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

When Hurricane Irene made landfall last month, I’ll admit to feeling a tiny bit of storm envy. Ensconced in landlocked Nebraska, I could only watch on CNN and MSNBC as the winds slashed and the rain pelted and the seas rose. Friends on the east coast littered my Facebook feed with updates about closures, storm preparations, and hurricane parties. It was the last of these that really made me jealous. I love situational drinking, and a hurricane drunk sounded like a great way to wile away the windswept hours.

To be sure, I understand the actual dangers of hurricanes. I don’t need to be told how deadly they can be (seriously, don’t tell me, I remember Hurricane Katrina). However, as a mid-westerner in Tornado Alley, my envy goes beyond the opportunity to skip work and drink Boone’s Farm.

In Nebraska, our natural disasters come with only minutes of warning; they drop from the sky and spend a few lethal seconds on earth, before disappearing into the nothing from which they came. As we know from Joplin, tornadoes are a terror. In contrast, a big, slow moving hurricane, which we can follow from birth as well as any human child, seems almost benign. Thanks to technology, there are updates every day of hurricane season, telling us about a tropical depression that might turn into a tropical storm; of tropical storms that just got named; and of named tropical storms that evolved into hurricanes. These monsters are deadly, but they signal their arrival well in advance, giving people plenty of chance to flee.

Technology helps make us safe from hurricanes.

Technology also lulls us into a false sense of security. Knowing every detail about the composition of oncoming storms (or thinking the same), leads people to make critical judgments about whether they can ride things out. This is not always for the good. A little bit of knowledge, in untrained hands, can be deadly.

That, at least, is the point I took away from Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm, about the Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900. The storm, the deadliest in American history, killed upwards of 6,000 people. It destroyed a city on the make, and hastened a shift in Texas municipal power from Galveston to Houston (a shift helped, of course, by oil). It was an event that, according to scientists such as meteorologist Isaac Cline, could never happen to Galveston.

Though built almost at sea level, the received wisdom at the turn of the century was that Galveston was safe. Meteorologists from the fledgling U.S. Weather Bureau calculated projected storm paths and concluded that hurricanes could not strike Galveston. Furthermore, there was a belief that the gradient of the beach would undercut the power of approaching waves. Accordingly, no seawall was built.

Isaac’s Storm tells the story of Isaac Cline, the man at the center of this folly, and of the horrible consequences that entailed when people got too comfortable in their certainty. In 1900, Cline was part of the new breed at the Weather Bureau, a nascent, criticized governmental agency that had been wracked by scandal and corruption. He was an ambitious, well-educated man (he graduated medical school in his spare time), and was sent to Galveston to clean up the local Bureau office. Cline did this. During his time there, he also came to believe that Galveston was impervious to hurricanes.

(The Bureau as a whole had a hurricane problem; due to bad press from faulty forecasts, meteorologists were warned to be skeptical about issuing hurricane warnings. As a result, Galveston was hammered by a storm that had passed unknown to Bureau men in Cuba).

The subtitle of Larson’s book is A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. Generally, I’m wary of books with the phrase “a Time” in the title. Simply put, that’s often editorial code for “this book contains plenty of filler.” Now, I’m not philosophically opposed to filler; as with everything in line, it depends on quality. However, I’ve found that filler typically runs the gamut: sometimes it’s homemade stuffing; sometimes it’s Stove Top; and sometimes it’s sawdust.

In Isaac’s Storm, there wouldn’t be a book without the filler. There’s not enough information on Isaac’s life for a full scale biography, and a storm by itself is not ample enough a subject for an entire book.

Here, the filler is the best stuff. I didn't care much for Isaac’s part of the story. The events of his life are sketchy (many of his papers were destroyed in the hurricane) and Larson has to rely heavily on Isaac’s memoir, which self-servingly makes him the hero of his own story.

On the other hand, the contextual aspects of the story – the 1900s in general, and Galveston in particular – are fascinating. The 1900s was a new era of hope, coming after the Gilded Age and the Panic of 1893. It was a time of industrialization and progress. There was electricity and automobiles; within three years the Wright Brothers would take off on a plane at Kitty Hawk. Less than a decade after Galveston, the keel for Titanic would be laid. Man truly believed he had conquered his environment. All this would end tragically in 1914, when Western Civilization collectively decided to commit suicide. Yet it’s fascinating to reenter that time, without the awful foreknowledge of how it’s going to end.

