Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [37]
The result can be rainfall more akin to the flow from a faucet than from a cloud.
In 1979 a tropical storm named Claudette blew off the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston and deluged the town of Alvin, Texas, with forty-two inches of rain in twenty-four hours, still the U.S. record for sheer intensity. A Philippine typhoon holds the world’s record, dropping 73.62 inches in twenty-four hours. Total accumulations have been higher, however. Ninety-six and a half inches of rain once fell on Silver Hill, Jamaica, over four days. That’s eight feet. In 1899 a hurricane dropped an estimated 2.6 billion tons of water on Puerto Rico. Hurricane Camille, which came ashore on the Gulf Coast in August 1969, was still flush with water two days later when it reached Virginia. With no advance warning from the Weather Bureau, it jettisoned thirty inches of rain in six hours. Hillsides turned to mud, then to an earthen slurry that flowed at highway speeds. In Virginia alone, 109 people lost their lives.
Camille’s rain fell with such ferocity it was said to have filled the overhead nostrils of birds and drowned them from the trees.
GALVESTON
Louisa Rollfing
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, was a big day in the home of August and Louisa Rollfing, a day for serious celebration. August, the housepainter secretly identified as a deadbeat in the Giles directory, had managed at last to make the final payment on the family’s treasured piano. The moment had a resonance beyond the purchase itself. The piano was, literally, an anchor. It was heavy and big; just moving it into the house had required a huge effort—it had to be lifted in through a window.
This was their seventh house in Galveston. The house was a rental like all the others, but the piano made it feel more permanent, and Louisa badly needed such a sign. She was tired of moving. At each new address she had thrown herself into the task of making old and worn rooms look not only new, but as if they belonged to people of wealth.
She and August had been through so much turmoil, both individually and together. Both had come to America from Germany, August first at the age of one and with tragic bad timing. He and his parents arrived just as the Civil War began. His father, William, was promptly drafted, and just as promptly killed.
Louisa came to America much later, as a young woman. She had lived on an island in the North Sea, but had grown restless. There was so much talk of America. It started when a man named Daniel Goos came back to the island to visit family and told everyone of his big sawmill in a place called Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he had a wife and children and a large home. He needed more workers. He offered to take sixty people back with him to America. He would guarantee them jobs and advance them money for their passage. Many people Louisa knew went with him and they in turn sent for brothers, sisters, cousins, and sweethearts, until it seemed as if everyone was headed for America. A cousin and his wife now lived in Lake Charles and wrote often, each letter arriving at Louisa’s house in a huge yellow envelope that her father placed in the window, a beacon of adventure that drew Louisa and her siblings at a run. “Just to hear the word America caused an excited feeling,” Louisa wrote.
Each year more people left. The island got smaller and smaller. Her work as a housekeeper and companion for an elderly woman, Madam Michelson, made it positively tiny. There were days, it seemed, when Madam was the only person she saw. Louisa was lonely and dissatisfied and the idea of America crept deeper and deeper into her heart, until one day she simply resolved to go.
Her cousin sent her a ticket. She packed her things. Her confidence held until the night before her journey when she found herself lying awake, her heart racing, sleep an impossibility. “All at once I realized what it meant to leave everyone that was dear to me.” The only thing that kept her going was the fact that her cousin would be waiting for her at the other side of the world. “I