Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [103]
That night, New Year’s Eve 1900, a piece of very strange news flashed over the submarine cables from England. A wind had risen so freakishly strong it had toppled one of the great pillars of Stonehenge that no wind had budged for ten thousand years. The twentieth century had begun.
PART VI
Haunted
ISAAC
Haunted
The Storm
ON MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, Willis Moore telegraphed the New York Evening World with a report on the hurricane’s travels after it left Galveston. The cyclone, he wrote, “had lost its distinctive character as a destructive storm, and its future energy will more likely be expended in general rains over the western country rather than in high winds.”
Once again Moore had let the expected obscure the real. Somewhere in the heavens over Oklahoma, the storm’s lingering vortex entered the great low-pressure system then moving eastward across the country. It rapidly regained power and roared north, much to the dismay of A. I. Root, president of a Medina, Ohio, company that sold beekeeping supplies. As early as Monday he watched his personal barometer begin to drop “in a very unusual way,” yet all he saw from the Weather Bureau were telegrams forecasting fair skies for Monday and Tuesday, partly cloudy conditions on Wednesday. Instead he got a destructive windstorm that tore his company apart. He wrote to Moore, “Now wasn’t it a mistake that there wasn’t anything said about the big blow?”
The Central Office countered that it was not bureau policy to send wind forecasts to inland locations.
The storm brought hurricane-force winds to Chicago and Buffalo, this even after crossing America’s vast midriff. It killed six loggers trying to make their way across the Eau Claire River and nearly sank a Lake Michigan steamship. It downed so many telegraph lines that communication throughout the Midwest and the northern tier of the nation came to a halt. On Wednesday night, the storm savaged Prince Edward Island, then burst into the North Atlantic. Manhattan, half a continent south, received winds of sixty-five miles per hour.
As thousands of men moved into the countryside to replant telegraph poles and string fallen cable, reports began to emerge of shipwrecks in the Atlantic. The storm sank six vessels off Saint-Pierre, six more in Placentia Bay, four at Renews Harbor, and drove forty-two fishing boats aground in the Strait of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and mainland Canada. The storm raced in a cold and lethal arc across the top of the world until it fell at last into Siberia and disappeared from human observation.
America cooled. The Cascades grayed under frost. Snow fell on the Wasatch Front east of Salt Lake City. At Sherman, Wyoming, snow accumulated to a depth of thirteen inches. From Chattanooga to Brooklyn, men and women greeted the day with a feeling not unlike love.
Galveston
GALVESTON COUNTED ITS dead. The city conducted a census and in October reported a tally of 3,406 confirmed deaths. Eight of the city’s twelve wards had lost 10 percent or more of their residents. The storm killed 21 percent of the Twelfth Ward, 19 percent of the Tenth. The Galveston News published its final death roster on October 7, and listed 4,263 names. Early in 1901, the Morrison and Fourmy Company, which published the city directory, conducted its own canvass and found an overall loss in population of 8,124. Two thousand of these had simply moved from the city, the company believed. That left 6,000 dead. Informal estimates placed the toll at 8,000, even 10,000, not including the several thousand deaths that occurred in low-lying towns on the mainland. No one knew how many bodies still rested in the sea. “Many people,” one survivor noted, “would not eat fish, shrimp, or crabs for several