Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [7]
He had stumbled into the deadliest storm ever to target America. Within the next twenty-four hours, eight thousand men, women, and children in the city of Galveston would lose their lives. The city itself would lose its future. Isaac would suffer an unbearable loss. And he would wonder always if some of the blame did not belong to him.
This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.
PART I
The Law of Storms
The Storm
Somewhere, a Butterfly
IT BEGAN, AS all things must, with an awakening of molecules. The sun rose over the African highlands east of Cameroon and warmed grasslands, forests, lakes, and rivers, and the men and creatures that moved and breathed among them; it warmed their exhalations and caused these to rise upward as a great plume of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen, the earth’s soul. The air contained water: haze, steam, vapor; the stench of day-old kill and the greetings of men glad to awaken from the cool mystery of night. There was cordite, ether, urine, dung. Coffee. Bacon. Sweat. An invisible paisley of plumes and counterplumes formed above the earth, the pattern as ephemeral as the copper and bronze veils that appear when water enters whiskey.
Winds converged. A big, hot easterly raced around a heat-induced low in the Sahara, where temperatures averaged 113 degrees Fahrenheit, heat scalded the air, and winds filled the sky with dust. This easterly blew toward the moist and far cooler bulge of West Africa. High over the lush lands north of the Gulf of Guinea, over Ouagadougou, Zungeru, and Yamoussoukro, this thermal stream encountered moist monsoon air blowing in from the sea from the southwest. The monsoon crossed the point where zero latitude and zero longitude meet, and entered the continent over Nigeria. Where these winds collided, they produced a zone of instability. The air began to undulate.
THE SEAS WERE hot. The land was hot. Throughout much of the United States temperatures rose into the nineties and often broke 100. Heat suffused the Rockies, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and a vast swath of country from the Gulf all the way to Pennsylvania. At 3:00 P.M. on Saturday, August 11, the temperature in Philadelphia hit 100.6 degrees. There was no air-conditioning. Trains were hot. Suits were black wool. Dresses were taffeta, mohair, gabardine. Carriages had black canvas tops, black-enameled bodies. Passengers roasted. Horses glistened. That same Saturday, thirty people in New York City died of heat prostration. Three children died when they fell from fire escapes where they had hoped to find a breeze. A high-pressure zone stretched from the Midwest far into the Atlantic and halted the flow of air over much of the nation. There was no breeze to find. “The air near the surface of the earth became superheated,” wrote Prof. E. B. Garriott, the Weather Bureau’s chief forecaster at the time. “Considered as a whole, the month of August, 1900, was the warmest August on record generally from the upper Mississippi Valley over the Lake region, Ohio Valley, and Middle Atlantic States.”
Which meant the heat embraced most of the nation’s population. Everyone shared in the suffering. What made the heat wave exceptional was not the maximum temperature recorded from city to city, but the sheer persistence of the heat. Springfield, Illinois, reported the longest hot spell in twenty years: twelve consecutive days with temperatures of 90 or higher. The men at Weather Bureau headquarters suffered deeply as the mercury hit or surpassed 96 degrees seven days in a row. In August, mean temperatures in Albany, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Erie, New York, and Philadelphia were the highest they had been since the bureau began keeping formal records in 1873.
In Galveston there was heat and rain.