“As we watched from the porch were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good,’ we thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.'”

The deadliest hurricane in U.S. history was not the one that hit New Orleans last year. It was the Galveston hurricane of September 8,1900; author Eric Larson calls it “Isaac’s Storm.” (Hurricanes did not begin receiving official names from the U.S. Weather Bureau until the late 1940’s.) Isaac Cline was the chief weatherman for the U.S. Weather Bureau on Galveston Island in the year of the hurricane.

This history is not the best organized one I’ve ever read. The narrative skips back forth from Thursday to Saturday to Friday and back again. However, I did learn some fascinating facts about the Galveston Hurricane and about Isaac Cline:

1) Before being sent to Galveston, Isaac Cline was stationed at Fort Concho in West Texas, a fact which is of interest to me because I was born and grew up in San Angelo, Texas, the town that formed in the shadow of Fort Concho.

2) On Galveston Island at least 6000 people died in the hurricane, possibly as many as 10,000. Records were not carefully kept, and the dead had to be buried or burned rather quickly to prevent disease.

3) In 1891 Isaac Cline wrote that “[t]he coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to causes known in meteorology as accidental.” The two hurricanes of which he wrote struck Indianola, Texas in 1875 and again in 1886. After the second hurricane, the town was abandoned.

4) After the Indianola hurricanes, the residents of Galveston did make plans to build a seawall, but it was never built—until after 1900.

5) The storm surge in 1900 covered the island with water, uprooted trees, toppled houses, and carried masses of debris that did as much damage as the water itself.

6) Isaac Cline’s pregnant wife, Cora, died in the hurricane, and Cline’s brother, Joseph, who also worked for the Weather Bureau, became estranged from Isaac apparently as a result of the events of that day.

The most interesting aspect of the story was the failure of the U.S. Weather Service to warn Galveston of the approaching hurricane. Weather forecasting methods were not as sophisticated or accurate as they are now, but other problems included a rivalry between the U.S. Weather Bureau in Cuba and Cuban weather forecasters and a reluctance to frighten the public with possibly false alarms. In fact weather forecasters were not even allowed to use the word “hurricane” in their forecasts without permission from Washington. This failure followed upon the the failure of the weather service to warn the public of the Blizzard of 1888 and both caused people to further lose faith in the ability of the weather service to predict storms and precipitated changes in the organization and leadership of the weather bureau in order to improve its performance.

Nevertheless, we are dealing with some of the same problems today. When is it prudent and/or necessary to tell the people of a large metropolitan area to evacuate in the face of a possible hurricane? How accurately, even now, is it possible to predict the path of such a hurricane? Can we trust the instructions given by government bureaucrats, or should we trust our own judgment? Even as the freeways backed up and became impassable in Houston before Rita, we were being told not to leave yet, but rather to wait until the next day. Was this advice, heeded by hardly anyone, good or bad? Would it really be possible to evacuate Galveston Island and the coastal areas behind the Island and up towards Houston in the face of a major storm? Would people listen to evacuation notices, or was Rita the “false alarm” that would cause people to stay home and take their chances rather than face gridlock and dehydration and gas lines on the freeways again?

Lots of unanswered questions even 100 years after the Galveston Hurricane that practically destroyed that city once. By the way, hurricane season in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico officially begins today.