Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [27]
THE clamor TO reform the weather service continued to grow. Demand for better and more useful forecasts intensified. Until the creation of the weather service, individuals had relied on their own meteorological savvy—and assorted almanacs, crackpots, and backwoods lore—to produce their own forecasts of the weather, just as they produced their own soap, bread, and clothing. But America as a whole was shifting rapidly toward a consumer culture in which remote factories produced the things families needed. Now a farmer could get a daily report from the Weather Bureau. “In the past the man has been first,” Frederick Taylor wrote, “in the future the system must be first.”
But was the system up to the task?
The weather service needed a hero, and got one. On January 16, 1887, Gen. Adolphus W. Greely took over as chief of the Signal Corps. He was by now one of the most famous men in America, albeit famous for having barely survived the failure of his 1881 expedition to Lady Franklin Bay in the Arctic, which left him marooned until his rescue in July 1884 by Capt. Winfield Scott Schley of the U.S. Navy, whose daring expedition made him a celebrity as well.
Captain Howgate, the embezzler, was still at large. Congress launched a formal investigation of the weather service. To gauge just how far the service had fallen, General Greely dispatched inspectors to weather stations around the country. In Greely’s first year, he dismissed one hundred employees for all manner of offenses, including some that suggest that weathermen of the day were not drab bureaucrats who spent their lives watching mercury rise and fall. He fired one New England observer for indulging his passion for photography on bureau time. The observer turned the office into a studio where he photographed nude young women.
A fondness for extended fishing trips caused the head of the Rocky Mountain district to engage in some long-range forecasting. He would create a week’s worth of weather observations, then unload them at the telegraph office with instructions to the operator to send them one by one over the following week. This worked fine, apparently—a testament either to the consistent character of Rocky Mountain weather or the observer’s real forecasting savvy—until one of Greely’s inspectors dropped in without warning. Finding the office vacant, the inspector went to the telegraph office and there discovered a neat stack of timed and dated weather reports awaiting transmission.
An observer in the Midwest turned out to be a compulsive poker player. Desperate for cash, he hocked the station’s instruments. He took his daily readings at the pawnshop.
On January 21, 1888, while Isaac was still at Fort Concho, one of Greely’s inspectors walked into the Galveston station. At the time, it occupied the third floor of a building that served as the city’s police station and courthouse. The inspector, Lt. J. H. Weber, arrived at 1:00 P.M., and was greeted by Private E. D. Chase, the soldier then in charge. Lieutenant Weber checked the barometers with a plumb line to see if they were standing vertically. He checked whether they had enough mercury and if air had infiltrated their vacuum tubes. He reviewed the station’s wind-signal record book and its expense book, and evaluated the performance and appearance of each man assigned to the station.
He did not like what he saw. He had not liked much of anything since the moment he arrived. Above all he did not like Private Chase.
The barometers were filthy. Lieutenant Weber had to clean them just to read the scales. Galveston merchants and agents of the Cotton Exchange complained loudly of neglect. Noted Weber, “They hardly look at the local office for information but depend mostly upon St. Louis and New Orleans papers for weather news.” The station itself, he wrote, was in “execrable” condition. “Gentlemen should not be compelled to occupy quarters in which one would not kennel a well-bred