What’s in it for me? Discover the fascinating story behind one of America’s worst natural disasters.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Galveston, Texas was a city with boundless promise.
It had a diverse population that coexisted with a remarkable level of harmony.
Galveston was a place of prosperity for many.
But that all changed on September 8, 1900.
By the time the sun rose on September 9, thousands would be dead, buildings disintegrated, hopes crushed.
It was the worst natural disaster to hit the United States at that time, and it forever changed the course of the city’s history.
Isaac Cline quickly rose through the ranks of the Weather Bureau to run the Galveston, Texas office.
In these blinks, you’ll learn how scientific hubris caused a massive storm to reach without warning; how the storm forced families to make dreadful decisions; and why some mysteries around the storm still persist.
The federal Weather Bureau started through an act of Congress in 1870.
At that time it was called the Signal Corps, and its purpose was to not only provide detailed weather reports on the interior, but also for outer territories that served as bases of military operations or trade destinations.
However, by 1882, there were problems.
The chief financial manager got caught embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars, employees were found to be making up forecasts, getting drunk, and using their offices for a variety of extracurricular activities.
It was a mess.
What the company needed was smart, diligent employees.
People like Isaac Cline.
The key message here is: Isaac Cline quickly rose through the ranks of the Weather Bureau to run the Galveston, Texas office.
Isaac grew up in Monroe County, Tennessee, a land where tornadoes and summer lightning storms offered dangerous, mysterious, and exciting displays of weather’s awesome power.
Isaac always had a focus to his studies, and later his career.
So when the Signal Corps sent letters to colleges, seeking potential candidates to help fill its ranks, Isaac was recommended by no less than the president of his college.
Indeed, Isaac had a keen scientific mind and was a perfect match for the Weather Bureau.
He arrived for duty in Washington, D.
C.
, on July 6, 1882, and later wrote, “.
.
.
it was just the kind of work I wanted.
” Isaac trained at Fort Myer, where he learned the telegraph code that agents used to send information around the country.
For example, “Paul diction sunk Johnson imbue hersal.
” These six words actually meant: “St.
Paul 29.
26 inches barometric pressure, -4 degrees temperature, wind six miles per hour, maximum temperature 10 degrees, dewpoint -18 degrees.
This observation was at 8:00 p.
m.
and the local prediction called for fair weather.
” Isaac learned this coded language, how to use and read weather monitoring equipment, and also how to send messages through the use of flags, torches, and the light and mirror technique known as heliography.
He was a rising star, and was soon tasked with helping to train new recruits.
He kept a tidy workstation and even found spare time to go to medical school, from which he graduated in 1885.
And by 1889, he was married, with a daughter.
In other words, he was a perfect agent.
A shining example of the best the Signal Corps had to offer.
The kind of agent who could help the program move past the scandals and bad reputation that had been dogging it for years.
So, in 1889, Isaac was put in charge of the struggling bureau station in Galveston, Texas.
Popular scientific opinion suggested that strong hurricanes would never hit Galveston.
In the 1890s, scientific progress was being made, but much was still unknown.
Certainly, when it came to weather, many things remained a mystery.
And yet, preeminent meteorologists like Isaac Cline were starting to believe that they understood hurricanes.
Long before that, in the 1840s, the English sea captain Henry Piddington had published a series of papers followed by a book, The Horn-Book for the Law of Storms for the Indian and China Seas, that described the basic features and nature of a hurricane.
It even provided other sea captains with a set of cards that allowed them to take wind readings and accurately position themselves in proximity to the center of the storm.
And yet, 50 years later, there would still be much that science didn’t know about hurricanes.
The key message here is: Popular scientific opinion suggested that strong hurricanes would never hit Galveston.
Isaac had eye-witness experience with tornadoes, bizarre hail storms, and floods.
He knew there was a scientific reason for all of these, even if others were more inclined to chalk them up as freakish anomalies.
He recognized patterns.
He could see that changes in data like drops in barometric pressure preceded many severe storms.
So, being the confident man he was, Isaac made a bold prediction in an article published in the Galveston Daily News on July 15, 1891.
He claimed that Galveston Island, which sits along the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico, was most certainly safe from the threat of hurricanes.
