Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [57]
Partly this was the fault of the Weather Bureau—its forecasters had failed to identify the storm as a hurricane and to recognize that it was not following the rules. The bureau’s West Indies service was so busy trying to downplay the danger and show up the Cubans that it apparently missed whatever signs the Cubans saw that convinced them the storm had suddenly become more violent. And Willis Moore’s obsession with control and public image guaranteed that no one in the Galveston office would even whisper the word hurricane without a formal authorization from Moore himself.
It was also the fault, however, of the city’s newspapers and the editorial customs of the time. Certainly anyone who read that morning’s Galveston News could be forgiven for not taking the storm too seriously.
At the turn of the century, newspaper editors expected readers to read everything and packed their pages tight with items that ranged in length from a single sentence to several full columns. They sprinkled news throughout each day’s edition with what late-twentieth-century readers would consider mindless abandon. Late-breaking stories got shoe-horned into whatever space happened to be available, because composers had neither the time nor the will to break apart existing plates of type. On Sunday, September 2, for example, a reporter told in extraordinary detail the story of a well-dressed young man beheaded by a switch locomotive in a freak accident on Galveston’s wharf—how the head had disappeared, and no one knew the man’s identity. The reporter even gave readers the color of the dead man’s underwear. Later that night, at about 3:00 A.M., police found the man’s head (it had been deposited atop an axle housing, hat still in place) and soon afterward identified the victim as an engineer off the steamship Michigan who somehow had stumbled in front of the locomotive. The editors ran both stories, four pages apart.
In fact, Saturday’s edition of the News was a gold mine of weather information, in the sense that fragments of the story were lodged throughout the paper like nuggets on an abandoned claim. Nearly everyone in Galveston read the News that morning. They found the first weather story on page 2—a report about a storm that had struck the Florida coast. The second item was only one sentence long and appeared on page 3, describing how the same storm was “raging” along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts as of 12:45 A.M. Saturday, the time at which the dispatch was filed.
On another page, the newspaper published the routine daily weather forecast out of Washington:
“For western Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Indian territory: Local rains Saturday and Sunday; variable winds.
“For eastern Texas: Rain Saturday, with high northerly winds; Sunday rain, followed by clearing.”
The most substantial story appeared on page 10 and reported that the Weather Bureau now believed the tropical storm in the Gulf “instead of moving north, had changed its course,” and was moving toward the northwest. “The early indications were that the storm would probably strike land somewhere east of Texas, and make its way across land westwardly.” The report downplayed the storm. “The weather bureau officials did not anticipate any dangerous disturbance, although they were not in a position to judge just what degree the storm may reach or develop when it strikes Texas.”
Early Saturday morning, apparently just before deadline, someone at the paper added a paragraph to this story, seeking to pack the paper with the freshest news possible. “At midnight the moon was shining brightly and the sky was not as threatening as earlier in the night. The weather bureau had no late advices as to the