Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [79]
Another ingredient is geography. In 1876 Henry Blanford, a meteorologist in India, proposed that the configuration of the Bay of Bengal contributed greatly to the immense storm tides that came ashore during typhoons. Blanford thought of these tides as great waves. Every cyclone raised them, “but it is only when the wave thus formed reaches a low coast, with a shallow shelving foreshore, such as are the coasts of Bengal and Orissa, that, like the tidal wave, it is retarded and piled up to a height which enables it to inundate the flats of the maritime belt, over which it sweeps with an irresistible onset.”
Despite such reports, Isaac and his colleagues in the bureau believed that a hurricane’s most lethal weapon was the wind. They did not see the parallels. Isaac, like the famous Commodore Maury, believed the shallow slope of the seabed off Galveston would wear down incoming seas before they struck the city, and had argued in his 1891 News article that mainland areas north of Galveston Bay would serve as basins to capture whatever floodwaters a storm did manage to drive ashore.
The hurricane of 1900 would cause a hasty reevaluation. In October, in the Weather Bureau’s Monthly Weather Review, one of the bureau’s leading lights, Prof. E. B. Garriott, belatedly observed that Galveston’s geography and topography in fact “render it, in the presence of severe storms, peculiarly subject to inundation.”
A storm’s trajectory can also increase the destructive power of a surge. If a hurricane strikes at an oblique angle, it spreads its storm surge over a broader swath of coast, thereby dissipating the surge’s depth and energy. The Galveston hurricane struck the Texas coast head-on, at a nearly perfect ninety-degree angle, after traveling a long, unobstructed fetch of some eight hundred miles. The track focused the onshore flow directly into the city.
The track produced another lethal effect, however. It brought north winds to Galveston Bay twenty-four hours before landfall. Throughout most of Saturday, these intensified to gale force and finally to hurricane force. Due north of Galveston Island, the bay offers an unobstructed fetch of about thirty-five miles (about the same fetch as presented by Lake Okeechobee). And just as in the freak Galveston blizzard of February 1899, the wind blew the water out of Galveston Bay—this time into the city itself.
In effect, the storm’s trajectory made Galveston the victim of two storm surges, the first from the bay, the second from the Gulf, and ensured moreover that the Gulf portion would be exceptionally severe. Throughout the morning, the north winds kept the leading edge of the Gulf surge out at sea, banking the water and transforming the Gulf into a compressed spring, ready to leap forward the moment the winds shifted.
The first shift, from north to east, began at about two o’clock Saturday afternoon, Galveston time. This allowed some of the Gulf surge to come ashore. Water flowed over the Bolivar Peninsula and began rising within the shaft of the Bolivar Light. It flowed too over Fort San Jacinto and Galveston’s East Side, where it met the floodwater already driven into the city from the bay. The reason so many men and women in Galveston began furiously chopping holes in their beloved parlor floors was to admit the water and, they hoped, anchor their homes in place.
At 7:30 P.M., the wind shifted again, this time from east to south. And again it accelerated. It moved through the city like a mailman delivering dynamite. Sustained winds must have reached 150 miles an hour, gusts perhaps 200 or more.
The sea followed.
Galveston became Atlantis.
AVENUE P½
The Wind and Dr. Young
ABOUT SEVEN O’CLOCK, Dr. Young heard a heavy thumping that seemed to come from a downstairs bedroom on the east side of his house. He lit the candle that he had held in reserve and walked toward the hall stairwell, the candle throwing only a shallow arc of light on the floor around him. Pistol-shot drafts penetrated deep within the house and caused the candle’s flame to twist, but