Inaccurate weather forecasts can be merely irritating. But when the US Weather Bureau failed to warn Galveston, Texas, of the most devastating hurricane in American history, in September, 1900, about 8,000 men, women and children were killed.
In his exhaustive account of the catastrophe, Erik Larson, who writes for Time, points out that Galveston in 1900 "stood on the verge of greatness". It had just become the third-busiest port in the United States, dubbed the New York of the Gulf of Mexico, with more millionaires than in Newport, Rhode Island, and 500 bars, more than in New Orleans.
However, Galveston was physically vulnerable. The city was situated between Galveston Bay and the Gulf, on a narrow island whose highest point was only 8.7 feet above sea level, and an average elevation only half that. High tides, even without a hurricane, sometimes caused flooding. The tropical cyclone that hit Galveston on September 8th at speeds estimated up to 150 miles an hour, with gusts up to 200, ruined the city's chances of winning its competition with nearby Houston to dominate the coast of Texas.
Larson portrays Isaac Cline, the director of the Weather Bureau's Galveston office in 1900, as a well-qualified and conscientious meteorologist and doctor of medicine who was handicapped by bureaucratic rivalry and wishful thinking. The Bureau was reluctant to publicise alarming predictions, particularly if they were founded on observations in Cuba, the last land in the usual path of Caribbean storms bound for the Gulf coast. Cline's analysis of the early symptoms of the storm now bearing his name was unrealistically optimistic. He eventually acknowledged the danger too late.
An immense amount of research has gone into this book - more, perhaps, than called for. Larson's notes, sources and index take up 78 pages. He explains the genesis and development of cyclones from their possible origin in what chaos theorists call "the butterfly effect" to the resulting huge surges of ocean waves.
He describes, almost minute by minute, with contemporary quotations, the 1900 hurricane's impact on the people and buildings of Galveston, from the time when children enjoyed paddling in the first flood waters, until the last mass cremations. Larson's prose is mostly utilitarian, with only a few regrettable attempts at poetry, such as when "dead hands clawed at the moon", and "Galveston became Atlantis."
The 16th-century Spanish name for Galveston, Larson notes, was "The Isle of Misfortune". When General P.H.Sheridan visited the city late in the 19th century he said: "If I owned Texas and hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." Galveston is still known for climatic discomfort and potential hazards.
Immediately before the "hypercane", Cline wrote: "It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city." After the city was destroyed, Willis Moore, chief of the Weather Bureau's Washington headquarters, wrote consolingly that "Galveston should take heart as the chances are that not once in a thousand years would she be so terribly stricken". However, Larson lists nine dates of hurricanes that have struck Galveston since then, and warns that "toward the end of the 20th century, meteorologists still considered Galveston one of the most likely targets for the next great hurricane disaster".
Erik Larson's lugubrious message seems to be the truism that the forces of nature sometimes overwhelm the fragile works of man. His book will do nothing to enhance Galveston's tourist trade, but will provide a treat for readers interested in freaks of meteorology, and for those with a morbid appetite for details of human suffering.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic