Book review: Isaac's Storm

Published 1999, Authored by Erik Larson (ISBN 0-609-60233-0).

I enjoyed the first portions of this book, the ones that seemed to be filled with the most facts. The author recounts such weather phenomena as fish being frozen in warm Summer streams from the melting of large hailstorms (hailstones the size of baseballs, three feet deep). The storm surge that accompanies hurricanes is only partially caused by the low pressures. A one-inch drop in barometric pressure will lift the sea about one foot. Even severe hurricanes do not drop the normal 29.8 inches of mercury more than a couple or three inches. Instead, it is the relentless wind that pushes the water up on top of itself. In the case of Galveston, the island was battered two ways. Cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere rotate counter-clockwise; as the hurricane approached, its winds were from the North, driving water from the bay onto the island. As it passed, its winds from from the South, driving water from the ocean onto the island. Hurricanes were not then named; this hurricane of 1900 came ashore in Texas and swept up through the middle of the country, hitting Chicago with hurricane-force winds and Manhattan with 65 MPH winds. The wind speeds at Galveston itself were only estimated, as the anemometers were blown away. The official death toll was eight thousand, with estimates between six and twelve thousand.

The main thrust of the book was the sorry state of the U.S. Weather Bureau. Larson reminds us that predicting weather is still not easy. Weather systems are large, our instruments are dispersed, and the so-called butterfly effect means that even small measurement errors can lead to large prediction errors. What was sorry about the Weather Bureau was its lack of professionalism: its unwillingness to work with Cuban observers, who because of their geographic position could serve as a source of valuable data; its unwillingness to say the word "hurricane" unless it was already parked on top of you.

I did not enjoy the second half of the book because it seemed to veer into conjecture about what the survivors and perishers said and felt as the storm raged. Perhaps the author's guesses are educated, but it strikes me as do those color pictures of dinosaurs: in truth, nobody really knows what happened, and whether and how Isaac (Isaac Cline, the book's protagonist) argued with his younger brother Joseph. However, I do believe that Isaac lost his wife, but none of his three daughters. And I do believe that the stench of six thousand rotting corpses, plus the corpses of horses and other dead animals, was overpowering. And I do believe that the survivors burned bodies on the shores and that attempts to bury the dead at sea were ineffectual when insufficient weight was attached to them: the bodies washed back up on the shore.