The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  The storm would probably, the bureau informed the gulf stations, “be felt as far northward as Norfolk by Thursday night and is likely to extend over the middle Atlantic and South New England states by Friday.” It was moving away, that is, and heading for the East Coast. After that, the storm was expected to exit the United States into the Atlantic somewhere in or above New England.

  There was another well-regarded meteorologist in Havana: Julio Jover. Like Father Viñes and Father Gangoite, he had a reputation for accurate storm prediction during hurricane season. Jover was, if anything, even more of an irritant than his Jesuit colleagues to Stockman, Dunwoody, and Moore.

  Now, regarding the storm out in the Florida Straits, which had just drenched and battered his island, Jover was making his own prediction. It dovetailed perfectly with Father Gangoite’s ideas. Together, the two major Cuban weathermen were offering a forecast that was nearly a perfect opposite of the forecast made by Washington.

  As early as Wednesday morning, when the storm was still leaving Cuba, Julio Jover said this: “We are today near the center of the low pressure area of the hurricane.”

  He’d said it: “hurricane.” And he mailed that forecast to the Havana newspaper La Lucha. He was infuriated by the cable ban. The mail was all he could use. But Jover was at least on the record.

  Father Gangoite meanwhile referred to Father Viñes’s rules of storm travel and made some notes of his own on what he was observing. Late Wednesday night, there was a big halo around the moon. The halo did not dissipate. At dawn, the sky turned red—deep red—and “cirrus clouds,” Gangoite said later, “were moving from the west by north and northwest by north, with a focus on those same points.” To him that meant the storm had transformed drastically after beating up Cuba.

  The change in the storm took three forms. First, the storm had gained intensity, as Gangoite had predicted it would.

  Second, it had gained structure. No longer what we would call a depression, the whole gigantic thing had begun twirling around a more definite eye. That was a hurricane.

  These Cuban weathermen couldn’t directly see the hurricane. They only had observation and deduction, based on years of study. And what they saw in imagination is exactly what Captain Halsey met, in fact, at sea: a huge hurricane in the Florida Straits.

  Gangoite’s third note was the most important. The hurricane was taking a path very different from what Willis Moore predicted—the reverse, in fact. Both the prevailing winds in Cuba and Father Viñes’s rules for observing hurricanes suggested that, far from recurving northeastward toward Florida, as the Weather Bureau had it, the hurricane was actually heading northwestward, straight for the Texas coast.

  The Cubans even pinpointed the destination of the storm’s center. It would go somewhere between Abilene and Palestine on the Texas mainland. Lying right in that path: Galveston.

  They would soon see, as Father Gangoite put it with growing frustration, “who is right.” With the telegraph ban silencing the Cuban forecasters, there was no way to warn U.S. weather stations in New Orleans or Galveston of what these men knew was about to happen.

  Jover and Gangoite could do nothing but wait, in outrage, for disaster to strike Texas.

  Willis Moore had blocked the forecast. But he couldn’t stop the hurricane.

  PART II

  MAELSTROM

  CHAPTER 6

  GALVESTON: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

  WHAT MADE THE STORM SO QUICKLY APPROACHING GALVESTON a hurricane—whatever Willis Moore said—and no longer a tropical depression or tropical storm? And why did it not, in this case, “recurve”—Moore was actually correct in believing that many hurricanes do—and head toward Florida?

  The answer to both of those questions has to do with features of air pressure. The force of air, that is, measured by a barometer, which makes us feel good when it presses on us fairly hard, and makes us feel sluggish when the pressure lessens.

  As this particular swirling storm system moved northward across the Florida Straits, it was still spinning counterclockwise, thanks to the rotation of the Earth. And by now it had become truly gigantic: a fully organized, circular system of destruction, literally hundreds of miles across. And that whole swirling mass of violent rain, pushed hard by relentless winds, was letting off energy in wild spirals of drenching thunderstorms.

