The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  Joseph Cline had left John Blagden in charge at the weather station in the Levy Building. He told Blagden that things in the station, at least, were about to calm down. Certainly there would be no more phone calls.

  And Joseph returned, still soaked, to the street. He again faced the gales and rivers that uptown Galveston had become.

  At first his destination, as he splashed more than a mile through those rivers, fighting those gales, was the gulf beach near Isaac’s house. He had it in mind to warn anyone he saw there that the peak of the storm was coming soon.

  But he decided to take shelter at his brother’s house. That building seemed capable of withstanding any assault—even these winds that, as Joseph waded his way downtown, kept knocking him off his course by many feet. It was true that the Cline house stood very near what had once been the beach and was now a deep and raging gulf. And Joseph himself had seen water covering the lawn that very morning, before things had gotten so bad.

  And yet as he neared the house, shouting at anyone he saw to seek the higher ground of Broadway, Joseph looked upon his brother’s home as “a lighthouse built upon a rock.” In all previous storms, it had easily weathered the worst. It was built for that. He had to get there.

  Isaac Cline, for his part, had already retreated home. There was nothing left to do after giving Joseph the desperate message to Willis Moore in Washington. Galveston was cut off from the outside world. The storm was only increasing in violence as evening fell. The elements themselves, Isaac felt, had terminated his services as a weatherman.

  So he began wading homeward to Cora and the three girls.

  Timbers flew in the air around him. They drove themselves into house walls, splitting the paling and weatherboarding. Entire homes were being opened to the wind and rising tide.

  But Isaac’s house was new. It was built for stability in storms. It had withstood all previous weather. Like Joseph, Isaac believed it was the place to be.

  Isaac and Joseph Cline were hardly the only people in Galveston who believed in the security and stability of the Cline home. When Isaac finally arrived there, he didn’t find only Cora, ill and weak with her pregnancy, and the three Cline girls. He also discovered fifty neighbors.

  They’d come there for safety. Among them were the builder of the house, along with his family. He knew what kind of structure he’d put up.

  And yet if Cora hadn’t been so weak and frail with this fourth pregnancy, Isaac would have wanted to move her and the girls up off the beach, toward Broadway, maybe even all the way to the Levy Building itself. However strong Isaac and his builder knew this house to be, higher ground seemed even safer. But getting Cora out into the storm seemed riskier than staying put.

  By the time Joseph arrived, the water outside their home was waist deep. All of the houses directly on the beach were down. Inside, Joseph found the place milling with increasingly distraught families. And he found his brother Isaac at Cora’s bedside.

  Hoping to avoid further terrifying their family and the fifty refugees, the Cline brothers stepped together onto the porch to discuss their limited options. The water was nearly all the way to the top of the porch steps.

  And as they stood there, weighing the risks of staying in the house or trying to escape uptown, the elements answered the question for them. What Isaac had expected came true.

  The north wind was no longer a north wind. It had been shifting. And now it made its decisive move.

  It came out of the east. That is: the wind no longer held back the rising gulf.

  Standing on the porch, the Cline brothers watched the water rise four feet. It took four seconds.

  So there was no chance of leaving. The porch was underwater. The Cline brothers turned and retreated inside.

  There they faced Cora, the three girls, and a house full of refugees. Isaac and Joseph were the experts. Everybody wanted to know what to do.

  But the water, having risen four feet in four seconds, followed the brothers inside. Trying to restrain the growing panic, the brothers ushered everybody to the second floor.

  There, they had to choose a room to pack everybody into. Somewhat counterintuitively, they picked not a room away from the wind, but a room on the windward side of the house.

  That wasn’t an accident. Joseph and Isaac had quickly come up with a theory—even a kind of grim plan. Should the blasts of punishing wind finally push the house over, the Clines reasoned, they would want to be on top of, not under, what would then be a house flipped on its side and floating. They needed to stay on the wind side, which would become the top side after a capsize.

  The house itself, or parts of it, might then serve them as a raft. And now the likelihood of even this strong house going over was starting to seem high. From the packed second-story room, shaken horribly by the direct wind, the terrified crowd could see other houses that had come down and split into pieces. Those houses churned, becoming massive debris in the swollen tide and heavy rain. The Cline home, the brothers felt, was soon to join them.

  Arnold Wolfram and the messenger boy had reached Broadway and Twenty-Fifth, site of the monument to the Texas heroes of Fort San Jacinto. Parts of buildings and other giant debris, brought uptown by the gulf water, had started piling up against the statues there. It was getting dark now.

  The duo pressed on. After many blocks of navigating the rising seas, they were actually nearing Wolfram’s house.

  A few of the houses along Broadway seemed to be withstanding the storm so far. Arnold recognized the home of a friend and, looking up, could see through the windswept rain that the man was inside the house. Arnold and the boy waved and yelled for entry, maybe through a window.

  In the dark and the wind, the friend didn’t see or hear them. There was no time to keep calling out; there was nothing to do but move on.

  Fording yet another river of a street, Arnold and the boy neared another friend’s house. In shoulder-high water now, Arnold hoped to try again here.

