Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [68]
Now the telephone at the station rang incessantly. He heard fear in the voices of the men and women at the other end. They told him fantastic stories about water up to their necks, waves striking their front doors, the collapse of the big bathhouses along the beach, and a strange inundation of tiny frogs—thousands of them. And he had seen the remains of Ritter’s with his own eyes.
“The storm swells were increasing in magnitude and frequency and were building up a storm tide which told me as plainly as though it was a written message that great danger was approaching,” he wrote later. He drove, he claimed, from one end of the beach to the other, shouting a warning to everyone he saw. “I warned the people that great danger threatened them, and advised some 6,000 persons, from the interior of the State, who were summering along the beach to go home immediately. I warned persons residing within three blocks of the beach to move to the higher portions of the city, that their houses would be undermined by the ebb and flow of the increasing storm tide and would be washed away. Summer visitors went home, and residents moved out in accordance with the advice given them. Some 6,000 lives were saved by my advice and warnings.”
His story, however, does not mesh well with other accounts of the day. Of the hundreds of reminiscences in the archives of Galveston’s Rosenberg Library, none mentions Isaac Cline aboard his sulky sounding the alarm. And there simply were not enough locomotives or coaches to accommodate the crush of refugees that, if his account were correct, would have sought to flee the city throughout the morning. The last train to arrive was Kellogg’s GH&H train from Houston, at 1:15 P.M.; it could not have survived the journey back to the mainland. R. Wilbur Goodman took the last trolley of the day toward the beach and heard no talk of the storm among his fellow passengers. Many people did eventually leave their homes, but only after water began flowing over the wood planks of their galleries and under their front doors. By 2:30 P.M., Galveston time—the time Isaac says he recognized “that an awful disaster was upon us”—the streets within three blocks of the beach were already impassable.
Isaac’s and Joseph’s accounts diverged in subtle ways that seemed to shed light on their later estrangement.
Isaac reported that at 2:30 P.M. he sat down to write an urgent cable to Willis Moore, “advising him of the terrible situation, and stat[ing] that the city was fast going under water, that great loss of life must result, and stress[ing] the need for relief.” He gave this to “my assistant,” Joseph L. Cline, to carry to the telegraph office. “Having been on duty since 5 a.m. [four o’clock Galveston time], after giving this message to the observer, I went home to lunch.”
Joseph gave himself a less passive role. “At 3:30 p.m. [2:30 Galveston time] I took a special observation to be wired to the Chief at Washington. The message indicated that the hurricane’s intensity was going to be more severe than was at first anticipated. About this time, my brother paused in his warnings long enough to telephone from the beach the following fact, which I added to the message: ‘Gulf rising rapidly; half the city now under water.’ Had I known the whole picture, I could have altered the message at the time of its filing to read, ‘Entire city under water.’ ”
Joseph enciphered the message, then fought his way to the Strand. “The entire pavement of wooden blocks throughout the business section was afloat and up to the level of the raised sidewalks, bobbing up and down like a carpet of corks.” In places, he said, the water was knee-deep. He went first to the Western Union office, but learned its wires had been down for two hours. He walked to the nearby Postal Telegraph office, and heard the same news. “I made my way painfully back again, through the top crust of wooden blocks, to the weather bureau.”
It suddenly dawned on him to use the telephone. He called the telephone company and asked for a direct long-distance connection