Isaac's Storm

"Zebrowski proposed that the answer might lie in the science of 'nonlinear dynamics': chaos theory and the famous butterfly effect. He framed the question this way: 'Could a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?'"

At the turn of the century, America's faith in science and reason as a method for explaining and predicting natural phenomena peaked. As Larson Ernest Zebrowski, Jr. points out, the factors involved in forming a massive hurricane may be too numerous for even the most advanced scientists and mathematicians to calculate.

"There were many things you could be in the new America, but a coward was not one of them."

Throughout the book, Larson seeks to analyze the collective psyche of America at the turn of the century. This observation is reflected in both the Weather Bureau appointees, who failed to issue timely hurricane warnings because they didn't want to look like alarmists; and the Galveston residents who refused to leave their homes for higher ground, even as the storm raged around them.

"Such detailed journals told nothing about the fundamental forces that powered the weather, but they gave the men who kept them a sense of mastery over nature. By recording the weather, quantifying it, comparing it year to year, they demystified it at least to the point where storms ceased to be punishments meted by God.”

When Larson describes the daily weather journals kept by men like Thomas Jefferson, he perceives a desire for control so great that even the illusion of control was enough to satisfy them. The steadfast belief in this illusion, however, would arguably exacerbate the collective hubris of Americans by the start of the 20th century.

"No navy could have made such short work of the military might of the world's greatest powers. Clearly hurricanes posed a greater menace than any single nation's forces."

Over the course of the book, Larson explores the extent to which the weather—far from being something trivial or commonplace—can magnify a host of issues related to the national interest, from racism to national security.

"Now a farmer could get a daily report from the Weather Bureau. 'In the past the man had been first,' Frederick Taylor wrote, 'in the future the system must be first."

While national institutions like the Weather Bureau have access to far greater resources and information than any one individual, the degree to which individuals will come to rely on these institutions for guidance—even when that guidance contradicts what they can see with their own eyes—becomes potentially problematic. This is particularly true when a given institution operates on the whims of individual bureaucrats, like the Weather Bureau did in the days and hours leading up to the Galveston hurricane.

"The system, [Weather Bureau chief Willis Moore] told Congress, helped explain why Weather Bureau employees had to be committed to insane asylums more often that employees of any other federal agency. He said this with pride."

Even though the book concerns what many would describe as an "act of God," Larson identifies a number of human villains in the tragedy of the Galveston hurricane, none more insidious than US Weather Bureau chief Moore. Even before his bureau makes critical errors in the lead-up to the hurricane, Moore is shown as a ruthlessly ineffective manager, who in his capacity as the head of a major federal agency is driven by personal quirks and agendas.

"Wilson arranged a meeting between himself, Moore, and President William McKinley. Moore spread out a map of the Caribbean featuring the tracks of past hurricanes. McKinley studied the map, then turned to the secretary. 'Wilson,' he said, 'I am more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than I am of the entire Spanish navy."

While Larson would likely agree with President McKinley's conclusion, it is tragically ironic that despite this recognition of hurricanes' devastating effects, so little was done as one bore down on Galveston. Based on several other passages, this is likely because no hurricane had caused massive damage to Galveston in the past, and so much of what politicians and bureaucrats believed they knew about tropical storms came from past events, rather than a careful consideration of facts.

"[Isaac] had met the most feared of all meteorological phenomena, yet had lived through it with only a case of seasickness. The experience had to have influenced his appraisal of the survivability of hurricanes. On some level, perhaps, he came to believe that hurricanes were not quite as awful as Piddington, Redfield, and Dampier had depicted. Or he assumed that technology—in this case, the modern steamship—had stripped hurricanes of their power to surprise and destroy."

Here, Larson identifies two different strains of Isaac's hubris concerning hurricanes. First, Isaac allows his personal experience to color his view of hurricanes, even though as a scientist he should have realized this experience is statistically irrelevant to how hurricanes in the past and future behave. Second, Isaac's blind faith in the technological progress of the late-19th century to beat back ruin and devastation from natural phenomena is in keeping with the broader national psyche of America Larson describes elsewhere.

