Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [77]
The battering continued. By now all four galleries had been torn from Isaac’s house, all slate stripped from its roof.
The trestle was a yard away.
IN DALLAS, THREE hundred miles north, the telegraph operator at the Dallas News, sister to the Galveston News, realized the steady flow of cables from the Galveston paper had ceased. The two newspapers maintained a leased telegraph line that ran directly between their editorial offices. The telegrapher at the Dallas paper keyed off an inquiry, but got no response. He tried again. Again nothing. He then tried raising Galveston over public lines by relay through Beaumont, and next by sending a message to Vera Cruz, Mexico, for relay to Galveston via the Mexican Cable Company (whose Galveston agent had only a few hours to live).
Again he failed.
At that moment, City Editor William O’Leary was in the office of the Dallas paper’s manager, G. B. Dealey, showing Dealey a passage in Matthew Fontaine Maury’s best-selling Physical Geography of the Sea that seemed to show “that destruction of Galveston by tropical storm could not happen.”
The wires remained dead.
THE LEVY BUILDING
Vital Signs
SATURDAY EVENING, JOHN Blagden, the new man temporarily assigned to Galveston, found himself alone in the office. He had been in the city all of two weeks and here he was alone in the dark, facing a storm whose intensity seemed to place it in the realm of the supernatural.
The Levy Building was four stories tall and made of brick but in some gusts, Blagden said, it “rocked frightfully.” Bornkessell, the station’s printer, had left for home first thing in the morning. Isaac had gone home next, followed by Joseph. Ernest Kuhnel, a clerk, was supposed to be in the office but had fled the building in terror.
The storm flag was gone, as were the anemometer, rain gauge, and sunshine recorder. The telephone had stopped ringing. There was nothing for Blagden to do but watch the barometer and try to keep himself sane. He estimated the wind at 110 miles an hour.
The hurricane had set a course toward Galveston soon after leaving Cuba, and had stayed on that course ever since, as if it had chosen Galveston as its target. It had a different target, however. The great low-pressure zone that had formed over the Pacific Coast earlier in the week had progressed to where it now covered a broad slice of the nation from Texas to Canada. The hurricane saw this low-pressure zone as a giant open door through which it could at last begin its northward journey.
The storm’s track intersected Galveston’s coastline at a ninety-degree angle, with the eye passing about forty miles west of the city somewhere between Galveston and the Brazos River. Meteorologists discovered this later when officers aboard an Army tug stationed at the mouth of the Brazos reported a pattern of winds that showed the eye had passed somewhere east of their position. The pattern in Galveston indicated the eye had passed to the west of the city. This was the worst-possible angle of approach, for it brought the hurricane’s most-powerful right flank directly into the city.
Blagden knew nothing of the storm’s track. What he did know was that the first shift in wind direction, from north to northeast, had brought a sudden acceleration in wind speed. And now he sensed the wind beginning to shift again, toward the east. Impossibly, the change seemed to bring another increase in velocity. Gusts struck the building like cannonballs.
Barometric pressure had fallen all day, but at five o’clock Galveston time it began to fall as if someone had punched a leak into the instrument’s mercury basin. At five, the barometer read 29.05 inches.
Nineteen minutes later, 28.95.
At 6:40 P.M., 28.73 inches.
Eight minutes later, 28.70.
An hour later, the barometer read 28.53 inches, and continued falling. It bottomed at 28.48.
Blagden had never seen it that low. Few people had. At the time, it was the lowest reading ever recorded by a station of the U.S. Weather Bureau.
In fact, the storm drove the pressure even lower,