Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [55]
Examples of Cuban errors comprised the bulk of the letter. The Cubans loved to dash off alarming forecasts. It seemed to Stockman that a big part of his job was simply to counter the panic their forecasts produced.
Stockman devoted half his letter to the storm that had come through Cuba earlier that week. A perfect example.
Nothing much had come of the storm, yet the Cubans had called the storm a cyclone ever since the first sighting in the final days of August. On Wednesday, September 5, Jover had actually called it a hurricane.
Jover’s forecast had moved Stockman to add a few reassuring words to his own advisory: “No dangerous winds are indicated.”
Any comparison of U.S. and Cuban forecasts regarding this latest storm, Stockman assured Dunwoody, “will show that the forecasts of this Bureau were verified in every particular; and that the conditions which obtained did not warrant the issuance of a forecast likely to cause any alarms whatsoever.”
All in all, Stockman felt, it was an excellent letter: muscular, understated, full of detail. Eighteen pages, yes, but every word in those eighteen pages had value. Stockman sealed the letter.
It was Friday, September 7, and from the look of the latest observations telegraphed from St. Kitts, Barbados, and the other West Indies stations, the weekend would be a peaceful one. The entire season had been peaceful. No hurricanes at all, other than the imaginary ones concocted by Jover and Gangoite. Any rational man could see the need for limiting the telegraphic flow of their reports.
These people—they saw hurricanes in their sleep.
FATHER GANGOITE REMAINED troubled by atmospheric signs that suggested the storm, while no longer a threat to Cuba, had undergone a dramatic transformation.
He saw a large and persistent halo around the moon, which indicated the presence of the high, thin clouds first identified by Father Vines as signs of a hurricane. Gangoite was up at dawn the next day, composing a dispatch for La Lucha. He would have to deliver it by hand.
“At day-break,” he wrote, “the sky was an intense red, cirrus clouds were moving from the W by N and NW by N, with a focus at these same points; these are clear indications that the storm had much more intensity and was better defined than when it crossed this island. It is, we think, central in Texas, probably at the WSW of San Antonio and northward of the city of Porfirio Diaz.”
He could not resist tweaking the Americans and their mistaken belief that the storm would cross to the Atlantic, as if storms could behave one way, and one way only.
“Now some articles have been written saying that the disturbance from the SE had moved by the first quadrant out over the Atlantic; we think however that we still have it in sight as it passes through the Gulf, and that it is at present in the 4th quadrant, between Abilene and Palestine.
“Who is right?”
PART III
Spectacle
OBSERVATION
Saturday, September 8: Buford T. Morris, a real-estate agent who lived in Houston but spent weekends in Galveston at his house a few blocks from the wharf, happened to look out his bedroom window at first light.
“The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl; gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Never had I seen such a beautiful sky.”
GULF OF MEXICO
The Pensacola
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING the Pensacola swung from her anchor in seas turned luminous by lightning and exploding rain. Each great swell seemed to bring the ship closer and closer to disintegration. Captain Simmons and his two guests, Menard and Carroll, held tight to rails and bulkheads, trying hard in the manner of the age not to show their fear. All night the ship’s steel beams howled like wolves. Wind keened among the deck rails and boom wires. To the first officer, it seemed as if the ship were caught at the convergence of two storms, a gale