Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson.

3/5 rating. 273 pages.

Book #69 of 2021. Read December 30, 2021.

This is a recounting of the 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas and (at least when it was written) was the most deadly hurricane on record.

Isaac Cline, the head of the local weather bureau in Galveston is the main character focused on in the book, but there is a lot of detail about a varied amount of people in the town. A confluence of unfortunate, and interesting things led to Isaac, and just about everyone else not being at all prepared for this storm. Though there was some equipment to forecast the coming of a storm, through a combination of disbelief that Galveston could be hit and some pigheadedness, this storm was unbelievably deadly.

As always, Erik does a great job of putting in some fun facts connected to the main story. Such as:

• “He arrived in Little Rock just before the state legislature passed a bill that resolved a long-festering controversy. Henceforth, the new law declared, the legal pronunciation was ‘Arkansaw.’”
• “In 1979 a tropical storm named Claudette blew off the Gulf of Mexico near Galveston and deluged the town of Alvin, Texas, with forty-two inches of rain in twenty-four hours, still the U.S. record for sheer intensity. A Phillipine typhoon holds the world record, dropping 73.62 inches in twenty-four hours.”

While this was an interesting book, and it was good to learn about this disaster, if you’re looking to start reading some of Erik’s books, I would recommend you start with “Devil in the White City.”

Quotes:

“To move was to drip.”

“Probable northeast to southwest winds, varying to the southward and westward and eastward, and points between, high and low barometer swapping around from place to place, probably areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes, with thunder and lightning.” – Mark Twain

“There were many things you could be in the new America, but a coward was not one of them.”

“In the age of certainty, at the gateway to the twentieth century, the expected was as good as fact.”

“A few passengers did not see the storm flag. They were seasick and already considering death an attractive option.”

“In the age of scientific certainty, one could not allow one’s judgment to be clouded by mere poetry.”

“The [1923 Japan typhoon] and earthquake together killed 99,330 people. Another 43,500 simply disappeared.”

“The tallest wave on record was 112 feet, but occurred amid steady winds of only 75 miles an hour.”

“These were hard days for Isaac. He believed in work and in filling his day to the limit with productive effort, but in so doing, he had put love and family in a box that he had allowed himself to open only rarely. A mistake, he saw now. He had lost his wife and nearly lost a daughter. How completely Cora had held his world together now became apparent to him. His children needed food, warmth, a dry place, and most of all they needed him.“

“Time lost can never be recovered,”

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