  At the system’s center there was now an eye. The spinning complex of storms was turning around a large, roughly circular space, empty of any evident action. The eye of this hurricane moving toward Galveston might have been thirty or more miles in diameter. In the middle of the maniacal turbulence, the axis at the center of the eye resembled a state of pure stillness.

  That doesn’t make the eye of a hurricane any place you’d want to hang around, supposing you could somehow rise into the eye and spend some time suspended there outside an airplane. The stillness at the axis is caused by drastically low air pressure in the eye. Around it rises a “stadium effect”: the high wall of thick cloud that defines the eye. If you could get up there and inside it, you’d think you’d entered a world ringed by snowy mountains that rise far across a snowy plain, dozens of miles wide in every direction you look.

  The thickness of those far-off mountainous clouds surrounding the eye make the word “cloud” seem wrong: it’s an “eyewall,” in meteorological terms. Despite the eerie stillness within the eye itself, the wall that rings it serves as the location for the most violently swirling thunderstorms the hurricane can bring.

  And the air inside the eye is horribly hot and strange in human terms. It doesn’t rain, but the air pressure is so low that the stillness wouldn’t seem peaceful but painfully oppressive. The air is so dry that it would feel rough, inhospitable. There’s nothing familiar or beneficial to human beings about any component of a hurricane, especially the eye.

  One of the effects of the otherworldly low pressure in the vast eye of a hurricane is that the storm doesn’t lose power as it travels but actually gathers up immense energy. As this storm traveled toward Galveston, it drew heat, evaporating from the hot gulf waters, into its central zone of low pressure. The heat fueled the storm, turning it faster, causing it to throw off new and harder winds, even as it was pushed by winds at its back.

  The monster could only grow. It would soon become what today we call a category four hurricane. The highest number on that scale is five.

  There also happened to be, at that moment in September of 1900, a big zone of high pressure sitting well to the east of the storm. This high-pressure zone bordered the Florida Keys—that string of narrow islands curving southwestward from the southern tip of the state’s long peninsula.

  This high-pressure zone to the east of the Keys caused an exception to the so-called rule of hurricane recurve, which Willis Moore thought was immutable. A recurve would have drawn the hurricane eastward to Florida and then up the East Coast. Many storms traveling north from Cuba into the Florida Straits do indeed tend eastward, as Moore’s men were sure this one was doing.

  But in this case, the storm was actively blocked in that direction. The high pressure at the Keys pushed it away. High pressure, with its tightly packed molecules, can hold off low pressure; low pressure, like that at the eye of the hurricane, seeks still lower pressure. Winds off the Keys, blowing from east to west, added to the pushback.

  So even as it grew into a monster of disastrous violence, the cycling hurricane’s eastern edges were pushed away from Florida, brushing against and bouncing off the high-pressure zone there. That action kept the whole system—in defiance of all U.S. forecasters’ rules—from recurving eastward. The hurricane was cycling steadily toward the Texas coastline, just as the Cuban forecasters had predicted it would.

  On it went. Its world was titanically violent. Drawing new energy constantly from the hot sea below, pulling those waves high upward, throwing wind in every direction as it circled, unleashing gigantic thunderclaps and streaks of jagged lightning, and pouring hard rain, the storm—blocked from
any possible turn eastward—was invited west-northwestward by low pressure there, pushed that way by winds at its back.

  The track had now become unchangeable. That track put the hurricane farther and farther away, every second, from the track that the U.S. Weather Bureau was drawing, with such infinite confidence, care, and precision, on the national weather map.

  At 6:00 on Thursday morning, September 7, the people of Galveston, Texas, were rising, looking forward to the weekend, and hoping for relief from the heat. That’s when William Stockman, Director Moore and Colonel Dunwoody’s man in Havana, filed an official observation from Cuba. Regarding the storm that just had beat up Cuba, Stockman described its current position as 150 miles north of Key West—the southernmost point of the Florida Keys and of the United States as a whole.

