Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [44]
Moore too suspected the Cubans, and believed a conduit for purloined weather intelligence ran between New Orleans and Belen. On August 24, 1900, W. T. Blythe, director of the bureau’s New Orleans section, wrote Moore a letter that stoked his suspicions. He notified Moore that the College of Immaculate Conception in New Orleans received a copy of the national weather map every single day—the college simply dispatched a messenger to his office to pick one up. He did not feel he had the authority to refuse. He suspected, however, that the college then transmitted the contents by submarine cable to Belen. The real purpose, Blythe wrote, was “to enable the Belen College in Havana to compete with this Service.”
It was all too much for Moore. Too clear. Moore instituted the ban on Cuban weather telegrams and halted all direct transmission of West Indies storm reports from the bureau’s Havana office to its New Orleans station. The bureau even sought the help of Western Union. On August 28, Willis Moore, then serving as acting secretary of agriculture, wrote to Gen. Thomas T. Eckert, president of Western Union. “The United States Weather Bureau in Cuba has been greatly annoyed by independent observatories securing a few scattered reports and then attempting to make weather predictions and issue hurricane warnings to the detriment of commerce and the embarrassment of the Government service.” He revealed his suspicions of the New Orleans connection. “I have reason to believe that they are copying, or contemplate doing so, data from our daily weather maps in New Orleans and cabling the same to Havana.”
Moore closed the letter, stating, “I presume you have not the right to refuse to transmit such telegrams, but I would respectfully ask that they be not allowed any of the privileges accorded messages of this Bureau, and that they be not given precedence over other commercial messages.”
To the Cubans, the cable ban was an outrage. “This conduct,” wrote the Tribuna in Cienfuegos, “is inconceivable.” Especially at the peak of hurricane season, “when everybody is waiting for the opinions and observations” of Cuba’s hurricane experts. The newspaper cited in particular the reports of a meteorologist named Julio Jover. The cable ban, it cried, represented “an extraordinary contempt for the public.”
The uproar took the bureau by surprise. Apparently Moore, Dunwoody, and Stockman expected the backward peoples of Cuba to accept the ban just as they accepted the daily rise of the sun. On Wednesday, September 5, as the storm of 1900 moved toward Havana, Dunwoody wrote to Stockman: “A very bitter opposition is being made both officially and through the newspapers, to the order prohibiting the transmission of weather bureau dispatches, by cranks on the island.
“I am not certain whether my position will be sustained by higher officials, but I have made the issue on the basis of good service. Of course, it will be necessary for you to furnish the press with good reliable warnings, in order to defend the stand I have taken.”
Dunwoody stood firm, and for the moment prevailed. The War Department allowed the ban to continue.
STOCKMAN AND THE observers in his network took special pains to avoid using the word hurricane, except when absolutely necessary or when stipulating that a particular storm was not a hurricane. They took what might be called a behavioralist approach to storms. They collected readings of temperature, pressure, and wind, and based solely on these, determined whether a storm existed or not. They sent clipped telegrams in a code that did not allow for conjecture or expressions of instinct, yet in their seeming precision produced the same sense of mastery over the weather that daily weather journals gave to men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. To Stockman, the tropical storm then making its way over Cuba was the sum exactly of its parts, no more and no less. And the parts did not add up to much. On Saturday, September 1, he released the bureau’s evaluation of the storm to the Diario de la Marina, in Havana. “A storm of