Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [41]
Isaac heard the first clap of thunder at 3:48 A.M., and later noted the time in the station’s daily journal. He stayed up to listen, partly out of professional responsibility, partly because, like all meteorologists ever born, he loved thunderstorms. He walked onto his second-floor porch and there noted the occurrence of each electric burst, and how different the lightning was from that in Tennessee. In the knob country of his childhood it writhed across the sky in ruptured webs. Here it came in blue-white shafts, each spasm like the flare of flash powder from a photographer’s trowel. In that instant, Galveston became an Arctic city of silver and black, a dying mariner’s dream.
The loudest thunder occurred at 4:57 A.M., Isaac noted, the last at 5:20. The storm had come from the southeast, the direction of Cuba.
After breakfast, Isaac walked to the office. High above the warehouses along the wharf he saw thickets of masts and spars and the tall funnels of steamships. Some mornings, the varnish and brass caught the sun and made this tangle of line and wood gleam as if glazed by an ice storm. When the breezes were sluggish, smoke from coal-fueled steamships drifted over the streets in fat indigo plumes until the entire wharf seemed to smolder. One of the newest arrivals was the big British Roma, which had docked Sunday after a passage from New York. Its captain had the improbable name Storms.
Isaac’s walk on Tuesday morning was especially pleasant, because the thunderstorm had dropped the temperature by a full seven degrees.
AT THE OFFICE, Isaac examined the 8:00 A.M. Washington weather map composed that morning by Theodore C. Bornkessell, the station’s printer, using details telegraphed from headquarters. Bornkessell’s graphic version included loopy isobars that linked areas of equal atmospheric pressure and dotted isotherms that did the same for temperature. Isaac sent a man to the Cotton Exchange to compose its large-scale version of the map. He might have sent his brother, Joseph, or Bornkessell, or a new man named John D. Blagden, on loan to ease the station’s workload since the recent departure, in disgrace, of an assistant observer named Harrison McP. Baldwin. Baldwin, the Fort Myer clown, had come to work for Isaac a year earlier and quickly tarnished the station’s reputation for accuracy. Throughout July and the first weeks of August 1900, error messages flowed from Washington to Galveston citing mistakes that Baldwin had made, and that Isaac was obligated to acknowledge and correct. The errors pained Isaac deeply. Chief Moore suspected Baldwin of far greater sins. He told Secretary of Agriculture Wilson he believed Baldwin had “fabricated” barometric readings—the highest of crimes. In mid-August, Moore put Baldwin on mandatory furlough, without pay. Baldwin left Galveston at 5:30 P.M., Monday, August 27.
Isaac was no doubt glad to be rid of Baldwin. The man had been a drag on performance and morale. It is likely, too, that Baldwin made fun of Isaac. Certainly Baldwin was given to pranks and poking fun. To a man like that, Isaac had to have been an irresistible target. With Baldwin gone, however, Isaac found himself short of hands. Moore promised him a junior observer named Ernst Giers, but at the last moment, for reasons Moore felt no obligation to explain, Moore rerouted Giers to Carson City, Nevada. The abrupt reassignment moved Isaac to a rare, if quiet, expression of complaint. He telegraphed Moore: “Giers not having arrived impossible to get along without experienced assistance in Baldwin’s place.”
Moore sent him John Blagden.
THE BUREAU’S MAPMAKER used colored chalk to compose the Exchange map. He noted pressures, temperatures, rainfall, and wind direction on a large