  That in itself wasn’t exactly wrong. As Captain Halsey and his crew and passengers would shortly find out, the storm had indeed passed Key West the day before, clanging against the high-pressure zone to its east. That action caused intense winds on the Keys, and those winds quickly become gale force from Key West to Tampa.

  The barometer fell to the lowest level ever recorded in Key West. The weathermen’s telegraph wire, linking Key West to Washington, D.C., blew down.

  It was also true, as Stockman reported Thursday morning, that the storm was continuing northward. But it was continuing northward with a critical difference. Stockman reported not only that the storm was north of Key West but also, based on the recurve rule, that it was north by east.

  That was exactly wrong. The storm was north by west of the Keys. It was traveling across the Gulf of Mexico toward the coastal mainland to the west. It was starting to raise the gulf seas to heights that had never before been recorded. Just as the hurricane was building on itself, changing water and wind in ways that fed back into the storm and amplified its own destructive energy, Stockman’s erroneous tracking fed into a growing set of assumptions, and then into some new miscalculations, made by the U.S. weathermen.

  Now came the U.S. Weather Bureau’s forecast from Washington. At 8:00 that Thursday morning, the bureau confirmed its prediction, telegraphed to New Orleans and Galveston the day before, regarding the storm recently reported in the West Indies. This storm, the bureau reported, was diminishing in power and had recurved, as such storms always must. So it had arrived in Florida—just as expected.

  At Key West, the bureau went on to report, the wind had quickly dropped from gale force to the lightest kind of breeze. Then it had picked up and changed direction. The wind had been blowing from the northeast; now it came out of the south.

  That meant to Director Willis Moore that the storm must be proceeding on the track they’d already determined it must be traveling on. They didn’t read the wind change as indicating a zone of high pressure in the Keys, which would push the storm off to the west.

  So this “storm”—certainly not a hurricane!—would “probably continue slowly northward and its effects will be felt as far as the lower portion of the middle Atlantic coast by Friday night,” the bureau told its stations on Thursday morning. Not a hurricane, and heading northeast: that’s the precise reverse of a hurricane warning for the Gulf Coast.

  In fact, some fisherman on the New Jersey shore, having received the national report, cabled Director Moore for advice in dealing with this storm that was supposedly heading their way. Never one to hesitate, Moore cabled right back. “Not safe to leave nets in after tonight,” he warned them. A rough storm—though by no means a hurricane—was heading right for the Jersey shore, Moore was certain.

  If Boyer Gonzales, scion of the Galveston Gonzaleses, now painting in New England for the summer, had been reading the weather forecast in Thursday’s afternoon Boston paper, he would have expected some heavy rains a few days hence. That might even have offered him dramatic conditions for capturing a certain northern marine light in his painting.

  Boyer certainly wouldn’t have had any reason to worry about his younger brother and his sisters, or about his friend and correspondent Miss Nell Hertford, all sweating it out back home in Texas.

  In Galveston, meanwhile, everything looked fine that Thursday morning—if continuing still and humid—when Joseph Cline, Isaac’s brother and chief assistant, went to the top of the Levy Building to take the morning readings.

  Barometric pressure within the normal range. Light winds. Temperature already 80 degrees early in the morning—hot, but slightly cooler than it had been, actually. The huge sky over the Levy Building and out to the calm gulf was as clear and blue as could be.

  As usual, Joseph coded those readings and sent them via messenger over to the Western Union office a few blocks away. From there, the readings would go to Washington.

  Thus the local Galveston readings too played into disastrously faulty tracking of the storm by Moore and his men in Washington. The clarity of the sky, as viewed from Galveston, the slight drop in temperature there, and the normal barometric reading: all of these would have suggested to U.S. meteorologists of 1900 an utter absence from the Gulf of Mexico of the storm that had drenched Cuba only days earlier.