He explained what he knew: how the rotation of the earth contributed to wind patterns, and how along the equator these forces can create “cyclones” (a relatively recent addition to weather terminology that means “coils of a snake” in Greek) that move from the western coast of Africa to the eastern coast of the United States.
He maintained that cyclones always turned north when they moved along the Bahamas and Cuba, which means they tend to go up the eastern coast of the United States, and not into the Gulf of Mexico.
As Isaac saw it, Galveston would never find itself in the path of one of these cyclones.
What’s troubling about this contention isn’t just that Isaac’s foolhardy claim was wrong.
His article actually mentions two recent exceptions that should have been seen as proof that hurricanes were most definitely a possibility.
He’d noted that the town of Indianola, which sits just 150 miles southwest of Galveston, had been hit by two hurricanes: one on September 16, 1875, and another on August 20, 1886.
The first one killed 170 people.
The second caused so much death and destruction, the town was abandoned.
Even so, somehow, Isaac considered these to be anomalies.
Galveston, in his estimation, was safe.
Until it wasn’t.
As Isaac’s reputation blossomed in Galveston, weather communiqués with Cuba were blocked in an attempt to bolster the Bureau’s damaged one.
When he first encountered Galveston, Isaac found an exciting, vibrantly diverse town that was on the rise in many respects.
Galveston sits along the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico in southeast Texas, making it a convenient port town for trade and commerce.
It also had a railway station, meaning that it could bring in travelers both by land and sea.
Isaac quickly made a name for himself as the man in charge of the local Weather Bureau station.
He established himself as a smart, respected man of science, and given his fondness for fancy clothing and walking sticks, it was hard to miss him on the streets.
The key message here is: As Isaac’s reputation blossomed in Galveston, weather communiqués with Cuba were blocked in an attempt to bolster the Bureau’s damaged one.
In addition to his wife and young daughter, he was also accompanied by his younger brother Joseph Cline, who before landing alongside him at the Weather Bureau, had spent a few years bouncing between odd jobs.
As it happened, Joseph proved that he too had a talent for weather, and with his brother on the team, Isaac made the Galveston branch a jewel within the Bureau.
This sibling relationship, however, was always hampered by rivalry.
By 1894, Joseph had become one of the most accurate weather forecasters in the Bureau, with his name routinely at the top of the lists created by the Bureau’s verification unit.
He proudly pointed this achievement out, yet it didn’t win him the kind of acclaim received by Isaac.
For example, in late 1893, a glowing inspection review was sent to the Department of Agriculture.
It didn’t mention Joseph, but it praised Isaac as being peerless, with “none better” working in the field.
Simply put, Joseph had trouble getting out from under Isaac’s shadow, and there was some apparent resentment.
Meanwhile, across the Gulf of Mexico, there was an office that wasn’t running as smoothly.
The Cuban branch of the Weather Bureau was a source of much conflict for the Bureau chief, Willis Moore.
Moore wanted control, especially when it came to what was written on the official weather reports sent from every office in the region.
Having been shrouded in scandal, the Bureau needed to gain the respect and trust of the people.
This meant no more wildly inaccurate forecasts.
On March 12, 1888, for instance, the Bureau predicted “fair weather” for New York City.
What happened instead was “the Blizzard of ’88,” which left 400 people dead.
This is exactly the kind of thing Moore wanted to put a stop to.
And, in this regard, he didn’t trust the Cuban forecasters.
So, in an ill-judged move, he silenced them by having the government block all outgoing weather cables from the island.
The problem with silencing the Cuban meteorologists is that few people are more familiar with hurricanes.
The hurricane began with little warning and few sensing the real danger.
You don’t live long on the island of Cuba without getting first-hand experience of tropical storms and cyclones.
One Cuban meteorologist, Julio Jover, reported some worrying signs on Friday, August 31, 1900.
Barometric pressure readings were unstable, which suggested activity over the Caribbean Sea that could very well be a cyclone.
Jover’s report got to the local paper, La Lucha, and the Weather Bureau station in Havana.
But it seemed like yet another reason for the cable ban because there was that word: “cyclone.
