Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [23]
Piddington, in his immensely popular text The Sailor’s Horn-Book for the Law of Storms, offered practical advice for coping with hurricanes. He included transparent storm cards, or “horn cards,” which showed the direction of wind at various points in a cyclonic circle. A mariner could match the winds he was experiencing with the winds marked on the card and thus determine where in the body of the storm his ship was located and thus how to avoid sailing toward what Piddington called “the fatal centre.” With these storm cards, Piddington wrote, “you have the hurricane in your hand.”
It all sounded good and precise on paper, but hurricanes still came by surprise, still killed by the thousands. As one nineteenth-century captain put it, “if the centre always bore eight points from the direction of the wind; if the wind gradually increased in force as we near the centre; if the wind veered gradually in all parts of the storm; and if the centre were the only dangerous part of it, then the avoiding of a hurricane would be very simple.”
WHAT ISAAC DID not learn much about at Fort Myer was forecasting, a black and dangerous art that only a few men in Washington were allowed to practice. Incorrect forecasts eroded the faith of a public already skeptical of the service’s prowess and worth. A few newspapers had taken to running the service’s weather forecasts opposite the often-superior forecasts of astrologers and assorted weather prophets. To help ensure that the best men got deployed to the field, the weather service gave its Fort Myer trainees a rigorous examination. The top scorers won immediate assignment as assistant observers to posts throughout the country.
At one point the test asked each trainee to choose a scientific mission related to meteorology that each could pursue while conducting the routine work required in a weather station. The chief did not want his observers just sitting around between weather observations, a wise policy, given the sex scandals, grave robbing, and other incidents that would soon surface and further undermine the weather service’s reputation. Isaac gave a beauty queen’s answer—that he wanted to do something that would “give results beneficial to mankind.”
Isaac scored in sixteenth position, and the service promptly assigned him to Little Rock, Arkansas. When not recording temperature and barometric pressure, he was to investigate how climate shaped the behavior of Rocky Mountain locusts, said to be swarming the countryside. To Isaac, this was the fulfillment of a dream. “I was twenty-one years old,” he wrote, “the world was before me and my enthusiasm was such that I thought I could do any thing that it was possible for man to accomplish.”
THE STORM
Tuesday, August 28, 1900:
16 N, 49.3 W
THE VORTEX GAINED definition. Rivers of air flowed toward its center. The earth’s rotation drove them to the right, but each right-veering gust imparted to the vortex a left-hand spin, just as a glancing blow on the right side of a cue ball will cause it to spin left. The arriving winds lowered pressure. As the pressure fell, air moving toward the storm gained velocity. The stronger winds drew more water vapor from the sea, which fed the clouds around the center of the vortex—releasing more heat and driving the pressure still lower.
On Tuesday, August 28, the storm overtook a ship located about three hundred nautical miles southeast of Monday’s first sighting. The ship’s log noted winds from the south-southwest, the bottom right rim on a Piddington horn card. The wind was stronger, Force 6, twenty-five to thirty-one miles an hour.
Guy wires whistled.
GALVESTON
Dirty Weather
IT WAS WINTER. Isaac’s train passed through an austere landscape of grays and browns, the trees like upended spiders, but to him all of it was dazzling. “Something new, something of interest and beauty unfolded before my eyes all the time.” He arrived in Little Rock just before the state legislature passed a bill that resolved a long-festering