  Yet even as they approached Arnold’s friend’s porch, a mighty current suddenly grabbed them both and swept them off their feet. They went all the way underwater.

  Arnold, pushed with immense force, banged into a tree. Still underwater, he did his best to grab it. He got a grip and held on desperately against the current.

  Using the tree, he pulled himself upward to get out of the water. He clung to the tree as the water rushed by and looked about for the boy.

  And miraculously, the kid was clinging to the tree too. He too had hit it, had pulled himself out of the water, and was hanging onto a branch.

  This tree wasn’t big. But it had thick branches that would bear human weight. With their last strength, Arnold and the boy hoisted themselves out of the water. They climbed into the fork of those branches.

  There, just above the rushing tide, they huddled together, gasping for breath and sheltering as best they could from flying wood, slate, and glass. For now, they’d gone as far as they could go.

  Packed into the rocking windward side of the Clines’ second floor, Isaac, Joseph, Cora, the girls, and the neighbors were in the dark now. As they waited, looking out the windows, they saw that they were really alone. Almost every other house in the neighborhood had gone into the water.

  The Clines’ own porches, upper and lower, front and rear, had been torn away as well. The water was now at least fifteen feet high.

  Joseph Cline was certain the house was doomed. He urged the assembled crowd to be ready for collapse. When it happened, he told them, try to get out the windows, climb on top of whatever house was left, and then ride the house like a raft through the storm.

  He was in an altered state of strange calm. He felt that he would live. He and Isaac had an uncle who had survived a shipwreck by drifting on a plank, and Joseph believed they might do the same.

  Others in the crowded room were anything but calm. Some were kneeling in prayer. Some were running around pointlessly, in total panic. Some were crying, some wailing aloud. Most, strange
ly enough, were singing.

  Isaac was meanwhile watching the progress of debris in the wild water outside. Other houses were down because the wreckage of buildings had itself become a cause of further destruction. The waves tossed ruined timbers and roof structures again and again against standing walls, driving down walls and roofs together. Then the newly fallen wreckage added greater and greater power to an assault on the standing houses.

  Finally there seemed to be nothing but wreckage. It seemed to Isaac to be hanging around his house—the last house standing—as if to menace it. In a newly horrible development, the relationship between the gigantic debris and the raging sea was changing.

  The wreckage was forming a high dam. It held the water back so that its level was rising monumentally higher even than before. Thanks to this dam effect, caused by the destruction it had already wrought, the sea at the Cline house was soon towering twenty feet above the ground—ten feet higher than the storm tide itself.

  Then, as Isaac watched, an iron train track appeared in the water. Here was a monster. He saw the trestles emerge from the sea, held together by track, and come shooting, an ideal battering ram, toward his house. As it came, the track revealed its length. It was a quarter-mile long.

  This was the same trolley track that, on happy days, had run along the beachfront over the gulf water. Underwater for hours, the track had finally been torn loose from its moorings by the surging force of the water.

  The sea had put the track on a rampage. It was speeding straight for Isaac’s house. The swells brought the track through the high water. Squarely, at storm-tide speed, it smashed the wall of the Cline house.

  It pulled back with the swells. It came again. It smashed the house. It pulled back. It came again. Again.

  As gigantic iron battered his house, Isaac went to Cora’s side in the center of the room; with them huddled their youngest girl, the six-year-old. The entire house made a loud creaking noise. Then it started to fall, spilling the people about the room.

  Joseph was standing by the window when the whole house started moving. With him were Isaac’s other two daughters.

  Joseph executed his plan. He grabbed the hand of each of the girls, turned his back to the window, and lunging from his heels, used his back and shoulders to smash window glass and break through the wooden storm shutters. As the building slowly turned, capsizing, Joseph and the girls together went through the open window, toward the water.

  Isaac, Cora, and their six-year-old were meanwhile tossed like the lightest of objects by the impact of the trestle, the turning of the house, and the entry of the sea. They were sliding fast into a wide chimney. Down the chimney they tumbled, all the way to the bottom of the capsizing house, then out of the ruined house and farther down, to the very bottom of the violent sea twenty feet deep.

  They were underwater.

  Trying to rest in the fork of the tree branches above the water, Arnold Wolfram began to see that his and the boy’s situation was becoming precarious. It was totally dark now, but despite the rain and cloud, the moon was faintly visible. In its dim light, they could see not only the sky, but now also the dark, churning sea just below them, full of gigantic objects. The debris swirled, plunged, and launched from the fast water.

  The wind and the ocean had already brought down hundreds of buildings toward the gulf side. The water was now pushing all that debris chaotically uptown toward the higher ground. Arnold and the boy could see, thanks to the dim moonlight, the deadly battery that the tide was sending at them—they could at least dodge and duck as they waited in the tree.

  But the tree had now begun stopping the wreckage in the water. Debris pounded the tree and then piled up against it with immense weight. Arnold thought the tree might be battered to pieces or pushed over.

  And he and the kid were freezing cold now, soaked, weak from hunger and sheer exhaustion. How long could they possibly hang on?

  As Arnold considered what to do, he and the boy saw something out of a nightmare. A house roof came bearing straight down on them, through the water, and trying to ride it like a raft were a man and a woman. The roof came crashing into the tree where Arnold and the boy perched.

