Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

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Isaac's Storm

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by Erik Larson, Isaac Monroe Cline - A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History.

The winds were mild; the skies were clear. On Friday, September 7th, 1900, most of the thirty seven thousand residents of Galveston were looking forward to a quiet weekend. Within two days, however, more than a fifth of them would be dead, and their city of splendid homes & broad clean streets, their city of oleanders and roses and palms would be swept away or reduced to rubble.

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Pub. Date: July 2000
Paperback - First Vintage Books Edition

The winds were mild; the skies were clear. On Friday, September 7th, 1900, most of the thirty seven thousand residents of Galveston were looking forward to a quiet weekend. Within two days, however, more than a fifth of them would be dead, and their city of splendid homes & broad clean streets, their city of oleanders and roses and palms would be swept away or reduced to rubble. In hardcover, Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm brought the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900 to present consciousness. This paperback edition will honor the centennial of this tragic event, the greatest disaster in American history.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people - possibly as many as 10,000 - would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Meticulously researched and vividly written, ISAAC'S STORM is based on Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. It is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last uncontrollable force. As such, ISAAC'S STORM carries a warning for our time.

Michael Kenney - Boston Globe

If the predictions of meteorologists are on target, this could be the most timely book of the next two months: This year's Atlantic hurricane season is supposed to produce more, and perhaps more intense, storms than in any recent year.

But if a major hurricane does menace the New England coast, Isaac's Storm will not be the most comfortable book to have by the bedside as the wind shrieks and the waves rise.

The storm in question - its designation as Isaac's is another question - is the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900. It was a storm of truly frightful proportions, turning a thriving, bustling city into a wasteland of rubble in which were buried the bodies of as many as 8,000 of its residents.

Erik Larson's accomplishment is to have made this great-storm story a very human one - thanks to his use of the large number of survivors' accounts - without ignoring the hurricane itself.

The storm crossed Cuba on Sept. 4 and was predicted to turn north toward the Atlantic coast. Instead, it steered across the Gulf of Mexico and made landfall just south of Galveston. The conventional wisdom of the time held that Galveston's sloping offshore shelf would temper the force of storm-driven waves, and there are accounts of children playing in the surf just hours before the hurricane-force winds drove the sea over the beach and far into the city.

By early evening, Larson writes, ''the sea had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long'' that was ''so tall, so massive that it acted as a kind of seawall'' - except that as the waves shoved it forward, ''it scraped the city clean of all structures and all life.''

This is clearly more than ''Isaac's storm.'' Building the story around one character is a useful device, but perhaps it was done mainly as an (over-)reaction to the impersonality of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm.'' True, Isaac Cline is an easily identifiable character, and there is a serious question about whether, as head of the weather bureau, he fatally underestimated the potential for destruction from a storm hitting Galveston. But curiously, the story seems to stall whenever Cline becomes the focus - and too often Larson has to pump up his central character with ''what was Isaac thinking'' speculation. And frankly, Larson's bit players too often upstage Cline.

Among the incidents that capture the physical and emotional impact of the storm surge is that experienced by merchant (and amateur meteorologist) Samuel O. Young. His house was six blocks in from the beachfront, and his family was safely out of town, so Young stayed, watching the storm's progress from his second-floor windows. Curious about ''a heavy thumping that seemed to come from a downstairs bedroom,'' he went to investigate. Looking down the stairwell, he saw that the water had risen almost to the top step. ''The heavy thudding ... had to be furniture. A bureau, perhaps, bumping against the ceiling as the water rose and fell.''

By that time, in the early evening, only one other house still stood in Young's immediate neighborhood: that of a family named Youens. As Young watched, he saw it ''begin a slow pirouette.'' In his account, ''Mr. Youens' house rose like a huge steamboat, was swept back and suddenly disappeared.'' Knowing that the parents and their two children had remained inside, he said, ''my feelings were indescribable as I saw them go.''

And there are dozens of other vividly recounted incidents that could be singled out to illustrate the dimensions of the story and Larson's skillful telling of it.

It is a tribute to his control of his material - and of his writing - that there is only one moment at which he seems to have allowed his emotional response to overtake the story.

''Suddenly,'' Larson writes, ''the prospect of watching their children die became very real'' for families trapped in their houses. ''Whom did you save? Did you seek to save one child, or try to save all, at the risk of ultimately saving none? ... And if you saved none, what then? How did you go on?''

The sophisticated reader may find the emotionalism unsettling, a lapse in literary judgment. But ultimately, as the accounts of just such situations multiply thumping like Mr. Young's furniture at the reader's consciousness - that series of questions universalizes the account of one storm in one place at one time. The storm, the place, the time, after all, could be here and now.

Craig Offman - Salon

In a crucial scene in Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, meteorologist Joseph Cline warns some residents that they should evacuate before a storm hits their town. But another meteorologist -- his older brother, Isaac -- insists they should stay. The debate takes place on Sept. 8, 1900 -- shortly before the hurricane slams into the thriving Texas town and kills thousands of people in a cataclysm that remains the most fatality-heavy natural disaster in U.S. history.

Isaac's Storm takes place in an era when the field of meteorology was just getting off the ground. While weather-watchers like Isaac and Joseph Cline had a strong faith in their scientific abilities, they obviously didn't have the technology that could have blessed their forecasts with more accuracy.

