Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [6]
Isaac knew the low-pressure center of the storm had to be somewhere off to his left, out in the Gulf. It was a fundamental tenet of marine navigation, one he explained during a lecture at the Galveston YMCA on a Saturday evening in 1891. Large crowds gathered for such talks. They consumed the spoken word the way later men would consume television. In the northern hemisphere, Isaac told his audience, the winds of tropical cyclones always move counterclockwise around a central area of low pressure. “Stand with your back to the wind,” he said, “and the barometer will be lower on your left than on your right.”
The swells came very slowly, at intervals of one to five minutes. To lay observers, this slow pace might have seemed reassuring. In fact, the slowness made the swells far more ominous, a principle Isaac only vaguely understood. Many years later he would write, “If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells … told us in unerring language was coming.”
ISAAC TURNED HIS sulky around and headed back toward his office. The breeze was now head-on and ruffled the mane of his horse. The oyster-shell paving gave way to heavy wooden blocks and these imparted to the sulky a beat like that of a swiftly moving train. The north wind brought Isaac the perfume of a waking city: the clean, almost minty, smell of freshly cut lumber from the Hildenbrand planing mill; coffee from bulk roasters in the alley between Mechanic and Market; and always, everywhere, the scent of horses.
At the Levy Building, Isaac walked the three flights to the bureau, stopped inside for a moment, then continued up to the roof. To the east and south he saw the sea; to the west, the spires of St. Patrick’s Church, still under construction. The bureau’s storm flag, a single crimson square with a smaller black square at its center, rippled from a tower.
The barometer showed that atmospheric pressure had fallen only slightly from the night before. “Only one-tenth of an inch lower,” Isaac said.
Nothing in the sky, the instruments, or the cables from Washington indicated a storm of much intensity. “The usual signs which herald the approach of hurricanes were not present in this case,” he said. “The brick-dust sky was not in evidence in the smallest degree.”
Even so, the day felt wrong. Ordinarily, offshore winds kept the surf and tides down, but now, despite the brisk north wind, both the surf and tide were rising. It was a pattern new to Isaac.
He drove his sulky back to the beach. He again timed the swells. He noted their shape, their color, the arc they produced as they mounted the sand. They were heavier now and pushed seawater onto the streets closest to the beach.
Isaac returned to his office and composed a telegram to the Central Office in Washington. He ended the telegram: “Such high water with opposing winds never observed previously.”
Isaac’s concern was tempered by his belief that no storm could do serious damage to Galveston. He had concluded this on the basis of his own analysis of the unique geography of the Gulf and how it shaped the region’s weather. In 1891, in the wake of a tropical storm that Galveston weathered handily, the editors of the Galveston News invited Isaac to appraise the city’s vulnerability to extreme weather. Isaac, father of three, husband, lover, scientist, and creature of the new heroic American age, wrote: “The opinion held by some who are unacquainted with the actual conditions of things, that Galveston will at some time be seriously damaged by some such disturbance, is simply an absurd delusion.”
At the top of the Levy Building the anemometer spun. The wind vane shifted ever so slightly. The self-recording barometer etched another tiny decline.
FAR OUT TO sea, one hundred miles from where Isaac stood, Capt. J. W. Simmons, master of the steamship Pensacola, prayed softly to himself