The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  The rest of Ed’s family—they lived near Annie and Ed—were already inside the building. When they saw Ed and Annie come in, they cheered. But upstairs, the school’s second floor was a chaotic refugee scene.

  The darkened rooms were packed with people. Many wept. Some wandered, calling out for their families. Some who couldn’t find their families began crying out with grief and fear. Everybody knew now what was happening to Galveston.

  Ed and Annie and their families went down to the first floor. They chose a place to sit in the east-west hall. The doors strained against the men holding them closed as Annie sat and waited.

  All day, per Isaac Cline’s instructions, the Galveston weather office had been sending reports to Director Willis Moore in Washington. The first morning cable from Galveston had reported Isaac’s frightening observation of the nature of the storm tide: “Such high water with opposing winds,” that cable said, “never observed previously.”

  But the last cable the Clines sent that afternoon conveyed a different sort of message. For it reflected a horrific reality.

  At exactly 3:30 that afternoon, Isaac Cline—always punctilious about noting the time—finally recognized the situation for what it was. This was nothing less, he saw at last, than a deadly disaster.

  By this time, the winds across the bay were gusting to 75 miles per hour, soon to become gale force. And that north wind had started to shift. It was moving from northwest to northeast.

  So this, Cline knew, was indeed a hurricane. The gale wind was circling around an eye. Galveston was right in the hurricane’s path.

  The circling wind signaled other disastrous complications. For as the hurricane rotated around its eye, the wind direction too would circle the compass. It would become a wind out of the east, then a wind out of the east-southeast, then a wind out of the south-southeast. And finally the gale would blow straight out of the south.

  While the wind had been coming from the north, it had been pushing against the gulf tides. The tides had nevertheless risen far beyond anything seen before. But as it circled all the way around and began blowing the gulf from behind, it would stop holding the water back. Worse: the wind would get behind the water and push it. There was no telling how high the water would then rise over the island.

  Isaac was back on the beach when this revelation hit him. Joseph was at the Levy Building. Isaac hurriedly called the weather station from a phone near the gulf beach.

  Joseph picked up the receiver. He listened closely amid the hectic crowds in the office, and his heart sank as Isaac dictated the wording of a new cable to Director Moore in Washington.

  This cable wasn’t just reporting. It was also forecasting.

  There was about to be great loss of life, Cline dictated to Joseph. Galveston would need immediate relief.

  “Gulf rising rapidly,” the cable read. “Half the city underwater.”

  For it was true. Not only had the waters submerged the deep gutters, then the deep streets, and then the sidewalks themselves, but wind was driving the rain hard now, adding to the water’s volume. And wind was knocking into the water and launching into the sky everything nailed down and otherwise. At the gulf, the tall, gaudy bathhouses at the bathing and amusement pier had swayed and toppled. They floated, they bobbed, they sank.

  At the bay harbor, the waters had risen a full six feet, and waves were slamming the piers. Both steam and sailing ships’ captains had tied their crafts to wharves and moorings with every bit of line they could find. They dropped anchors too. The steamers kept their boilers going. Anything to keep these rocking, leaping boats from disappearing into the chaos.

  Down at the gulf, tracks for the trolley that ran along the island over the water had gone under. Up on the bay side stood far more important transportation infrastructure, the railroad bridges and the wagon bridge.

  Earlier that day, a train packed with people had left Galveston’s station, heading for Houston. Just like the unhappy passengers who had come into Galveston, the Houston-bound passengers crossing the bay could see the rising water getting close to the tracks. Now both the rail and the wagon bridges were wrecked. By the time Isaac dictated his forecast of lost life to Joseph for telegraphing to Moore, there was no way off the island.

  But maybe information, at least, could make it off the island: that cable to Willis Moore with a plea for relief from the horror that the Cline brothers now had no doubt was about to ensue.

  Joseph Cline stepped out of the Levy Building into the blinding rain and wind. Tucked away in his clothes was the encrypted cable with Galveston’s desperate request for relief from Washington. He started for the Western Union office a few blocks away—normally a quick jaunt—to send the cable.

  But the wood-block pavement of the business sidewalks on the bay side of town had come loose. The blocks were bobbing around in the high water like corks up at the level of the high sidewalks.

  Joseph stepped into the water and waded knee-deep through the driving rain, making tortuous progress toward Western Union. The water was rising even as he walked.

  Inside the Western Union building, the soaked meteorologist was informed that there would be no telegraphing there. The cable lines had succumbed to the wind two hours earlier. The Postal Telegraph Office might be an alternative

  So Joseph waded there—yet another slow, drenching block. But no. Those lines were down too. Joseph fought his way all the way back to Levy Building.

  Upstairs in the office, using the telephone, he asked the phone company operator for an immediate long-distance connection to the Western Union office in Houston. The operator refused.

  There was only one operational phone line to Houston now, and it was working only intermittently. More than 4,000 calls were ahead of Joseph in the queue, the operator told him.

  Joseph reminded the operator that according to protocol, rushed government calls had precedence over civilian calls. The operator still refused to place the call. Joseph hit the roof and demanded a supervisor.

