Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [33]
It did not include a seawall.
STRANGE WEATHER CAME and went. One episode revealed an unusual characteristic of Galveston Bay, but its true significance was lost among the more obvious phenomena of the moment.
The winter of 1898–99 proved a savage one. On November 26, just ten years after the awful Blizzard of ’88, a powerful gale, known ever since as the Portland Gale, blew off the Atlantic and brought another surprise blizzard to New York. It destroyed 150 vessels off New England and caused the deaths of 450 men, women, and children, including all 200 passengers of the 291-foot paddle steamer Portland, whose captain had believed he could outrun the storm. Two months later, a blizzard swept much of the South. Icebergs ten feet high flowed down the Mississippi past New Orleans. The sudden cold killed participants in the Mardi Gras parade. The blizzard even struck Galveston and piled snow on its beaches. Snowmen populated the Garten Verein.
At the Levy Building, the temperature sank to 8 degrees, by Isaac’s measure.
Seven-point-five, by Joseph’s.
The wind blew from the north at up to eighty miles an hour, with so much power it literally drove water out of Galveston Bay into the Gulf, to the point where portions of the bay bottom lay exposed. Joseph, out hunting geese, claimed he was able to wade a channel ordinarily traversed by ocean-going ships.
No one, however, seemed to grasp the implications of this: that so vast a body of water could be blown from its basin. There were many distractions, however. There was snow on the beach. Icicles jutted from the underside of the Pagoda. Galveston residents filled rowboats with benumbed fish. Thousands of other fish accumulated along the bay shore in a blue-silver fringe four feet wide and half a foot thick.
The fish died. As the air warmed, the scent of death became overpowering.
THE STORM
Thursday, August 30, 1900:
17 N, 59.3 W
ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 30, 1900, the storm was just off the eastern coast of Antigua, where Francis Watts, an agricultural chemist with the government laboratory in St. Johns, observed a falling barometer and curiously shifty winds. At 9:00 A.M., the lab’s barometer recorded pressure of 29.96 inches, still in the normal range. By midafternoon, the pressure had fallen to 29.84.
“About 10 P.M.,” Watts reported, “a thunderstorm sprung up to the S.W. and came up over the land, appearing to be most severe over the region S.W. of St. Johns Harbor and generally within a radius of 3 miles of St. Johns. It died away after midnight. While it lasted it was very severe; the lightning was brilliant and almost continuous, while the flashes were very quickly followed by loud peals of thunder.”
Shortly before the storm’s arrival, strange weather had settled on the island. The day was intensely hot, the sky rimmed with a reddish-yellow light. There was, according to the Antigua Standard, an “ominous” stillness.
GALVESTON
An Absurd Delusion
IN JANUARY 1900, a self-styled weather prophet, Prof. Andrew Jackson DeVoe of Chattanooga, Tennessee, issued a long-range forecast for the year in his Ladies’ Birthday Almanac. He predicted that September would be hot and dry throughout the northern states. “On the 9th,” he wrote, “a great cyclone will form over the Gulf of Mexico and move up the Atlantic coast, causing very heavy rains from Florida to Maine from 10th to 12th.”
It was the kind of prophecy Isaac Cline loathed. He was a scientist. He believed he understood weather in ways others did not. He did not know there was such a thing as the jet stream, or that easterly waves marched from the coast of West Africa every summer, or that a massive flow within the Atlantic Ocean ferried heat around the globe. Nor had he heard of a phenomenon called El Niño. But for his time, he knew everything. Or thought he did.
On July 15, 1891, the Galveston News published an article Isaac wrote on hurricanes. It is a troublesome document, for it abrades the body of convenient truth that has accumulated over the last century regarding Isaac’s role in preparing Galveston