(It’s also a bit refreshing to revisit a period of history marked by rationality and scientific belief. Compared to 1900, we’ve regressed in many ways. Today, science is a competing theory, and local school boards get to decide whether our species evolved, or were created by an old guy with a flowing robe and a long white beard).

The attitude that marked the age, of course, also led to its great disasters. Galveston, much like Titanic, was guided to its fate by hubris. When it came to Galveston and its susceptibility to storms, many experts broke the first rule of punditry: always bet on disaster. If you’re right, everyone will call you a seer; if you’re wrong, no one will care, because you’re busy predicting another disaster.

Larson writes in a crisp, straightforward, journalistic style. It is an approach that does not lend itself to deeper insights into humanity, and the most well-developed character in Isaac’s Storm is the hurricane. Still, it is a style that holds your attention. You can read this straight through without your mind wandering in the slightest. The highest praise I can give is that the sections on the history of meteorology and the composition of hurricanes were among the best in the book. Larson is able to make prosaic experiments and scientific concepts understandable. Rather than falling asleep at the first mention of physics, I actually felt I learned something.

Larson also does a good job building tension. Throughout the book, he intercuts scenes from Isaac’s life to update you on the progress of the storm. Each time he checks back in, the storm has gotten closer and stronger, brushing past land masses and tossing about the ships at sea.

After such a deliberate, finely-tuned buildup, the climax simply sputters. Quite frankly, the hurricane’s landfall is the least interesting part of the book.

Larson does his best to make it visceral, with adjective filled sentences. The problem is that I didn't care about any of the people mentioned. They were just names, abstracted from humanity. My head knew they were people once, but my heart did not. As these names were swept away, one by one, I just couldn’t care. I’m not blaming Larson for this. He makes an attempt to humanize at least one family in Galveston. The problem, I suspect, is that there isn’t much of a historical record for him to comb.

The consequence, though, is a description of a storm that quickly becomes numbing and worse, mundane. It’s a list of people I didn't know, getting pulled away by the sea. This is not to say that there aren’t things that stick in your brain. For instance, there was the horrifying fate of 90 some children at the orphanage. The nuns had tied them together, so that no one would get separated, and that’s how their bodies were found, a string of small corpses. And of course there are the usual stories of miraculous survivals, families reunited, and lucky pets.

The book ends with a short, closing chapter, that follows Isaac (who lost his wife in the storm) through the rest of his career. Perhaps knowing that he’d failed the greatest task of his life (the one for which he’d trained many years), Isaac spent a great deal of time on self-serving writings in which he attempted to cast himself as a hero, roaming the beach and warning 6,000 people to leave (either the 6,000 people stayed and died, or they all had horrible memories, since there is no documented evidence that Isaac played the role of a maritime Paul Revere).

Isaac’s last posting with the Weather Bureau was in New Orleans, which at the time still had its illusions. He was dead long before Katrina came roaring out of the Gulf. In this last section, Larson also notes that, despite technological advances, the unpredictability and fury of hurricanes mean they are still deadly. Since this book was written in 1999, there is a tendency to divine some sort of prophecy in Larson’s warning. I don’t see it that way. Every book about a disaster is going to warn that greater disaster is looming. All of life tends toward doom, and no one ever missed a house payment by predicting that hell will eventually break loose.

I suppose the lasting image I’ll take from Isaac’s Storm isn’t the ferocity of the hurricane, but the hubristic certainty of Galveston before the flood. In my imagination, I can see it glittering on the beach, snug and smug and secure. It is a sunny day and kids are playing and laundry is snapping on the lines and mothers are cooking dinner and pot-bellied men in three-piece suits and starchy collars stand in clusters on street corners congratulating each other on their foresight. And just over the horizon is a hurricane.

I know I’m supposed to look back at those times and shake my head at those silly humans who thought they understood nature and the universe so well. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt a stirring of nostalgia for an era in which people dreamed big. Today’s world is ruled by cynics, those people who love to say “we can’t,” and then set out to prove it. With so much negativity, the heart almost craves the fast-talking, twinkle-eyed, forked-tongue huckster, promising happiness, prosperity, and a sea that won’t ever rise.