  The manager got on the phone, and thankfully, here was a man Joseph knew. He put Joseph through to Houston.

  On the phone with the Western Union operator in Houston, Joseph read Isaac’s message aloud. While reading it, he realized it was inaccurate. Half the city was not underwater. All of Galveston was underwater.

  And yet Joseph also took pains to remind Western Union in Houston that the contents of this message were highly confidential. He was still concerned about the rivalry between Houston and Galveston. News of the submerging of Galveston, Joseph told the operator, was the property of the United States. Only Willis Moore in Washington could make it public.

  Moments after that message made it to Houston by phone, Galveston’s last phone line blew down. It joined the telegraph lines in the wild water. Silence prevailed between Galveston Island and the rest of the world.

  The Clines’ cable, however, did make it out of Houston.

  In Washington, Willis Moore received it.

  He wouldn’t hear from Galveston again for days. By then, everything would be different.

  Daisy’s Thorne’s mother had declined help from the police. Now the police could not have reached the Thorne apartment: the Lucas Terrace building was deep in what was now the gulf itself.

  Water was ankle-high on the ground floor of the Thornes’ two-story apartment. Yet Mrs. Thorne stayed in the kitchen there, wading to make biscuits and coffee for the terrified guests—dozens of them now, some of them already homeless—who filled the apartment.

  Finally, though, Mrs. Thorne had to give in. She left her kitchen and went upstairs with Daisy and all the others.

  But Daisy came back down to the first floor. The trick about a flood, people had often said, was to give it its head, relieve its pressure, diminish its power by letting it in. To that end, Daisy opened the doors on the first floor. In rushed the gulf waves.

  The Thornes had five cats. In three trips, Daisy scooped them up out of the water and ran them upstairs. The water
on the first floor was knee-deep and rising. The raging wind shook the building with every blast. The visitors were getting more and more terrified.

  Daisy had begun today by photographing the waves. Now, as afternoon waned into evening, when she looked out the second-floor window at the dark and violent scene, she saw no other houses standing.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE NIGHT OF HORRORS

  AS NIGHT FELL ON GALVESTON, THE STORM ONLY GAINED strength.

  Isaac Cline’s realization had been correct: the hurricane that was passing straight through the city was circling around an eye of drastic low pressure. This was the kind of storm that does not readily weaken easily but instead draws energy from a variety of sources, throwing its titanic violence in a multitude of directions all at once.

  In 1900, what meteorologists feared most about hurricanes was the astonishing strength and wildness of the winds that accompany them. Hurricane-force winds rip roofs from buildings and tear up deep-rooted trees and structures on deep foundations. They toss those gigantic, heavy objects about as if they were nothing but balsa-wood slivers.

  But the ripped-up debris is, of course, big and heavy. Objects become deadly missiles with bomb-like destructive power over people, buildings, everything. Smaller objects too, borne through the air with force—slate roof tiles, lighting fixtures, flowerpots, anything at all—add to this deadly barrage, which occurs on multiple trajectories, random and unpredictable.

  Meanwhile, with the roofs shattered and the big timbers shivering and quaking, the wind robs buildings of all integrity, exposing them to the rising, shoving flood. From shacks to grand homes, churches, and public buildings: all go down, sometimes slowly and in pieces, sometimes all at once.

  And the bigger the building, the more stone and brick involved in its construction, the deadlier to frail human life is its fall.

  In 1900, meteorologists knew all that. But the winds produced by this cycling hurricane attacking Galveston were of higher velocity than those scientists believed was physically possible. The speed resulted in part from the air pressure at the deathly still center of this system, likewise lower than most scientists then believed possible. They thought air pressure could never fall as low as the pressure was in fact descending now on the evening of September 8, 1900, in Galveston, Texas.

  Joseph Cline was shaken anew by the final barometer reading he took that day. Like Captain Halsey, at sea earlier in the week, Joseph was getting a reading below 29 inches. That was lower than barometers were generally known to fall.

  So the Levy Building—an unusually solid structure—was actually rocking in the blasts of wind. And at 5:15 that afternoon, the wind gauge on the rooftop weather station was torn from its housing. It hurtled into the dark sky to join the rain gauge in oblivion.

  When that happens, a wind gauge has done its work, in a crude fashion: it is reporting that the wind speed is terrifyingly high. The Galveston gauge’s final official wind-velocity recording was 84 miles per hour for the previous five minutes. That period included two minutes at nearly 100 miles per hour. And the wind was getting higher.

  And yet Willis Moore, the Weather Bureau chief, had always said winds could not reach those speeds, that such reports were anecdotal and hysterically exaggerated—the kind of thing those superstitious Cubans might come up with. Tonight the Galveston storm was proving wrong both Moore himself and also many of the certainties on which he and the entire bureau based their practice.

  Having barely gotten the final telegraph off to Washington, Joseph left John Blagden to man the office and started splashing toward the beach to give further warnings.

  And at 7:15 P.M., Blagden, still alone at his post at the weather station in the rocking Levy Building, took a barometer reading that he could barely believe. The pressure stood at 28.48 inches.

