Isaac's Storm (46 page)

Isaac
could
not
help
it,
but
now
and
then
a
thought
whispered
through
his
mind
that
he
should
have
come
to
the
Levy
Building
with
his
family,
instead
of
trying
to
weather
the
storm
at
home.
Why
had
he
chosen
that
course?
Was
it
pride?
For
the
sake
of
appearances?

Joseph,
underneath
his
demonstrations
of
sympathy,
seemed
all
too
aware
that
he
had
called
it
right
and
Isaac
had
not.

There
were
dreams.
Isaac
fell
asleep
easily
each
night
and
dreamed
of
happy
times,
only
to
wake
to
gloom
and
grief.
He
dreamed
that
he
had
saved
her.
He
dreamed
of
the
lost
baby.
"A
dream,"
Freud
wrote,
in
1900,
in
his
Interpretation
of
Dreams,
"is
the
fulfillment
of
a
wish."

During
the
week
he
worked
on
his
official
report
on
the
storm.
Psychically,
it
was
a
difficult
task.
His
wife
was
still
missing.
The
air
stank
of
rotting
flesh
and
burned
hair.
Always
in
the
past
he
had
been
able
to
separate
himself
from
the
meteorological
events
he
described.
Hot
winds.
Paralyzed
fish.
He
was
the
observer
looking
upon
these
phenomena
through
glass.
But
this
storm
had
dragged
him
to
its
heart
and
changed
his
life
forever.
As
he
sat
down
opposite
his
typewriter,
human
ash
dusted
each
fresh
sheet
of
paper.

He
began:
"The
hurricane
which
visited
Galveston
Island
on
Saturday,
September
8,1900,
was
no
doubt
one
of
the
most
important
meteorological
events
in
the
world's
history."

There
was
so
much
he
wanted
to
say,
but
could
not
—
how
headquarters
and
the
West
Indies
Service
had
failed
to
recognize
the
storm
as
a
hurricane,
how
even
he
had
not
understood
the
signs
of
warning
until
too
late.
That
was
the
most
difficult
part.
He
could
not
describe
these
conjoined
failures,
for
to
do
so
would
have
been
to
damage
the
bureau
in
its
struggle
for
credibility.

Instead,
he
wrote:
"Storm
warnings
were
timely
and
received
a
wide
distribution
not
only
in
Galveston
but
throughout
the
coast
region."

He
left
out
the
specific
character
of
these
warnings,
and
the
fact
that
none
mentioned
a
hurricane.

As
he
wrote,
a
question
consumed
him:
Why
did
so
many
people
die?
No
previous
storm
on
the
U.S.
mainland
had
come
even
close
to
causing
such
loss.
Why
this
one?
Was
he,
Isaac,
partly
to
blame?

As
if
to
address
the
question,
he
described
how
on
Saturday
morning
he
began
warning
the
public
to
seek
a
safe
place
to
spend
the
night.
"As
a
result
thousands
of
people
who
lived
near
the
beach
or
in
small
houses
moved
their
families
into
the
center
of
the
city
and
were
thus
saved."
In
later
years,
the
number
of
people
he
claimed
to
have
warned
increased
to
twelve
thousand.

Isaac
struggled
also
with
how
to
tell
the
story
in
a
dispassionate,
scientific
way,
and
bleach
it
of
his
personal
experience.
He
found
this
impossible.
This
was
his
storm.
What
he
knew
of
it
came
from
living
through
it.

In
a
few
austere
paragraphs,
he
described
the
collapse
of
his
house
and
his
night
on
the
wreckage.
He
devoted
a
single
line
to
Cora's
apparent
death:
"Among
the
lost
was
my
wife,
who
never
rose
above
the
water
after
the
wreck
of
the
building."

His
account
was
spare,
nothing
like
the
florid
writing
so
common
in
his
time.
For
him,
however,
it
was
new.
He
had
never
written
an
official
document
in
the
first
person
before,
only
in
the
passive
voice
of
a
bureaucrat;
certainly
he
had
never
mentioned
his
family.
It
was
risky.
He
was
violating
an
unwritten
tenet
of
bureau
culture
as
it
had
evolved
under
Willis
Moore:
Do
not
ever
let
your
own
star
shine
more
bnghtly
than
the
chief's.

But
there
was
no
other
way
to
tell
the
story.
Isaac
sent
it
to
Moore
with
a
cover
letter
in
which
he
wrote,
"My
personal
experience
was
so
interwoven
with
the
progress
of
the
storm
that
it
appears
that
I
should
include
it
in
the
report.
If
it
should
not
be
embodied
in
the
report
please
omit
that
portion.

"Very
respectfully,

"Your
obediant
servant,

"I.M.Cline."

ON
FRIDAY,
SEPTEMBER
28,
as
hundreds
of
fires
still
burned
in
the
city,
Isaac
Cline
read
the
Houston
Post
and
there
saw
an
angry
letter
from
Willis
Moore
defending
the
Weather
Bureau's
performance
in
forecasting
the
hurricane.
The
letter
troubled
Isaac.
Moore's
account
veered
from
reality;
why
was
he
changing
the
story?

Moore
had
written
to
the
Post
in
response
to
an
editorial
that
accused
the
bureau
of
having
failed
to
predict
and
track
the
storm.
The
editorial
stated:
"The
practical
inutility
of
the
national
weather
bureau,
for
certain
sections
of
the
country,
at
least,
was
never
so
conspicuously
shown
as
on
Friday
and
Saturday
last
when
South
Texas
was
left
without
any
warning
of
the
coming
storm,
or
at
least
its
severity."
The
editorial
then
quoted
the
forecasts
for
Texas
that
had
been
wired
from
the
bureau's
Central
Office
just
before
the
storm.
"With
the
weather
bureau
saying
that
Saturday
would
be
'fair;
fresh,
possibly
brisk,
northerly
winds
on
the
coast'
of
East
Texas,
who
would
have
looked
for
the
most
destructive
hurricane
of
modern
times
on
that
coast
on
that
date?"