  The roof split in half. The man was carried away into the darkness.

  The woman’s section of the roof got stuck, bobbing against other wreckage near the tree. Screaming for help, the woman reached out for Arnold and the boy.

  They tried to get her. The kid held tight to a branch; Arnold took his other hand and leaned out toward the woman, extending his hand toward hers. Arnold and the woman stared each other in the face as she reached toward him as far as she could.

  Her chunk of roof broke free of the wreckage. The woman’s face grew anguished, and she shrieked as the roof jumped away from the tree and plunged. Arnold could only stare as the woman went under and disappeared.

  At nearly the same moment, a long rafter beam came bearing down on the tree. It too stuck to the branches.

  After ducking its impact, Arnold picked up his head and saw something amazing.

  The beam’s other end had landed on the upper porch of his friend’s house—where they’d been hoping to seek shelter before the current had sent them into this tree. That house had remained standing. Unlike others, it still looked fairly solid.

  The rafter seemed to be tightly stuck at both ends . . . one side in their tree, the other on the upper porch. There was a slim chance that it would hold long enough to serve as a bridge from the tree to the house.

  By now, Arnold and the boy were thinking in unison. Their tree was swaying, about to break under the weight of debris. Yet even as Arnold moved to lower the boy onto the rafter, the youngster had anticipated him.

  As one, they were splattering their way, as quickly as they could, across the wet board toward the porch.

  Joseph Cline was climbing with haste from the rail trestle to the topside of the overturned house. He still grasped Isaac’s two little girls’ hands and pulled them upward. They all gained the top and crouched there above the water.

  The three were anything but safe. For now, though, they were alive. They crouched on the house, which had not broken up but was bobbing violently on the surf in wind-driven torrents of slashing rain. The girls clung to their uncle for protection from flying debris as the house rose and fell. The surface would climb a few feet above the rushing tide, point upward toward the dark sky, then plunge almost into the black water.

  Riding this gigantic, bucking raft, Joseph was still thinking about all the people who must still be inside the overturned house below them, full of water. There was nobody else on the swirling wreckage, nobody visible in the dark water. The window Joseph had broken, on what was now the top side of this floating structure, would be the only exit from that room.

  So Joseph gently let go of the girls and put his head and shoulders down through the window. As the house rose and fell, he yelled “Come here!”—hoping to help any conscious victims locate the one exit.

  He recalled that drowning people will grab at anything. He reversed position and dangled his legs through the window. He hoped to feel someone grasp them. Nothing.

  With anguish, Joseph concluded that they must have all been trapped and drowned. That meant Isaac, Cora, and their six-year-old daughter too. He returned to protect his nieces on their rocking craft in the howling wind.

  The danger had just increased: the house they were riding on was starting to break up.

  Isaac Cline was gasping for breath, swimming in the water, pinned between two huge house timbers that had kept him crushed underwater so long that he had become certain of death. Somehow he and the timbers had risen. He was alive, breathing, fighting the currents.

  Despite the driving rain and flying objects, there was a dim moon. Isaac scanned the churning waters now in desperate hope of seeing Cora, his daughters, his brother . . .

  A flash of lightning gave a flash of hope. There was his six-year-old, floating on some wreckage. She was alive.


  Isaac left the timbers and swam to her. He clung to his child and to the wreckage she floated on.

  A moment later, another lightning flash: miracle of miracles. Isaac saw Joseph and the other two girls. They were riding on a piece of what had been Isaac’s house. He grasped his youngest and swam with her to his brother and children.

  By the time Joseph saw Isaac and the youngest girl in the water, the house that Joseph and the girls were riding had splintered into big pieces, and they were working hard to stay on top of what they had left. Joseph’s heart leaped at the sight of his brother and the girl. He helped them aboard the precarious craft.

  Quickly, Isaac told Joseph what had happened. Far under the water, Cora’s clothes had become entangled with the wreckage. Isaac himself had lost consciousness when pinned. Somehow he’d survived. Cora, it was now plain, had not.

  And yet that night, as they struggled to remain atop the debris that might yet save them, the full weight of their loss hadn’t settled on the surviving Cline family. The children, Isaac noticed, weren’t panicking or crying. They showed no signs of fear at all.

  And the Cline brothers themselves, facing what they knew might still be their own deaths, felt nothing as recognizable as fear. This was all new. Their only idea was survival.

  Survival. Galveston was sea now: there was no island. The bay had met the gulf, and as the Cline family spun, pitched, and coasted on their collapsing raft, all they saw to suggest a city were the tops of a few remaining buildings, here and there visible in lightning flashes above crashing ocean waves that spread on all sides as far as they could see.

  And in the distances, they sometimes saw lights: signs of people in the upper floors of houses that remained standing, in the neighborhoods farther from what had been the beach.

  So their battle began.

  The howling sky was still alive with flying missiles that showered on their heads. Isaac and Joseph sat on the raft with their backs to the wind and the children seated in front of them, between their legs. The raft bobbed, circled, and surfed. Behind them, the brothers held some scavenged planks, hoping the wood might deflect any impact of flying objects.