” If that got out it would surely cause undue panic.
The official reports from the Bureau believed it to be a tropical storm, and so their official reports predicted it would turn north and travel up the coast of Florida like storms are supposed to.
The key message here is: The hurricane began with little warning and few sensing the real danger.
The report in La Lucha warned of heavy rain and that the storm would likely gain in intensity as it got into open water.
It was right on both counts.
On Monday, September 3, 10 inches of rain fell on Santiago, Cuba.
On the morning of Saturday, September 8, Isaac Cline stood on the beach of Galveston Island.
They’d been in the midst of an unusually sweltering heat wave and the barometer readings had been giving him cause for concern all week.
What was going on?
The waves that morning were not reassuring; they were battering the supports for the elevated rail car tracks that ran over the beach.
By the afternoon, Isaac’s own story suggests that he’d finally read the signs correctly – that a dangerous storm was approaching.
As he later explained, he proceeded to warn people along the beach and likely saved hundreds or thousands of lives.
But there’s little evidence to suggest that Isaac’s story is in fact what happened.
What we do know for sure is that many families received no warning.
In the morning, many kids were excited by the fantastic spray that was shooting up into the air as the water pounded against the shore.
People were relieved that the heat wave had finally broken.
Men pulled up their collars and fought the wind and rain to get to work, just like any other day.
For the women in Galveston, however, something in the air was noticeably different.
By 11:00 a.
m.
, water was rushing along the streets and reaching the tops of the high sidewalks that were built to control minor flooding.
Over at the Palmer house, Mae Palmer called her husband Judson, who was at work, and pleaded for him to come home.
It was 1:00 p.
m.
, and the yard to the house was underwater.
Rain was pouring from the sky; it was going to get worse before it got any better.
People sought safety as the storm began to bear down on Galveston.
Judson Palmer did come home early that afternoon.
It was becoming clear that this was more than just a bad storm.
This was something no one in Galveston had ever seen before.
Palmer was the secretary of the local YMCA and, like Isaac, a central figure in the community.
Once he got home, he wanted his wife and six-year-old son to go to the YMCA.
It was a big, sturdy building – surely one of the safest in town.
Meanwhile, he would stay and look after the house.
Mae was having none of it.
He’d just got back, she was relieved to see him, and they were going to remain together, either at the house or at the YMCA.
So they decided to stay at the house.
The key message here is: People sought safety as the storm began to bear down on Galveston.
Over at the Rollfing house, a similar scene played out.
What started out as an exciting morning soon grew bleak when the kids showed up to report that the storm had broken apart the bathhouses at the beach.
This was worrisome to Louisa Rollfing.
Those bathhouses were made with thick, sturdy wood.
They’d been there forever.
Around 2:30 p.
m.
, we do have an account of Isaac warning someone.
On the quickly-flooding streets he ran into Anthony Credo, who lived near the beach in a large two-story house.
Isaac admitted to him that he’d underestimated this storm.
In a matter of minutes, the winds had dramatically increased, from what some people were assuming was already in excess of 50 miles per hour.
Isaac then passed the Palmer house.
Judson Palmer waved him over from his window.
Isaac had to wade through the yard to meet him.
As he did so, he passed toads.
Everywhere, toads were covering any material that could float.
It was a bewildering sight.
Palmer asked Isaac if they should stay home or try to move downtown.
The Palmer house seemed quite sturdy.
Isaac recommended they stay put.
Isaac believed both the Palmer residence and his own house could weather the storm.
In fact, many people did.
Both homes, which sat just two blocks apart from each other, and just two blocks north of the beach, would soon be crowded with neighbors seeking shelter.
When Anthony Credo got home, his daughter Ruby was astonished at what her parents began to do: they’d started making holes in the floor of their parlor in a vain attempt at managing the rising water.
Soon enough, though, water was flowing right up into their home.
And so like many other families living in two-story homes, the Credos grabbed what they could and moved up to the second floor.
Galveston sits in a unique position.
It lays perpendicular along the coastline at a 45-degree angle.
Families fought for survival as the water levels rose dramatically.
On one side is the Gulf of Mexico, and between Galveston and the mainland is the stretch of Galveston Bay.
