weather predictions. The Signal Corps itself, formed during the Civil War, was already a leader in communications technology. By now it had the major responsibility for maintaining and operating the nation’s thousands of miles of telegraph lines. Telegraphy, with its amazing ability to transmit detailed information over great distances with lightning speed, already formed a critical component of weather reporting.
With the U.S. military now enjoying a lock on the massive, national-scale organizing power that weathermen needed, “military discipline would probably secure the greatest promptness, regularity, and accuracy in the required [weather] observations,” as the U.S. Congress put it when it formed the Weather Service and placed it under the authority of the Signal Corps. Weather forecasting, military prowess, and great nationhood went together.
On November 1, 1870, the Weather Service therefore went into operation, producing its first meteorological reports. They were based on observations made by sergeants at twenty-four stations around the country and transmitted by telegraph to a central office in Washington, D.C. This national report was, in the terminology of the day, “systematized and synchronous.” It gave, that is, a single, integrated snapshot of the weather across the whole continent, based on conditions observed locally.
Eleven years later, when Isaac Cline arrived in Washington, people took for granted what had once been a miracle: daily Weather Service reports. People had even started complaining about those reports.
Cline didn’t know it then, but the Weather Service was hitting some hard times. He would play a role in repairing its reputation.
The prospect of his new career could not have been more exciting. Yet he’d never been in a big city before. That first night in Washington, Cline was afraid to stray out of sight of his hotel. He was just out of school, having received his B.A. from Hiwassee College, only five miles from where he grew up on a farm in Monroe County, Tennessee. He’d stood out at Hiwassee, and some of his professors had sponsored his ambition to become a scientist. To pay his way, he worked in the college library and chopped wood for the school’s fireplaces. He went home on weekends to work on the farm and attend church; on school vacations, too, he worked on the farm. Until he became a scientist whose career took him around the country, Isaac Cline remained a Tennessee country boy.
While the Civil War was hard on his part of the state (the Clines and many others there were pro-Union), with the end of the war, Isaac’s father was able to build up his farming properties. His ambition was to get his sons educated and to give each of his daughters a farm upon her marriage.
The father’s plan succeeded. When, after graduating from Hiwassee, Isaac boarded the train in Sweetwater, Tennessee, for Washington and a new life, his father gave his blessing between sobs.
At the Fort Myer training school in Arlington, Isaac Cline wore an army uniform, slept in barracks, and drilled in squads with the other young meteorology recruits. He served guard duty. He learned infantry and cavalry tactics, horsemanship, and signaling with flags, torches, and balloons. He studied the mechanics of both the telegraph and the telephone.
But mostly Cline and the others learned how to take, record, and communicate meteorological readings. The instruments they studied became the tools of Isaac Cline’s science. With only slight refinements, these were the same tools he would be using in Galveston in 1900.
Cline took up the study of these instruments with great application. Here was the technology that, combined with methodical, precise, and objective observation, would allow humankind to take control of the biggest forces in nature. With these few tools, a single man could predict floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes and help thousands of others respond to them in advance. Nature’s terrors would succumb to the superior intelligence of the human race.
Nineteenth-century weather instruments, though not infallible in themselves, really are amazing. The complete weather station that Isaac Cline learned to install and use had a number of integrated elements.
They began with the simple weathervane, which shows wind direction and allows calculation of that direction to exact degrees. A rain gauge, also fairly simple, catches precipitation and measures it in a tube.
More complex was the sunshine recorder. A glass sphere focused the sun’s rays on cards mounted at the sphere’s back. The sun burned the card, allowing weathermen to calculate the number of hours of bright sunshine in a given day.
But those instruments measure only what is happening now and what has happened recently. The big meters—anemometer, barometer, and hygrometer—involve not just measuring but forecasting, and especially forecasting disasters. While the science of forecasting was becoming, in Cline’s day, a modern and objective one, much of the technology on which it depended was ancient.
Of the big three, the anemometer used the oldest technology. Four fine, metal, hemispherical cups, their bowls set vertically against the wind, caught air flow. Because each cup was fixed to one of the four posts of a thin, square metal cross, lying horizontally, and because the cross’s crux was fixed to a vertical pole, when wind pushed the cups, they made the whole cross rotate. It made revolutions around the pole.
In Cline’s day, the pole was connected to a sensor with a dial read-out display. The number of revolutions the cross made per minute—clocked by the sensor, transferred by the turnings of the wheels, and displayed on the dial—indicated a proportion of the wind’s speed in miles per hour.
Rotating cups, wheels, and a dial: the anemometer was fully mechanical, with no reliance on electricity. And while other competing anemometer designs existed, involving liquids and tubes, the four-cup design became standard in American meteorology in the nineteenth cen
tury, remaining remarkably stable.
In 1846, an Irish meteorologist named John Thomas Romney Robinson upgraded the technology. But before that, the biggest development in clocking wind speeds had been made in 1485—by Leonardo da Vinci. The anemometer was already a durable meteorology classic when Isaac Cline began studying.
The second member of the forecasting big three, which Isaac Cline studied with such interest under the Signal Corps, was the hygrometer, which measures relative humidity. Like the anemometer, it’s been around ever since a not-very-accurate means of measuring relative humidity was built by—once again—Leonardo da Vinci.
By Cline’s day, a basic hygrometer measured the degree of moisture in the air by using two glass bulbs, each at one end of a glass tube. The tube passed through the top of a wooden post and bent downward on both sides of the post, farther down one side than the other. Thus one of the bulbs was lower than the other. In that lower bulb sat a thermometer, dipped in ether, a gas that had condensed in the bulb into a liquid.
The other, higher bulb contained ether too, but here the gas remained in its vapor form. That bulb was covered in a light fabric.
When condensed ether was poured over the fabric covering the higher bulb, the bulb cooled, and the vaporized ether within condensed, lowering vapor pressure in the bulb. That lowering of pressure caused the liquid ether in the lower bulb to begin evaporating into the space provided. So the lower bulb’s temperature fell as well.
Moisture—known as a “dew”—therefore formed on the outside of the lower bulb. As it did, the temperature indicated by the thermometer in that bulb was read and noted. That reading is called the dew-point temperature. Simply comparing the dew-point temperature to the air temperature outside the bulbs—as measured by a common weather thermometer, conveniently mounted on the hygrometer’s wooden post—gives the relative humidity. It’s a ratio of dew-point temperature to air temperature. The closer dew-point temperature gets to air temperature, the higher the relative humidity.