  Blagden would have reason to doubt the evidence of his equipment and his senses. That was the lowest official barometer reading that had ever been taken by any U.S. Weather Bureau office. And it was correct.

  And yet these two record-breaking phenomena—both low pressure readings and wind velocities that until then were inconceivable—were connected in Galveston to another hurricane phenomenon, and meteorologists of the day were less sensitive to it than they were to wind and pressure. This was the rising of the gulf waters.

  Weathermen of 1900 feared hurricanes mainly for the winds, not so much for the floods. But the rising of the gulf on September 8 was causing a “trap” effect on Galveston Island. This phenomenon reflected a condition that precisely contradicted Isaac Cline’s confident prediction that the bay offered hurricane forces a release valve. In fact, there was a sympathetic rising of the bay in response to the height of gulf.

  So another record was being broken as night descended on Galveston and as the storm gained in intensity. Along with the deadly low pressure and the artillery-like winds it inspired, flooding of the island—from both directions, the gulf and bay—was reaching a height never before recorded.

  As the Cohen family sang Gilbert and Sullivan in the parlor, water rose all the way over their Broadway porch while plaster crashed to the floor with each shock of wind. Doors at the school building where Annie and Ed McCullough and their families had fled kept blowing open, no matter the weight of all the big men trying to hold them shut. Uptown near the harbor, the streets and sidewalks lay below deep, swiftly flowing rivers. Structures as big and solid as the Levy Building were rocking and booming in the wind.

  The passengers stranded upstairs at the railroad station had watched a dead child float below them in water. The collapsing second floor above Ritter’s had killed five people.

  And yet, as bad as things were, when Galvestonians retreated to public buildings and upper floors that evening, and when they lit their kerosene lamps against the darkness, they could be forgiven for hoping that what was banging their windows and shaking their foundations was hitting its peak—that the storm would soon pass. They had reason to hope that the gruesome extent of the damage, already well beyond anything they’d seen before, would be the most they were doomed to suffer.

  That hope was in vain. The north wind that had been pushing back against the tide all day was letting go. The wind would stop holding the water back.

  Soon it would turn all the way around. Roaring out of the south at record-force gales, it would get behind the biggest wall of water yet. No longer simply failing to hold the water back, the wind would now give the wave a huge assist. It would hurl that wall of water forward into town.

  What happened then could not have been imagined by anyone in Galveston that night.

  At the school, Annie and Ed McCullough and their families, trying to wait out the storm along with dozens of other distraught refugees, heard the people upstairs calling out for their families in the dark, weeping and praying. That’s why they’d decided, at first, to sit in the hallway running north-south, not facing the storm’s winds directly. They also hoped maybe the walls on that orientation would hold out longer.

  But there was pandemonium in that hallway—hardly anywhere to sit. Men still strained every muscle to hold the doors closed against the surges of surf and the record-force winds. But the wind was too much for them: water kept flooding in, and it was getting deep.

  Ed told Annie and the others it would be wiser to move to the east-west hall. The McCullough family began moving from the wet floor, but they were about to witness the most shocking event of their lives.

  Clarence Howth, the lawyer who had begun the afternoon smoking a cigar while watching water rise from his window, was feeling a lot less calm now with evening falling. There was an eight-foot fence around his garden, and he couldn’t see any of it—it was all underwater.

  And as he’d gazed out his windows that afternoon, he’d watched his chicken coop falling, full of chickens, into the rising sea. He’d watched his chickens drown.

  Meanwhile, slate tiles torn from his roof by the wind were flying wildly away. The resulting leaks brought
in the driving rain. All of Marie’s beloved upholstered furniture, lace curtains, and pillows were getting drenched.

  As Howth peered nervously out his windows into the darkness of raging storm and evening dimness, he saw no houses to his east. They had just been there, lining the street as always. Now they were gone.

  He looked westward. All the houses that way were gone too.

  His house stood alone. His sick wife and new baby were on its third floor.

  Shutters began falling from the house. Then windows started breaking, throwing glass around the inside. The wind was out of the east now, and the east side of the house would go first, Howth realized. His wife and baby were on that side.

  He got busy. He went to the east room on the third floor where his wife and newborn baby were lying. Mrs. Howth had been blissfully unaware until moments earlier how bad things were getting. Her father, a doctor—a former Confederate medical officer—had been attending his daughter and the infant in her room, along with a baby nurse. Mrs. Howth’s brother was staying in the house as well.

  Clarence Howth called both his brother-in-law and the family’s maid up to the third floor. All five carried Mrs. Howth and the baby, on a mattress, to a room on the west side of the house, away from the direct onslaught of wind.

  But this side offered small comfort. They were all sure now that the house was doomed. For those leaks in the ceilings were pouring rainwater now, and ocean waves were splashing against the windward windows, all the way up here on the third floor.

  Howth paced from his wife’s bed to the window and back in an agony of suspense. How long could these windows last? Might the storm abate before the house fell? Might this be the one house in the neighborhood that would survive?

  Then they heard the worst crash of all. The windward side of the house had caved in. It fell, exposing them to the rain, sea, and wind. Quickly they retreated upward, again carrying the mother and baby.

  They gained the drenched attic. They could go no higher.