Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [3]
As Isaac listened, background noises came forward. One noise in particular. It was more than noise, really. If Isaac lay very still, he could feel the shock waves climb the stilts of his house, the same way he felt the vibration of the pipe organ Cora played at church each Sunday. To children in houses all along the beach, particularly the ninety-three children in the big, sad St. Mary’s Orphanage two miles west at the very edge of the sea, the sound was a delight. They heard it and felt it and dreamed it. To some, each shock wave was the concussion of British artillery in the Boer War or a ghost gun from the dead Maine, or perhaps the thud of an approaching giant. A welcome giant. The shuddering ground promised a delightful departure from the steamy sameness of Galveston’s summers, and it came with exquisite timing: Saturday. Only hours ahead lay Saturday night, the most delicious night of all.
But the sound frightened Isaac. The thudding, he knew, was caused by great deep-ocean swells falling upon the beach. Most days the Gulf was as placid as a big lake, with surf that did not crash but rather wore itself away on the sand. The first swells had arrived Friday. Now the booming was louder and heavier, each concussion more profound.
ISAAC WOKE AGAIN at 4:00 A.M., but this time the cause was obvious. His brother stood outside the bedroom door tapping gently and calling his name.
Joseph too had been unable to sleep. Not a terribly creative man, he described this feeling as a sense of “impending disaster.” He had stayed up until midnight recording weather observations from a bank of instruments mounted on the roof of the Levy Building, a four-story brick building in the heart of Galveston’s commercial district. The barometers had captured only a slight decrease in pressure. The anemometer, which caught the wind in cups mounted at opposite ends of crossed metal bars, recorded wind speeds of eleven to nineteen miles an hour. It was capable of measuring velocities as high as one hundred miles an hour, but conditions had never come close to testing this capacity, nor did any rational soul believe they ever would. Throughout Friday afternoon and evening, a peculiar oppressiveness had settled over the city. Temperatures remained high well into the night.
None of these observations was enough by itself to raise concern. For days, however, Isaac had been receiving cables from the Weather Bureau’s Central Office in Washington describing a storm apparently of tropical origin that had drenched Cuba. Although Isaac did not know it, there was confusion about the storm’s true course, debate as to its character. The bureau’s men in Cuba said the storm was nothing to worry about; Cuba’s own weather observers, who had pioneered hurricane detection, disagreed. Conflict between both groups had grown increasingly intense, an effect of the unending campaign of Willis Moore, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau, to exert ever more centralized control over forecasting and the issuance of storm warnings. The bureau had long banned the use of the word tornado because it induced panic, and panic brought criticism, something the bureau could ill afford. Earlier that week, Moore had sent Galveston a telegram asserting yet again that only headquarters could issue storm warnings.
At 11:30 A.M. on Friday, Moore had sent another telegram, this one notifying Isaac and other observers of a tropical storm centered in the Gulf of Mexico south of Louisiana, “moving slowly northwest.” The telegram predicted “high northerly winds tonight and Saturday with probably heavy rain.”
Again, nothing especially worrisome. Tropical storms came ashore every summer. They brought wind and rain, even some flooding. Damage was rare. No one got hurt. But in one respect the telegram did surprise Isaac. Until