"Like Moore, Stockman worried about the damage likely to occur through the issuance of unwarranted storm alerts. In the Indies service, however, this concern took on a colonial cast. The poor, ignorant natives were too easily panicked. Restraint was the white weatherman's burden. It was paramount, he wrote, that the service avoid causing 'unnecessary alarm among the natives.'"

In describing the tension between the Cuban and US weather services and the frequent disparity between their reports, Larson lays bare the degree to which even something as seemingly objective as a weather forecast is affected by the racism and colonial prejudices prevalent among white Americans at the turn of the century.

"Nearly every Cuban alive had experienced at least one major hurricane. Cuban meteorologists had the same instruments as their American counterparts, and took the same measurements, but read into them vastly greater potential for evil. The Cubans wrote of hunches and beliefs, sunsets and forboding [sic]. Where the Americans saw numbers, the Cubans saw poetry. Dark poetry, perhaps—the works of Poe and Baudelaire—but poetry all the same."

While Larson may be guilty of his own sense of exoticism in this passage, he makes a strong argument that the Cuban weather service forecasts are not the work of alarmist natives as Moore and his lieutenants believe, but rather prudent vigilance on the part of individuals who again and again have seen the devastation wrought by hurricanes firsthand.

"In the age of certainty, at the gateway to the twentieth century, the expected was as good as fact. To turn was every storm's destiny."

Larson argues that the reason US meteorologists could hardly conceive that the hurricane would head straight toward Galveston rather than turn up the Atlantic Coast was a slavish devotion to past observations. This devotion was fed by the hubris of the era, along with a comforting yet plainly illusory belief that the past offered everything meteorologists needed to know about the future.

"They knew just enough to believe they had nothing to fear."

Here, Larson characterizes the turn of the 20th century as an inflection point for human knowledge and progress. The past decades had brought with them so many new technologies and discoveries that individuals across the Western hemisphere believed they had finally grasped and harnessed the secrets of the natural world. Yet they were about to be violently disabused of these notions by a hurricane whose strength, size, and trajectory would completely baffle even the top experts in the field of meteorology.

"The transformation was stunning: One moment a nondescript tropical storm, the next, a hurricane of an intensity no American alive had ever experienced. The storm did not grow through some gradual accretion of power; it exploded forth like something escaping from a cage. The Weather Bureau of 1900 had a code word for winds of 150 miles an hour—extreme—but no one in the bureau seriously expected to use it."

On one hand, the transformation of the hurricane was so rapid and dramatic, one could argue there was little forecasters could do to adequately warn the city of Galveston. On the other hand, the speed with which the storm evolved is all the more reason why every second counted, and why even small delays caused by bureaucratic incompetence and an overreliance on faulty institutional knowledge had outsized effects on the amount of death and devastation residents could have avoided.

"The Tribune never published the editorial. The storm flooded the presses. Many decades later, Ousley's daughter Angie would describe the flooding as an event 'which did much to preserve my father's reputation for editorial profundity."

There is perhaps no greater irony to be found in the story of the Galveston hurricane than in this anecdote, in which Galveston Tribune editor Clarence Ousley, during the early hours of the storm, writes an editorial predicting little damage and no loss of life from the hurricane. The only thing that stops Ousley's completely wrong predictions causing a considerable about of personal embarrassment for him is the storm itself, which floods the Tribune's presses and stops its Sunday edition.

"Ritter's Café was gone. Men were dead. It was the thing that at last brought fear to Galveston."

The way Larson chronicles the collapse of Ritter's Café and the instant deaths of at least five men inside effectively captures the terror of the moment when many Galveston residents finally realized this was not like other storms they had seen. One moment, wealthy businessmen are seen laughing, eating oysters, and drinking cocktails, the next moment these men are dead. It gravely highlights their tenuous grasp on security, exposed here as an illusion all along.

"The first 'intimation' of the true extent of the disaster, Benjamin recalled, 'came when the body of a child floated into the station.'"