This means that, as the winds shifted, which happened as the hurricane moved along, water could come from two directions.
The wind could blow water into the city from both the Gulf and the bay, and that’s just what it did.
The key message here is: Families fought for survival as the water levels rose dramatically.
The shift in wind preceded a very dramatic moment.
As night was setting in, and lamp light began to flicker in every house with a second floor, the water levels rose four feet in a matter of seconds.
By this time, 17 people had gathered in the Palmer house.
Like Isaac, they believed it to be one of the sturdiest in the neighborhood.
The winds at this point were around 150 miles per hour.
Windows had shattered.
Plaster had exploded off of the walls.
Some people rushed to the bathroom on the second floor, believing it could provide safe refuge.
One family, the Burnetts, crawled out the bathroom window and jumped aboard an upturned roof that floated by, and sailed off into the night.
The water continued to rise, and the Palmers huddled inside the bathtub.
Judson tried to comfort his young boy.
This is when the four-foot surge hit the Palmer house.
It lifted the house of its foundation and into deep water.
The roof collapsed upon the family.
Judson was thrown into cold darkness.
When he came to, he was floating outside his house.
He grabbed the nearest object.
It was a bunch of window shutters someone had tied together.
A makeshift life raft.
Judson’s wife and son were nowhere to be seen.
At Isaac’s house, there were around 50 men, women, and children.
They were all huddled upstairs, in a bedroom.
A debate ensued.
Isaac believed his house could withstand the storm.
Joseph disagreed.
There was at least 15 feet of water surrounding the house, and it was only getting deeper.
The wind was howling.
Pockets of wallpaper were exploding.
Water was pouring in from the roof.
As Issac tried to reassure people of his house’s durability, Joseph was trying to advise people on what to do when the house began to collapse.
Then, the house moved.
Making it to the next day was a mixture of survival and luck.
When Isaac’s home gave way, the entire structure toppled to one side.
At this moment, Joseph was standing by a window and next to two of Isaac’s daughters, Allie May and Rosemary.
Instinctively, Joseph grabbed the children and together they crashed through the window as the house toppled over.
Suddenly, they were lying on top of what used to be the side of the house.
The window they just crashed through was now looking down into a watery abyss.
Joseph lowered the bottom half of his body through the window.
He shouted for someone to grab hold of his legs, but no one did.
He gave up.
He would later explain, “I have no words to tell the agony of heart I experienced in that moment.
” Not unlike Judson Palmer, Isaac was plunged into underwater darkness when the house gave way.
A piece of timber caught him and dragged him down.
He was sure he would soon die.
But then, somehow, the timber dragged him back up, a block away from where his house once stood.
The key message here is: Making it to the next day was a mixture of survival and luck.
As he came to, the rain was hitting his face like bee stings.
He was surrounded by rubble.
There was a flash of lightning and, in the brief moment of light, he saw a child nearby.
Unbelievably, it was his youngest child, Esther, just six years old.
He put his arm around her and they drifted in the floodwaters.
There was no sign of his wife or his other two daughters.
His mind raced.
Where might they be?
Could they have survived as he and Esther had?
Another flash of lightning.
Ahead of them, three figures clutched to a piece of floating debris.
It was his brother and his two missing daughters.
His heart soared.
If only they could find his wife, Cora.
Isaac, Joseph, and the three children drifted for hours on floating wreckage.
They crossed paths with other survivors, but no sign of Cora.
Eventually, in the dead of night, their raft came to a stop.
Nearby, miraculously, there was a house that was still standing.
Most of them had sustained injuries, but sheltered inside the house, they were able to make it through the rest of the night.
The house they stayed in that night was one of the few structures still standing when dawn finally arrived.
It was an eerily beautiful morning.
One of the other remaining buildings was a convent a few blocks northwest from where they stood.
Reassuringly, someone at the convent rang the bells that morning.
And with so few structures to block the sound, the bells rang out louder than ever.
The clean up was an arduous and uncertain process.
Exactly how many people died that day is hard to say.
The Galveston News tried to keep a tally of names.
The final list, published on October 7, contained 4,263 names.
Judging by census polls, there was a loss of around 6,000 people.