Despite his failings as a scientist, it is Isaac rather than his brother who has gone down in Galveston-area legend as the Paul Revere who warned residents to leave before the hurricane raged into town. Nearly two weeks after the storm, the New York Evening Sun noted that "the warnings which were sent out by Dr. [Isaac] Cline are said to have saved thousands of lives along the coast."

But in the new book's account, Isaac is an incompetent rather than a soothsayer, misreading the fatal portents in the atmosphere. Now Larson, a Time magazine contributor who started researching his book five years ago, has run into some local resistance to his revisionist take.

Meteorologist Lew Fincher, vice president of the Houston chapter of the American Meteorological Society, thinks Larson has made Isaac a scapegoat. Fincher defends Isaac's role in the hurricane: "I think he studied everything he could. He was going by the knowledge that they had with them in the bureau."

According to Isaac's Storm, the two brothers barely spoke after the storm; by the time they both died -- within a week of each other in 1955 -- they hadn't been in touch "for years." But Fincher says that he has read both brothers' journals and that Larson overdramatized their relationship: "I think that he was trying to come up with a personal conflict to make the book more human. I've read a lot on both of those guys, and there's nothing out of the ordinary that any brothers wouldn't have experienced."

According to Fincher, Larson neglected to read an account in a book that was published shortly after the storm, The Story of the Galveston Flood, in which the brothers are quoted speaking of each other quite warmly. The cold, stilted tone of their letters he shrugs off as a combination of their very formal Victorian higher education and their military background. On a scientific note, he takes exception to Larson's classification of the hurricane as a Category 5 storm: "I'd call it a 4, maybe a 3." (Nevertheless, he considers Larson's book "a great read.")

Larson, however, is adamant in his insistence that his reporting is dead on. "There's pretty good evidence that the legend is not completely accurate," he said on the phone from his Seattle home. "Most likely [Isaac] did go to the beach and warn some people -- but did he warn 6,000? I don't see how that is possible." Alluding to documents he found at the National Archives, he said that two accounts point to Isaac's telling some people to stay in Galveston.

As for the strain in the brothers' relationship, Larson says that he assumed it was common knowledge and insists that he had no authorial motive to bend the truth: "It would have been an equally good story if they hadn't have been rivals, but you've got to call them as you see them." Larson says that one formidable expert, Neil Frank (whom Fincher calls "the Babe Ruth of hurricanes"), mentioned the rivalry to him. When pressed for the source of his information about the epic silence between the brothers, he referred to Frank and to an article in the Southwest Quarterly. (Neither is cited in the book as a source for the information.) Larson maintains that he, like Fincher, read the journals of both men very closely and that the tension is unmistakable. According to Larson, although Joseph endured the storm with his brother, his lengthy account of it never mentions Isaac. "It's either funny or very tragic," Larson says.

As far as his classification of the storm, Larson concedes the controversy but stands by his reasoning. "Officially it was a 4," he says. "Having spent two and a half years of intense research on this storm, I'm convinced it was a 5. The bottom line is that no one can know for sure." (After all, nobody back then had Air Force planes to monitor oncoming storms.) Larson also says that he gave the manuscript to Hugh E. Willoughby, a leader in the field of hurricane research, and Willoughby had no problem with the classification. ("Any lingering errors are entirely my fault, not his," Larson's acknowledgment notes, using the standard formula.)

The meteorological journal Weatherwise cited a host of what it deemed factual errors in Isaac's Storm, which didn't prevent it from giving the book a rave review. Putting it in a class with Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air -- hugely popular books that have also been called into question for their accuracy -- Weatherwise calls Larson's narrative "reading at its best."

Jeffrey Bolster - NY Times Book Review

...richly imagined and prodigiously researched...A gripping account, horridly fascinating to its core, and all the more compelling for being true...Few historical reconstructions sustain such drama.

John Christian Hoyle - The Christian Science Monitor

Larson based the book on Cline's well-documented and sometimes personal reports of the storm as well as testimony from people who survived the hurricane....[A] classic tale of mankind versus nature � which once again describes the capricious and sometimes deadly nature of weather.

Publishers Weekly

Torqued by drama and taut with suspense, this absorbing narrative of the 1900 hurricane that inundated Galveston, Tex., conveys the sudden, cruel power of the deadliest natural disaster in American history. Told largely from the perspective of Isaac Cline, the senior U.S. Weather Bureau official in Galveston at the time, the story considers an era when "the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself." As barometers plummet and wind gauges are plucked from their moorings, Larson (Lethal Passage) cuts cinematically from the eerie "eyewall" of the hurricane to the mundane hubbub of a lunchroom moments before it capitulates to the arriving winds, from the neat pirouette of Cline's house amid rising waters to the bridge of the steamship Pensacola, tossed like flotsam on the roiling seas. Most intriguingly, Larson details the mistakes that led bureau officials to dismiss warnings about the storm, which killed over 6000 and destroyed a third of the island city. The government's weather forecasting arm registered not only temperature and humidity but also political climate, civic boosterism and even sibling rivalries. America's patronizing stance toward Cuba, for instance, shut down forecasts from Cuban meteorologists, who had accurately predicted the Galveston storm's course and true scale, even as U.S. weather officials issued mollifying bulletins calling for mere rain and high winds. Larson expertly captures the power of the storm itself and the ironic, often catastrophic consequences of the unpredictable intersection of natural force and human choice. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.