You Did What__ Mad Plans and Great Historical Disasters - Bill Fawcett [53]
Now, the Weather Bureau was still in its infancy, but the people manning the Galveston division were pretty confident in their skills. Certainly more confident than they were of the skills of the Cubans they had defeated just two years earlier when Teddy Roosevelt led his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. The Cuban weathermen meant well, decided the Galveston Weather Bureau, but after all, they were just illiterate peasants, right?
So when, on September 7, 1900, Cuba began reporting that the biggest storm anyone had ever seen was heading right toward Galveston, the Weather Bureau was so sure they were totally mistaken and panicking needlessly that they refused to make the Cubans’ warnings public.
After all, everyone knew that Galveston couldn’t suffer serious damage from a storm. Either it would turn away before reaching shore, or it would pass right over and blow itself out somewhere over the vast Texas prairie.
But by the morning of September 8, it became apparent to Cline and his coworkers that the storm wasn’t going to turn away and miss Galveston. In fact, it was apparent to everyone in the city. All they had to do was look to the south and east and see what was approaching.
Should they evacuate the city? they wanted to know.
Certainly not, Cline and the Weather Bureau assured them. This is Galveston, not some shantytown that’s likely to get blown away by a strong wind. Our houses are well built, we’re sitting right on the slope of the Gulf coastline, and haven’t you ever seen a thunderstorm before?
So the people — most of them, anyway — trusted their government bureaucrats and stayed put.
At least until the water became knee-high, and then waist-high, and then neck-high. Pretty soon those who hadn’t fled the town were perched on their roofs.
And pretty soon after that there weren’t any roofs, because the houses began collapsing, and boats capsized, and bodies — infants and the elderly at first, then men and women in their primes — began floating down the streets, through the windows, over the vanished roofs.
And still the storm continued.
At one point a train from Beaumont entered the town but halted well short of the station. The passengers wanted to leave and find some high ground, or at least some rooftops, for safety. The conductors, hearing the reassurances of the Weather Bureau, urged the passengers to remain where they were. After all, this was a train, a massive thing of steel. Surely no storm can harm it or wash it away, and you don’t have to take our word for it; just ask the Weather Bureau.
Ten passengers looked out the window, said, in essence, “Bullshit!,” and waded and swam through the rampaging water to try to find some safe haven. Eighty-five passengers believed the bureaucrats of the Weather Bureau and stayed with the train.
By the next morning, all eighty-five were dead.
I should add that this wasn’t entirely the fault of Cline and his Galveston bureaucrats. They were in contact with a branch of the bureau in the West Indies, which was anxious to show up the Cubans — their recent enemies — and to prove that these Spanish peons were pressing the panic button needlessly.
Of course, back in Galveston, by the time it became clear that, if anything, the Cubans were underestimating the danger, no one could find the panic button. It was hidden under tons of water.
So did help rush in, as Americans have always helped their own and others?
Nope.
You see, Cline was in control of the forecasting, but his immediate superior, Willis Moore, was in control of the whole damned Galveston Bureau, and Moore was more concerned with Galveston’s — and his bureau’s — image than with saving citizens that he had convinced himself weren’t really in all that much danger to begin with. So a call for help never went out.
The city’s newspapers colluded with the bureau, and downplayed the story. In fact, an unpublished editorial in the Galveston Tribune the morning