Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [34]
Isaac was only twenty-nine, but the article read as if it were written by a much older man. Clearly Isaac already considered himself a weather sage. He wrote the article in response to a tropical storm that ten days earlier had come ashore near Matagorda about 120 miles southwest of Galveston along the downward arc of the Texas Gulf Coast. Hubris infused the text just as it infused the age. He wrote with absolute certainty about a phenomenon no one really understood. He called the storm “an excellent type” of cyclone.
He explained first how the earth’s rotation, the equatorial trades, and the midlatitude westerlies combined to give the storm a parabolic track that began near the equator, arced toward the northwest, then curved back toward the northeast. This last turn “nearly always” occurred between the 75th and 85th meridians of longitude, he wrote. (The 85th meridian passes through Havana, the 75th through the Bahamas.) Thus, he argued, hurricanes could not as a rule strike Texas. To buttress this observation he noted that during the two preceding decades, some twenty West Indies hurricanes had crossed the southern coast of the United States, but only two had actually reached Texas. “The coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to causes known in meteorology as accidental.”
The article exudes an unmistakable scent of boosterism reminiscent of the immigrant come-ons published by the railroads. Clearly he understood how much was at stake in the race between Galveston and Houston, and that Galveston’s promoters would not be pleased to read that the city lay in harm’s way. He argued that if anything the coast was “much less susceptible” to hostile weather. “No greater damage may be expected here from meteorological disturbances than in any other portions of the country.” In fact, he wrote, the “liability of loss” was much lower.
When storms did break the rules, he argued, they tended to be weak creatures. “The damage from the storm of July 5, 1891, aggregated less than $2,000, and yet was of much greater intensity than the average of these storms; and in fact no damage worthy of notice has been experienced along the Texas coast from any of these storms except those of 1875 and 1886 and in each of these two cases the loss of property aggregated less than that which often results from a single tornado in the central states.”
These two exceptions were hurricanes that struck the town of Indianola, a prosperous port 150 miles southwest of Galveston on Matagorda Bay. By Isaac’s analysis, the two hurricanes were accidents. Atmospheric freaks. But Isaac failed to grasp, or deliberately ignored, the true significance of the hurricanes, and what they did to Indianola. He focused on property damage. “The single tornado which struck Louisville, Ky., March 27, 1890, destroyed property of greater value than the aggregate of all the property which has been destroyed by wind and water along the Texas coast during the past twenty years.”
Isaac had to have recognized the misleading impression this argument would conjure in readers’ minds, unless of course he simply did not know what really happened in Indianola during those two storms.
For nowhere does he mention lost lives.
THE FIRST STORM struck Indianola on September 16, 1875. Gale-force winds had come ashore the previous day and gained velocity throughout the night. By 5:00 P.M. on the sixteenth the wind was blowing at eighty-two miles an hour. The wind continued to strengthen until by midnight, according to Sgt. C. A. Smith, the Signal Corps observer on duty, “it must have been fully 100 miles an hour.”
The storm raised an immense dome of water and shoved it through Indianola, pushing the waters of the Gulf and Matagorda Bay inland “until for