Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [47]
THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, at 6:00 A.M., William Stockman sent a dispatch that placed the storm 150 miles north, by east, of Key West.
It was a grave mistake, for it colored the expectations and perceptions of the bureau’s Central Office at a critical point in the storm’s journey. Stockman’s guess—and that’s all it was, a guess, armored in the certainty of the age—provided a framework into which Moore’s forecasters eagerly fitted other incoming observations.
Two hours later, the Central Office issued its 8:00 A.M. national weather map for Thursday, along with a prediction that “the storm will probably continue slowly northward and its effects will be felt as far as the lower portion of the middle Atlantic coast by Friday night.”
The Weather Bureau transmitted the map and its notes via the impossibly intricate web of telegraph wires that ran along every railroad right-of-way in the nation. The report caught the attention of fishermen in Long Branch, New Jersey, who cabled Washington: “Advise quick about storm unable decide about taking out nets.”
Moore liked messages like this. They showed that his efforts to increase the bureau’s credibility were beginning to pay off. The bureau’s own scientists had always believed that one day they would be able to make accurate long-range forecasts; the most enthusiastic hoped they might even learn to make rain and quash hail. It was the public that had always questioned the bureau’s competence. At last that skepticism was beginning to weaken. Many shippers, railroad agents, and cotton traders had grown as dependent on the bureau as the Galveston police had on electricity.
At 2:15 Thursday afternoon, Moore sent a reply to the Long Branch fishermen: “Not safe to leave nets in after tonight. Wind likely to increase from northeast beginning tomorrow morning.”
Moore’s telegram showed that the bureau was still convinced the storm was barreling north, bound ultimately for the Atlantic. The bureau had few hard facts about the storm, yet what is remarkable about its cables that day is the complete absence of doubt or qualification.
A week later, with Galveston in ruins, Cuba’s Julio Jover paid a visit to Colonel Dunwoody. Emboldened by disaster, Jover sought to confront Dunwoody on the telegraph ban, but the conversation expanded to include the efficacy of hurricane prediction.
As the interview gained heat, Dunwoody grew frustrated. He told Jover, “You had better go to the Belen College Observatory and there study a work which I wrote about meteorology—see if what I said about the prediction of cyclones is not a question of divination, as a cyclone has just occurred in Galveston which no meteorologist predicted.”
Jover, incredulous, paused a moment. He said, slowly, as one might address the inmate of an asylum: “That cyclone is the same one which passed over Cuba.”
“No sir,” Dunwoody snapped. “It cannot be; no cyclone ever can move from Florida to Galveston.”
KEY WEST
M Is for Missing
AT 7:00 A.M. Galveston time, Thursday, September 6, Joseph Cline made the station’s morning observations, coded them, and had a messenger carry the report to the Western Union office on the Strand, where it entered the great surge of weather details that crowded the nation’s telegraph lines that morning, and every morning. Joseph reported normal atmospheric pressure of 29.974 inches and a temperature of 80 degrees, markedly lower than the night before. The sky was clear and blue. Such fair weather must have been reassuring to Joseph and Isaac—the best evidence yet that the tropical storm was at that moment racing toward the Atlantic. Only much later, as meteorologists came to understand the strange physics of hurricanes, would such intervals of fair weather in the path of a tropical cyclone take on a more menacing cast.
In Washington, a legion of clerks at the Central Office processed the incoming blizzard of weather data and quickly constructed the morning’s national map, which the office then telegraphed back to every station in the country. Each station then added a local