Moore,
in
a
five-page
letter,
protested
that
on
Friday
morning
storm
signals
were
raised
in
Galveston
and
"a
few
hours
later"
were
changed
to
hurricane
signals.
He
called
Isaac
"one
of
the
heroic
spirits
of
that
awful
hour,"
and
offered
a
dramatic,
but
incorrect,
account
of
Isaac's
day.
"When
the
last
means
of
communication
with
the
outer
world
had
failed
he,
instead
of
going
to
the
relief
of
his
own
family,
braved
the
furies
of
the
storm
and
the
surging
waters
and,
reaching
a
certain
telephone
station
at
the
end
of
a
bridge,
succeeded
in
sending
out
from
the
doomed
city
the
last
message
that
was
received
until
after
the
passage
of
the
storm...
After
performing
this
service
for
the
benefit
of
the
whole
people
he
returned
to
his
own
home,
to
find
it
destroyed
and
his
wife
and
one
child
lost."

Isaac,
at
this
point,
still
considered
Moore
a
personal
friend.
It
hurt
him,
no
doubt,
that
Moore
had
distorted
the
story
of
his
experience
in
the
storm.
Isaac
had
lost
his
wife
and
home,
and
had
nearly
lost
a
daughter,
but
Moore
could
not
be
bothered
with
the
actual
details.
What
troubled
Isaac
most
was
Moore's
statement
that
an
order
to
raise
hurricane
warnings
had
been
sent
to
Galveston
and
that
hurricane
flags
had
been
raised
as
early
as
Friday.
It
simply
wasn't
true.

Isaac
clipped
Moore's
letter
and
an
accompanying
blurb
in
which
the
Post's
editors
stated
they
had
gladly
printed
Moore's
response
because
they
had
no
desire
"to
captiously
find
fault"
with
the
bureau,
adding
archly,
"We
would
all
rather
believe
that
the
weather
service
was
valuable
than
that
it
was
of
no
use
to
the
public."
Isaac
mailed
the
clippings
to
Moore
that
day,
with
a
cover
letter
that
was
defensive
but
also
obliquely
critical
of
Moore.
Isaac
insisted
he
had
done
all
he
could
on
Saturday.
In
fact,
he
told
Moore,
he
had
just
spoken
with
an
editor
of
the
Galveston
News
who
had
assured
him
that
his
station's
warnings
had
saved
"more
than
5,000
people."

Isaac
ignored
Moore's
distortion
of
his
personal
ordeal,
but
quietly
disputed
his
claim
that
the
Central
Office
had
ordered
hurricane
signals
raised.
"Regarding
the
warnings
received
at
Galveston
I
desire
to
say
that
the
hurricane
warning
never
reached
us,"
Isaac
wrote.
The
last
storm
advisory
received
from
Washington,
he
said,
was
an
order
that
arrived
at
10:30
A.M.
Saturday
specifying
only
a
change
in
wind
direction
of
an
existing
storm
warning.
Always
the
good
soldier,
Isaac
gave
Moore
an
escape.
"I
presume,"
he
wrote,
"the
hurricane
warning
which
followed
a
few
hours
later
did
not
reach
Houston
until
after
the
wires
had
gone
down."

There
was
more
he
wanted
to
say,
but
did
not.
Years
later,
in
a
personal
memoir,
he
wrote
that
the
only
warning
given
the
people
of
Galveston
came
from
him
and
his
station,
in
defiance
of
Moore's
"strict
orders"
against
unauthorized
storm
warnings.
"If
I
had
taken
the
time
on
the
morning
of
the
8th
to
ask
for
approval
from
the
forecaster
in
Washington
and
waited
for
his
reply
the
people
could
not
have
been
warned
of
the
disaster."
Loss
of
life,
he
wrote,
"would
have
been
twice
as
great."

But
he
conceded
he
too
had
underestimated
the
storm.
"I
did
not
foresee
the
magnitude
of
the
damage
it
would
do."

MOORE
CONTINUED
TO
portray
the
bureau
as
having
expertly
forecast
and
tracked
the
hurricane,
and
credited
in
particular
the
West
Indies
Service.
In
an
article
in
the
October
issue
of
Collier's
Weekly,
one
of
the
most
influential
magazines
of
the
day,
he
wrote,
"It
is
a
remarkable
testimonial
to
the
foresight
of
the
present
Secretary
of
Agriculture,
Honorable
James
Wilson,
that
the
meteorological
service
inaugurated
by
him
during
the
Spanish-American
war
as
a
protection
to
the
American
fleet
was,
by
the
last
Congress,
permanently
adopted
as
a
part
of
our
National
Weather
Bureau,
on
account
of
its
beneficent
application
to
the
peaceful
ways
of
trade
and
commerce.
Without
the
reporting
stations
of
the
new
service
the
Weather
Bureau
would
have
been
unable
to
detect
the
inception
of
the
Galveston
hurricane
when
it
was
only
a
harmless
storm,
and,
when
it
reached
the
intensity
of
a
hurricane,
to
issue
timely
warnings
in
advance
of
its
coming."
He
repeated
his
distorted
account
of
Isaac's
ordeal.