The Deadliest Storm

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It dumped biblical amounts of rain on Cuba but brought only moderate winds. The U.S. observers, technocrats of a brilliant new age, saw nothing to be concerned about. The Cubans, however, were suspicious. Poets of the air, they watched the sky as the storm left the island and saw in its red lights and wispy clouds the spore of disaster. Father Lorenzo Gangoite, a leading Cuban meteorologist, called these atmospherics "clear indications that the storm had much more intensity and was better defined than when it crossed this island."

Tweaking the U.S. observers, he wrote, "Who is right?"

Soon after leaving Cuba, the storm underwent an explosive intensification: one moment a nondescript tropical storm, the next, a hurricane of an intensity no American alive had ever experienced. Sea captains were the first to experience its new incarnation. On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 5, the steamer Louisiana left New Orleans under bright skies. By the next afternoon, its captain was fighting winds of 150 m.p.h. Horizontal rain clattered against the bridge with the sound of bullets against armor. Wherever the wind gained entry, it spoke, moaning among the cabins and corridors like Marley's ghost. The hull flexed. Beams twisted. The captain watched his barometer fall to levels he had never seen. The master of another ship, the Pensacola, summoned a passenger to his barometer. "Look at that glass," he said. "Twenty-eight point fifty-five. I have never seen it that low. You never have, and will in all probability never see it again." It continued to fall.

In 1900 the Weather Bureau enciphered its observations before transmitting them over telegraph lines. It had a code word for winds of 150 m.p.h.--"Extreme"--but no one in the bureau seriously expected to use it. The bureau's forecasters, prisoners of the expected, believed tropical cyclones always curved toward the northeast to end up in the Atlantic off the eastern seaboard. The official forecast for Galveston for Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900, called for rain followed by clearing.

Death in the Water
The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl," a visitor to Galveston said of that Saturday morning, "gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Never had I seen such a beautiful sky." But the great swells that morning made Isaac Cline uneasy. Ordinarily the Gulf was as placid as a lake, a quality that had seduced engineers into building great Victorian bathhouses on stilts well into the sea. A streetcar trestle snaked over the surf. Many years later Cline would write, "If we had known then what we know now of these swells, and the tides they create, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells told us in unerring language was coming."

The hurricane had a forward speed of about 10 m.p.h., but its powerful winds were producing waves that moved at 50 m.p.h. and reached the Texas coast long before the storm itself. They rose within the storm as jagged ship killers, but once beyond the storm's circle of influence, they settled into long, slow undulations of the kind that startled Columbus on his very first voyage to the Indies. Although they lost their jagged shape, they retained the energy originally transferred to them by the wind. As they met the gradual slope of the Texas coast, their leading edges slowed and the trailing water piled up, creating waves of incredible heights.

Upon leaving the beach, Cline drove his sulky to his office at the center of town. He checked the station's instruments and found only a slight decline in barometric pressure. "Only one-tenth of an inch lower," he wrote. The bureau's Central Office had at last sent orders to hoist a storm flag, but this telegram gave no cause for alarm. Such warnings in August were routine. There was nothing routine about the sea, however, or the ominous feel of the morning. Isaac drove his sulky back to the beach and again timed the swells. They were heavier now and pushed seawater well into the neighborhoods nearest the beach. He returned to his office and composed a telegram to Willis Moore, chief of the bureau in Washington. He ended the telegram: "Such high water with opposing winds never observed previously."

According to popular legend and his own memoirs, he raced to the beach and warned thousands to flee. There is evidence, however, that his response may have been more ambivalent. Saturday morning, for example, a sea captain, George B. Hix, stopped by the weather station to ask about the strange weather, and was told by one of Cline's colleagues "there was no cause for uneasiness." The storm was only a harmless "offspur" of a storm that had struck Florida a few days earlier. "Well, young man," Hix snorted, "it's going to be the damnedest offspur you ever saw."