Isaac's Storm

Here, the narrative shifts in time to detail Isaac's upbringing and career as a meteorologist. Born in 1861 in Eastern Tennessee, Isaac grows up on a farm in rural Monroe County. From an early age, Isaac is fascinated by meteorological phenomena: “Lightning was barely understood, tornadoes not at all. To a boy in a land of ghosts and wild men, how could they not be alluring?" (29).

At Tennessee's Hiwassee College, Isaac is a polymath who studies mathematics, physics, chemistry, Latin, and Greek. On the recommendation of Hiwassee's president, US Signal Corps chief General William B. Hazen recruits Isaac to the US Weather Bureau in 1882. Despite having only been established around a decade earlier, the Weather Bureau is already embroiled in an embezzlement scandal. Moreover, many Americans question the efficacy and even the morality of a national forecasting service: “Some critics argued men should not try to predict the weather, because it was God's province; others that men could not predict the weather, because men were incompetent" (31). Rather than try to predict the weather, most men are content to record it meticulously, giving humanity the illusion of control over natural phenomena.

Larson goes on to detail the history of hurricanes starting with Christopher Columbus, who in 1492 becomes the first European to witness a hurricane, albeit from afar. Ten years later, Columbus encounters a hurricane at a much closer distance when a storm makes landfall on the island of Hispaniola. Meanwhile, the field of atmospheric sciences moves forward at a crawl. It isn't until 1638 that Galileo Galilei successfully proves Aristotle's ancient hypothesis that air has weight. Building on Galileo's research, Evangelista Torricelli's invents the barometer, a device used to measure air pressure. Because hurricanes are accompanied by a dramatic drop in air pressure at sea level, Torricelli's device becomes an essential tool for storm detection.

As European powers continue to expand their commercial and military might around the globe, hurricanes become a matter of national interest. The hurricane season of 1780 alone kills thousands of soldiers and seamen in the West Indies, along with countless others who live on these islands: “Clearly hurricanes posed a greater menace than any single nation's forces" (51).

While surveying the aftermath of a hurricane that made landfall near New York City in 1821, a saddler named William Redfield observes that the trees in Northern Connecticut had fallen in the opposite direction of the trees further South. His findings lead to the discovery that hurricanes take the shape of a whirlwind. Further, his research inspires several merchant captains and naval officers to write down their observations of the meteorological phenomena they encounter. Isaac himself reads a number of these observations with interest, particularly the reports of the 1876 Backergunge cyclone which devastated the coast of present-day Bangladesh on the Bay of Bengal: “[Isaac] still had no appreciation of how similar the undersea landscape, or bathymetry, of Galveston Bay was to that of the Bay of Bengal. That would come later" (54).

After providing a brief history of hurricanes, Larson picks up where it left off in Isaac's story. Isaac's first assignment with the Weather Bureau is to take daily readings in Little Rock, Arkansas. Later, he is transferred to Abilene, Texas where he meets Cora May Bellew, whom he marries in 1887. Two years later, Isaac is tasked with overseeing the Galveston office and rescuing it from a state of disrepair. From Galveston, Isaac will also establish and oversee the first Texas-wide weather service.

The year 1891 brings major changes to the US Weather Bureau. When the agency is transferred from the Signal Corps to the Department of Agriculture, Agriculture Secretary Sterling Morton slashes scientists' salaries and appoints politically ambitious men like Major H.H.C. Dunwoody to high-ranking positions. When current bureau chief Mark Harrington complains about Dunwoody and the discord his anti-science attitudes cause in the bureau, Morton fires Harrington and replaces him with a man named Moore. Under Moore, the discord in the Weather Bureau intensifies: “Moore believed tension was good. The system, he told Congress, helped explain why Weather Bureau employees had to be committed to insane asylums more often that employees of any other federal agency. He said this with pride" (73). That same year, Isaac publishes an article in the Galveston News for which he would later become infamous. In it, he writes, "It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city" (84). Isaac's article also plays a role in the city's decision to forestall the construction of a seawall which would have likely mitigated the damage from the storm.

In 1898, Isaac is stationed for a brief period in Mexico. It is there, while abroad a ship off the coast, that Isaac encounters his first hurricane. Rather than instilling in Isaac a sense of dread, surviving the experience may have emboldened him: “On some level, perhaps, he came to believe that hurricanes were not quite as awful as Piddington, Redfield, and Dampier had depicted. Or he assumed that technology—in this case, the modern steamship—had stripped hurricanes of their power to surprise and destroy" (75).