  In later years—partly as a result of what was actually happening that September in the gulf—those signs might just as easily be taken as predicting trouble: “the calm before the storm,” as the saying goes. Even a normal barometric pressure would not suggest to meteorologists today that no storm could possibly be on its way. Pressure can fall far more quickly, and far more dramatically, than the observers of 1900 knew.

  That’s exactly what was about to happen in Galveston.

  The other thing the Galveston weather crew did every morning, along with sending local observations to Washington, was relay the information that came from Washington to the Galveston Cotton Exchange. Along with Isaac Cline, his brother Joseph, and the second assistant, John Blagden, the weather station in the Levy Building had a man dedicated to that exact purpose, a skilled printer.

  Every day, the printer made a graphic image of the national weather situation based on the data from Washington, using a system of codes to show high and low pressure and other conditions. Then, over at the hefty and ornate Cotton Exchange building, a professional mapmaker used a system of colored chalk to draw a big version of this daily map, so that all the men wheeling and dealing on the trading floor could see it as they loudly bid and sold at top speed. Growing conditions and transportation are subject to weather, so the prices of cotton and cotton futures were subject to weather too. On the big Cotton Exchange map, temperatures, wind speeds, and air-pressure readings were noted for the entire country.

  A system of circles denoted clear or cloudy skies. Little arrows showed wind direction. Letters signaled other conditions: “R” for rain, for example.

  On that Thursday morning, September 7, as the excitable men making deals on cotton looked up from the trading floor to squint at the weather map, Captain Halsey and his passengers and crew on the Louisiana were beginning their encounter with a giant system of calamitous energy. That monster was moving fast toward Galveston, only about a day away. But nobody looking up from the floor at the Cotton Exchange map could have imagined the screeching winds that rolled and pitched the steamship as it tried to ride out the worst hurricane its captain had ever experienced.

  On Thursday afternoon, Isaac Cline himself took readings. He noted only scattered clouds and a fresh wind.

  And at 1:59 P.M., Cline received a telegraphed report from Washington. The storm that had drenched Cuba was now, as expected, centered over southern Florida, the bureau reported with confidence.

  But observers in central Florida, surprised to read that report, now began a slow process of correcting the Weather Bureau’s forecast. Meanwhile, in Galveston, Cline took readings that night. It was hotter now—just over 90 degrees. That might cause disappointment for the citizens awaiting the weekend. The wind was out of the north. The barometer was down—but just barely. There were scattered clouds.

  Cline reported all of that in c
ode to Washington and went home to bed.

  CHAPTER 7

  FRIDAY: THE WAVES

  EVERYTHING HAD STOPPED MAKING SENSE.

  It was Friday, fewer than twenty-four hours after Isaac Cline’s untroubled Thursday-night readings at the Levy Building, and both Cline brothers found themselves deep in a state of anxious foreboding. They were scrambling to figure out what was going on.

  First of all, the Weather Bureau had abruptly reversed itself. Friday morning, Isaac Cline received a telegraph from Director Moore. Moore ordered Cline to raise the red-and-black storm-warning flag. That was to alert ships’ captains to expect trouble in the gulf.

  Why, all of a sudden, this change? It wasn’t only a change, but a total contradiction of everything the bureau had reported only yesterday. If that storm from Cuba was really now losing power across Florida, as reported the day before, heading up the East Coast and threatening to drench New Jersey and New England, then this abrupt storm warning for the Gulf of Mexico was nothing but baffling.

  At 10:35 that morning, Isaac Cline ordered the storm-warning flag hoisted. And he started thinking hard.

  Cline didn’t know it, but this is what had happened in Washington. The weathermen in bureau headquarters had begun getting surprising reports from local stations on the East Coast. The stormy weather predicted there had entirely failed to arrive. The winds that battered Key West did not start blowing in central Florida after all. Savannah and Charleston were not being drenched. Those fishermen in Long Branch, New Jersey, worrying about their nets had nothing to fear.