Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [106]
On the night of the storm the lives of Joseph and Isaac touched with an intensity that only a man blinded by anger could disavow. Perhaps Joseph resented Isaac’s subsequent success within the bureau, or Isaac’s failure to contest Moore’s portrayal of Isaac as the great hero of the storm. And maybe Isaac, for his part, transformed his own guilt into a perverse anger at Joseph for having been right about urging everyone to evacuate. Maybe each time Isaac saw Joseph the magnitude of his own error came roaring back to him.
Maybe Joseph sensed this, and played to it.
The hurricane changed Isaac. He gave up the study of climate and health and concentrated instead on trying to find out why the storm had been so deadly. He wrote two books on hurricanes, thus fulfilling his childhood dream of writing an important scientific treatise. He became one of the nation’s leading hurricane experts. It was Isaac who established that a hurricane’s deadliest weapon was not direct wind damage, as bureau dogma held, but its wind-driven tide, and that this tide provided important warning signals. He was not shy about taking credit. In his monograph “A Century of Progress in the Study of Cyclones,” published in 1942, he wrote, “I was the only official in the U.S. Weather Bureau who recognized and studied the importance of the storm tides in forecasting hurricanes resulting from tropical storms.”
But a question haunted him: Did some of the blame for all those deaths in Galveston belong to him? He blamed himself, certainly, for the loss of his wife. His decision to weather the storm in his house had been foolhardy, as had been his advice to some of the people he encountered on Saturday, among them Judson Palmer, who had lost everything. Isaac kept returning to the question. He told and retold the story of how he had asked a reporter for the Associated Press if anything more could have been done to warn the citizens of Galveston—and how the reporter replied, “Nothing more could have been done than was done.”
Isaac’s subsequent reports to the Monthly Weather Review suggest a man obsessed with proclaiming his own prowess at warning of troublesome weather. Unlike his peers, who filed their routine district reports in spare, self-quashing language, Isaac praised his own work, or quoted newspapers and letters that did likewise. In September 1909, for example, he quoted a letter to him praising his warnings of a hurricane that struck Louisiana: “ ‘We feel that your office was solely instrumental in saving to New Orleans, through advices sent out by you in advance, many lives and thousands of dollars worth of property.’ ”
The Galveston hurricane irrevocably collapsed the wall Isaac had erected between the personal and the professional, the irrational and the rational. On the morning of February 10, 1901, Isaac came forward “on profession of faith” to seek formal admittance to the Baptist church. A month later, the congregation convened at the YMCA pool to conduct its first baptism since the storm. Judson Palmer was there. So were Rosemary and Allie May, and of course Isaac’s baby, Esther, and a hundred members of the church. When Isaac stepped into the pool, applause rang for what seemed like hours.
Art became his passion. It filled his spare time with the scent of linseed oil, the seductive texture of canvas.