Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [99]
But there was no other way to tell the story. Isaac sent it to Moore with a cover letter in which he wrote, “My personal experience was so interwoven with the progress of the storm that it appears that I should include it in the report. If it should not be embodied in the report please omit that portion.
“Very respectfully,
“Your obediant servant,
“I. M. Cline.”
WASHINGTON
A Letter from Moore
ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, as hundreds of fires still burned in the city, Isaac Cline read the Houston Post and there saw an angry letter from Willis Moore defending the Weather Bureau’s performance in forecasting the hurricane. The letter troubled Isaac. Moore’s account veered from reality; why was he changing the story?
Moore had written to the Post in response to an editorial that accused the bureau of having failed to predict and track the storm. The editorial stated: “The practical inutility of the national weather bureau, for certain sections of the country, at least, was never so conspicuously shown as on Friday and Saturday last when South Texas was left without any warning of the coming storm, or at least its severity.” The editorial then quoted the forecasts for Texas that had been wired from the bureau’s Central Office just before the storm. “With the weather bureau saying that Saturday would be ‘fair; fresh, possibly brisk, northerly winds on the coast’ of East Texas, who would have looked for the most destructive hurricane of modern times on that coast on that date?”
Moore, in a five-page letter, protested that on Friday morning storm signals were raised in Galveston and “a few hours later” were changed to hurricane signals. He called Isaac “one of the heroic spirits of that awful hour,” and offered a dramatic, but incorrect, account of Isaac’s day. “When the last means of communication with the outer world had failed he, instead of going to the relief of his own family, braved the furies of the storm and the surging waters and, reaching a certain telephone station at the end of a bridge, succeeded in sending out from the doomed city the last message that was received until after the passage of the storm.… After performing this service for the benefit of the whole people he returned to his own home, to find it destroyed and his wife and one child lost.”
Isaac, at this point, still considered Moore a personal friend. It hurt him, no doubt, that Moore had distorted the story of his experience in the storm. Isaac had lost his wife and home, and had nearly lost a daughter, but Moore could not be bothered with the actual details. What troubled Isaac most was Moore’s statement that an order to raise hurricane warnings had been sent to Galveston and that hurricane flags had been raised as early as Friday. It simply wasn’t true.
Isaac clipped Moore’s letter and an accompanying blurb in which the Post’s editors stated they had gladly printed Moore’s response because they had no desire “to captiously find fault” with the bureau, adding archly, “We would all rather believe that the weather service was valuable than that it was of no use to the public.” Isaac mailed the clippings to Moore that day, with a cover letter that was defensive but also obliquely critical of Moore. Isaac insisted he had done all he could on Saturday. In fact, he told Moore, he had just spoken with an editor of the Galveston News who had assured him that his station’s warnings had saved “more than 5,000 people.”
Isaac ignored Moore’s distortion of his personal ordeal, but quietly disputed his claim that the Central Office had ordered hurricane signals raised. “Regarding the warnings received at Galveston I desire to say that the hurricane warning never reached us,” Isaac wrote. The last