Isaac's Storm

I was required to read this book for my honors sophomore English class. We had to read it the summer before our sophomore year and since I live about 30 minutes away from the Texas Gulf Coast and about 45 minutes away from Galveston, this book really had an amazing impact on me. It was pretty terrifying reading about how destructive hurricanes can be and it was also incredibly interesting. I loved it. Read it and learn a lot of history while being on the edge of your seat in suspense the whole time.

A cautionary tale if you will. Respect and trustworthiness is earned, not given. At the dawn of the century, Galveston was looking like the place to be, but arrogance from the National Weather Service sealed the city's fate.

Galveston would be torn apart by scandal in American meteorology in an attempt not to cause panic, hand waving the knowledge Caribbean countries had of hurricanes and the insistance that a disaster couldn't happen here. Even Isaac, who was a brilliant met couldn't see the writing on the wall for the city he called home.

From time to time it's as if we have yet to fully understand the true power of Hurricanes, Katrina, Harvey, Sandy, just a few that caught America by surprise. After each, lessons learned, but not taken to heart.

“Few asked the obvious question: If the bureau had done such a great job, why did so many people die?”

Unfortunately, a confluence of ego, hubris, and ignorance is not a good combination for a coastal city. At nearly every stage of this storm's journey (which you can revisit here), people not wanting to admit they were wrong, that other people knew better, or that anything was amiss in their great state of prosperity hindered any sort of advance warning that Galveston might have had. The result was catastrophic damage, something like 8-10,000 people dead, and survivors that had to pick up the pieces.

I thought this was an incredibly compelling book that outlined the day-by-day progress of the storm and all the points of failure along the way. We also got a brief historical writeup beforehand about hurricane detection in history, which I thought was really interesting as well. The beef between Columbus and Bobadilla and the ending that story had was especially delicious. There's an incredible amount of notes and sources at the end too, which were also interesting to flip through.

If you're a weather enthusiast looking for hard science, maybe pass this one up, though. Everything's kept at a basic level, which is great for keeping the ley person engaged and on board. If you're looking for a compelling historical look at an epic disaster, though, definitely give this a look.

Loved this book. Fascinating and sobering. Made me want to buy a barometer!

Meteorology isn't terribly exciting to me, so large portions of the first half of the book were a bit dry. But the second half was some of the most exciting non-fiction writing I've ever read.

It was Isaac Cline, the chief weatherman in Texas, who fervently denied the belief that a major hurricane could ever hit Galveston. He denied it as a storm formed in the Atlantic. He denied it as the storm moved through Cuba. He denied it as ships in the Gulf fought their way through the storm. He denied it hours before the storm began to make its presence known in Galveston, and he even denied it as the storm blew down his house, took the lives of his wife and unborn child, destroyed most of the city, killed what is believed to be over 10,000 people.

Isaac was wrong.

The Great 1900 Storm is considered to be one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit the United States.

Isaac's Storm is the story of an amazing city, a city with a massive amount of new development, a port city that seemed destined to become the biggest in Texas, a city filled with rich and ambitious people, a city ruined by the arrival of a tremendous and unexpected storm one day in September of 1900.

The stories author Erik Larson shares in this book, stories of death and destruction, are horrifying. I drive along the seventeen-foot seawall in Galveston, built after the storm in the hope that all could say never-again. I think about the orphanage and the lives lost there as I pass the place where Wal-Mart stands today. I drive down P 1/2 and 25th and think about Isaac's home which once stood, knocked down by the force of the storm, his wife lost. I see the Galvez Hotel, built after the storm, boldly outside the reach of the seawall, almost daring a storm to strike. I think about Galveston, as it was before the storm, as it was during the storm, and what it is like now, 123 years after the storm.

And I wonder when the next Great Storm will hit.