Like in the previous quote, Larson shows that no matter how strong the winds or how severe the flooding, only death—in this case, that of a child—makes people afraid of the weather. When that transition from security to fear takes place, it is jarring and absolute.

"The guns boomed well into the night. Marie Berryman Lang, daughter of the assistant lighthouse keeper, remembered it all so clearly: the waves that slammed against the lighthouse as the water rose within its base and drove the two hundred refugees ever higher up its spiral shaft; the heat and desperate humidity that caused the children to cry for water; and all the while, beyond the chaos, that lonesome booming of the guns, like the drumbeat of an Army cortege. 'It was the poor soldiers,' she learned the next morning, 'crying for help.'"

Here as elsewhere, Larson puts readers in the minds of those experiencing the storm firsthand, only explaining the exact nature of what they see and hear after the fact. That the military fort on Galveston Island begins to fire their weapons is initially as confusing to the reader as it must have been for Marie. Are they firing to warn others to stay away? Are the booming sounds the result of explosives set off inadvertently by the storm? It is only at the end of the passage that the reader discovers the grim truth behind the artillery fire.

"Thinking his family safe in San Antonio, he prepared for the storm's arrival—prepared, that is, to enjoy it, and savor every destructive impulse. Young was a member of that class of mostly landlocked men who believed God put storms on earth expressly for their entertainment."

While Larson's characterization of Dr. Young's storm "preparation" is especially rife with hubris, anyone who's ever sat on a porch to enjoy a summer thundershower can empathize with Dr. Young's view of weather as entertainment. It's a very fine line, however, between when a storm inspires wonder and when a storm inspires terror.

"Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk ultimately of saving none? Did you save a daughter or a son? The youngest or your firstborn? Did you save that sun-kissed child who gave you delight every morning, or the benighted adolescent who made your day a torment—save him, because every piece of you screamed to save the sweet one? And if you saved none, what then? How did you go on?"

Here, Larson details the grave choices many of the Galveston hurricane victims faced. It is also a reminder that while the size and strength of the storm rendered most of its victims powerless, others were given a grim sense of agency—illusory or not—in the matter of how best to protect their children.

"A single cubic yard of water weighs about fifteen hundred pounds. A wave fifty feet long and ten feet high has a static weight of over eighty thousand pounds. Moving at thirty miles an hour, it generates forward momentum of over two million pounds, so much force, it fact, that at this point during the storm the incoming swells had begun destroying the brand-new artillery emplacements at Fort Crockett, which had been designed to withstand Spanish bombardment."

Even after witnessing the destruction caused by hurricanes and floods, it can be difficult to grasp just how powerful and devastating such a large, fast-moving mass of water can be. Here, Larson captures that power in such a way that it makes it seem less like a storm and more like a warzone.

"'I am an old soldier,' General McKibben said later. 'I have seen many battlefields, but let me tell you that since I rode across the bay the other night and helped the man at the boat to steer to keep clear of the floating bodies of dead women and little children, I have not slept one single moment.'"

Much as the storm itself is likened to a warzone earlier, General McKibben here uses the aftermath of a bloody battle as a point of comparison to describe the trail of destruction the hurricane left in its wake.

"'It is,' [Clara Barton] wrote, 'an unfortunate trait in the human character to assail or asperse others engaged in the performance of humanitarian acts.'"

Larson writes that when Clara Barton, nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, arrives in Galveston to help in relief efforts, she is attacked by journalists and other outsiders for preying on the ravaged community as a play for publicity for herself and her organization. While Larson doesn't interrogate the reasons why this may be, it is possible these observers attack humanitarians to assuage their own guilt over not doing more to help.

"The more they studied hurricanes, the more they realized how little they knew of their origins and the forces that governed their travels. There was talk that warming seas could produce hyper-canes twice as powerful as the Galveston hurricane."

In writing of modern meteorologists, Larson suggests that while technology and their understanding of hurricanes has improved over the past century, they take the opposite outlook of their turn-of-the-century counterparts. For instance, rather than knowing just enough to believe themselves invincible, modern meteorologists know so much that it makes them realize how little they really know.