Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [85]
The sisters drew the children to the girls’ dormitory at the back of the building, away from the beach. They heard the crash of wood and brick behind them as the boys’ dormitory fell into the Gulf. The storm advanced through the building quickly and systematically, as if hunting the children. The chapel disappeared. Windows shattered. Hallways rose and fell like drawbridges. The children sang.
The sea and wind burst into the dormitory. In seconds, the building failed. Ninety children and all ten sisters died. Only Will, Albert, and Francis survived, all by catching hold of the same floating tree.
Later, a rescuer found one toddler’s corpse on the beach. He tried lifting the child. A length of clothesline leaped from the sand, then tightened. He pulled the line. Another child emerged. The line continued into the sand. He uncovered eight children and a nun.
Sister Camillus had hoped the clothesline would save the children, but it was the clothesline, rescuers saw, that caused so many to die, tangling them in submerged wreckage.
AUGUST ROLLFING SAT alone in his shop on 24th Street waiting for his men to come for their pay. As the storm worsened, his anxiety increased. Water began coming into his shop. The wind accelerated. It rolled up the tin roofs across the way, then hurled them to the ground like spent shell casings. Boards and glass shrapneled the street. August had money for eighteen workers. No one came.
He locked his shop and set out to join his family, with absolute faith that the driver from Malloy’s Livery had in fact done as he had asked and that now his family was safe at his mother’s house. He struggled west. He got as far as the city waterworks at 30th Street between Avenue G and Avenue H, when the wind picked him up “like a piece of paper” and blew him out of the water onto a sidewalk. He hugged a telephone pole. In a lull between gusts, he crawled to the waterworks building and entered. He found the lobby full of storm refugees.
The building seemed sturdy enough. What worried the occupants was its tall smokestack, which swayed through the sky like a giant black cobra. If it fell—when it fell—everyone in the building stood an excellent chance of being crushed. Whenever the wind paused, a group of refugees would dash out onto the sidewalk.
Rollfing left, accompanied by two black men. They went first to a grocery store, which soon became too dangerous. They moved next to a private house. A beam fell and killed a man. They moved on, until they saw a light in the window of another store.
August and his companions banged on the door. At first, the occupants refused to let them in. Finally they relented.
It was nearly dark now. In the shuddery glow of lanterns and candles, August saw that the store was crowded with about eighty men, women, and children, all standing on countertops to keep out of the water. But the water was rising fast. August found a place on a counter. Soon the water was at his ankles, then his chest. August lifted someone else’s son onto his shoulders as the water rose to his own neck.
He spent hours this way, until a man shouted, “The water is going down! Look at the door!”
The water had indeed reversed flow. The store owner pulled out a large jug of whiskey and passed it around the room. Men and women alike took great swallows and passed it on.
August wanted desperately to leave for his mother’s house to join his wife and children and make sure they were still safe. The water receded quickly, but to him its exit seemed to take forever. Rain continued cascading from the darkness; the wind seemed little changed.
At last the water level fell low enough to enable him to leave. Outside, he saw that houses had been shattered and upended. He stumbled