Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [45]
The Cubans took a more romantic view, a psychoanalytic approach, that was the product of the island’s long and tragic experience. Nearly every Cuban alive had experienced at least one major hurricane. Cuban meteorologists had the same instruments as their American counterparts, and took the same measurements, but read into them vastly greater potential for evil. The Cubans wrote of hunches and beliefs, sunsets and forboding. Where the Americans saw numbers, the Cubans saw poetry. Dark poetry, perhaps—the works of Poe and Baudelaire—but poetry all the same.
They were wary from the start. On August 31, Julio Jover reported his assessment of the atmosphere to La Lucha in Havana. Barometric pressure had begun to rise, he noted—but he saw no comfort in the fact: “This, far from proving to us that the indications of a cyclone are vanished, reaffirms our opinion of the unstable equilibrium of the atmosphere, and therefore of the increase in energy of the center of low [pressure] which is over the Caribbean Sea.”
The next day, Belen’s Father Gangoite released to La Lucha his view that the storm, while at the moment a small one, appeared to be “a cyclonic disturbance in its incipiency.… This kind of storm sometimes produces heavy rain over this island, and acquires greater energy as it moves out over the Atlantic.”
Father Gangoite was right about the rain—
Between noon and 8:00 P.M., Monday, September 3, Santiago received over 10 inches. The rain kept coming. By Friday, the total reached 24.34 inches, enough vertical flow to fill a claw-foot bathtub.
—but Gangoite was right, too, about the energy.
NEW ORLEANS
Captain Halsey’s Choice
AT 9:20 A.M. Wednesday, Captain T. P. Halsey of the steamship Louisiana, then moored in New Orleans, ordered his crew to cast off the main hawsers and make for the Gulf. He saw a red-and-black storm flag rippling in the wind at Port Eads, Louisiana, but believed he had nothing to fear. Nothing in the reports from the Weather Bureau indicated conditions capable of threatening a modern steamship—there was no reference at all to gales or cyclones, no indication whatsoever that the storm could be a hurricane, or even had the potential to become one.
And if a cyclone did materialize, so what? He had survived eight so far.
The Weather Bureau’s reluctance to use words like hurricane and cyclone inadvertently reinforced the bravado of sea captains like Halsey. Many mariners still believed that whether a ship encountered a storm or not was largely a matter of chance, so why worry? It was an ethos of resignation born of the frequency with which hurricanes took the ships and lives of even the best captains. Wrote Piddington, in a late edition of his Sailor’s Horn-Book, “we must expect to find many ‘of the old school’ who do not like ‘new-fangled notions;’ many who ‘do not like to be put out of their way;’ many who ‘think the old plan is good enough;’ and that ‘hit or miss, for luck’s all,’ is quite enough with a stout ship and a good crew.” Modern technology helped perpetuate this ethos. Steel and steam produced ever-stouter ships. Engines reduced the worst storm hazards—the loss of control after sails were furled, the imbalance imparted by suspending tons of timber, canvas, brass, and rope high above a ship’s deck. Technology was an elixir for last-minute qualms.
The Louisiana entered the main body of the Gulf at 5:22 P.M. Halsey’s barometer read 29.87 inches. Winds were from the east-northeast, the top-left quadrant of a cyclone. The storm itself was moving toward the northwest. If Halsey had held one of Henry Piddington’s transparent storm cards on a chart over his position, he would have seen that his ship now lay directly in the cyclone’s path.
To be concerned, however, he first had to know that a cyclone even existed. All Halsey knew was that a nondescript tropical storm was at that moment