Others suggest a number closer to 10,000.
What’s certain is that it was deadlier than any other natural disaster the United States had seen at that time.
Survivors were greeted the next morning by bodies everywhere.
Some were bloated with water, others crushed under rubble, and many had been gruesomely killed by flying timber and roof shingles.
There were new horrors laying, quite literally, at every step.
The key message here is: The clean up was an arduous and uncertain process.
The stench of decomposing bodies lingered throughout Galveston for days.
At first, removal and disposal teams tried to bury the bodies at sea, but many of them got loose from their weights and ended up washing back ashore.
Burning became the only feasible method to get rid of the dead bodies.
As late as September 28, hundreds of fires still burned throughout the city.
For many days following the hurricane, Isaac held a flame of hope that Cora would be found alive.
There were a few stories of such things happening.
People who got swept miles away were finding their way back home, days after the disaster.
Alas, Cora’s return was not to be.
Isaac did get closure, though.
On September 30, demolition teams were still taking apart wreckage and uncovering bodies.
That day, they reached Cora’s remains.
Isaac was likely either notified or monitoring the efforts, because he was reunited with the diamond engagement ring he’d given Cora.
He was also able to give his wife a burial on October 4, in Lakeview Cemetery.
He eventually had the ring enlarged so that he could wear it in her memory.
Of course, in the days and years that followed, Isaac would have his doubts about his role in the hurricane.
Could he have done more?
Could this disaster have been averted?
As we’ll see in the final blink, the Galveston hurricane still has its mysteries.
It was a highly unique hurricane that forever altered Galveston’s future.
The year 1900 was one of scientific hubris.
Steam-powered boats were defying the mighty power of winds, rivers, and oceans alike.
New discoveries were being made on a regular basis.
In this climate, people like Isaac Cline had confidence that the scientific consensus on matters like hurricanes couldn’t possibly be wrong.
Certainly, this hubris played a role in what happened in Galveston on September 8, 1900.
But the fact remains that no one had encountered a hurricane quite like this one.
The key message here is: It was a highly unique hurricane that forever altered Galveston’s future.
Prior to the arrival of the hurricane off the shores of the United States, few people had ever recorded a barometer reading at lower than 29 inches.
At the Weather Bureau, any reading below this was assumed to be an error.
So, on the afternoon of September 8, when Bureau agent John Blagden was taking readings at the Galveston office and recording 28.
48 inches, it seemed supernatural.
Such low pressures were thought to be impossible.
The question remained: How did a severe storm that dropped ten inches of rain in Cuba become the devastating hurricane that leveled Galveston?
Something dramatic happened between September 3 and September 8 that caused the storm to essentially burst out of a cage with unforeseen fury.
At the time, no one thought such a fast transformation was possible.
In fact, only in the late 1900s would meteorologists come up with the term “explosive deepening” to explain the phenomenon.
One of the best theories of what happened is that the storm encountered a Loop Current.
This is a branch of the Gulf Stream that carries warm water down through the Florida straits.
If it was present in 1900, which is possible, it would have been right in the hurricane’s path, and may have strengthened the hurricane by supplying it with an “infinite source of heat.
” While the residents of Galveston did rebuild after the storm, the city was never the same.
Prior to September 8, Galveston was competing with Houston, Texas, to be the port city of choice for ships traveling the Gulf coast.
It was primed to be one of the major hubs – a city of the future.
But after the storm, there was no competing with Houston.
In 1910, they finished work on a seawall, to protect the city from future storms.
And it did just that: between 1915 and 1983, nine hurricanes threatened the city, but didn’t reach that level of destruction.
Still, Galveston would never regain the promise it held on September 7, 1900.
Final summary
The key message in these blinks: The hurricane of 1900 was a storm like no other.
It hit Galveston completely by surprise, killing thousands of people and destroying the hopes of a city that had ambitions of being a major metropolis.
At the center of this storm was Isaac Cline, the foremost weather expert in Texas, and perhaps the brightest mind in the federal Weather Bureau.
Isaac knew a lot about weather, but his hubris, as well as the censoring practices within the Bureau, helped ensure that the storm’s danger would go unnoticed until it was too late.
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