The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  On February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded and sank in the harbor. Nobody knows why. But the explosion was enough. William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, was bent on getting the United States into a war with Spain. He was also carrying on his own war, against the other big newspaper publisher, his archenemy Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Headlines in the two papers screeched, at competing volume, that Spain was responsible for the sinking of the Maine.

  Dramatic speeches in Congress persuaded business leaders, formerly skittish, to support intervention. McKinley’s own assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, raised the nattily dressed volunteers known as the Rough Riders. The president’s stance against intervening in the Cuban War for Independence began isolating him from Congress, from the press, from the public, even from many of his own appointees.

  In April, at the president’s behest, Congress declared war. The United States blockaded Havana.

  Meanwhile, the Jesuits at the Belen Observatory continued their punctilious scientific work on hurricane prediction. It’s not that Jesuits were nonpolitical. Anything but: Father Viñes, Gangoite’s mentor, had come to Cuba after fleeing Spain, with much of the Jesuit order, after that nation’s Liberal Revolution of 1868.

  But Cuban Jesuit scientists tried to ignore colonial politics. When Cuba’s Spanish governors repeatedly closed down secular scientific institutions amid the long period of unrest, meteorology stayed with the Jesuits.

  Cuban weathermen couldn’t stay untouched by politics forever, however. Forecasting requires constant observation of phenomena that lie well beyond human politics. But in 1900, U.S. support for the Cuban rebellion, and the joint success enjoyed by the American government and the Cuban patriots, had political effects that played into a terrible natural disaster.

  When Father Gangoite was considering the likely path of the storm that was drenching Cuba on September 3, 1900, he wanted to prove his own expertise. But he also wanted to show that his predecessor, Father Viñes, hadn’t been working some magical personal mojo in sniffing out hurricanes. Gangoite wanted to demonstrate that Viñes’s models were scientific. The results could be repeated.

  So Gangoite observed this new storm. He saw that it was changing fast. It was twirling on its own axis as it zoomed across the spinning Earth—yet it hadn’t formed that perfect, and perfectly deadly, spiral form that we associate with a hurricane. There wasn’t yet an eye of low pressure at the system’s center. Its winds, while hard and rough, still did not reach above 60 miles per hour.

  The storm nevertheless already had the power to knock down buildings and wash away train tracks on Jamaica, Cuba, and other islands. The violent cloud mass was turning and turning, and its winds were blowing in a circular form, even as the whole system was moving on its northerly and westerly course over and then away from Cuba.

  If a storm like this were to follow the path that Father Viñes’s rules had always correctly predicted it should, it would soon be a hurricane. And Father Gangoite thought he could tell exactly where that hurricane was going to go: toward the coast of east Texas.

  If Gangoite’s predictions had been heard in the United States, there would have been time to give the people of Galveston and the Texas mainland a fairly long-range warning of the impending destruction. They might not have believed it, of course. Ordinary citizens of Galveston—from Daisy Thorne to Chief Ketchum, from Boyer Gonzales’s friend Nell Hertford to Annie McCullough to Arnold Wolfram—would have had no direct evidence that a deadly storm system, having left Cuba on Wednesday, September 5, 1900, was moving out into the Florida Straits and heading for them.

  Captain Halsey of the Louisiana would soon meet the storm in the straits. But nothing was going on in Galveston to suggest that trouble lay ahead. Many citizens there laughed down storms anyway.

  It didn’t matter. They never heard Gangoite’s forecast anyway. Both parts of that two-part forecast—that the storm was about to become a hurricane, and that it would turn westward, toward Texas—were anathema to the U.S. Weather Bureau. As far as the bureau was concerned, those two things could not happen. No Cuban was going to tell Americans that they could.

  Resentment and disdain for Cuban forecasting had become an entrenched conviction at the U.S. Weather Bureau by the fall of 1900. The man in charge of tracking and reporting from Washington, D.C., was Willis Moore, head of the bureau—he had succeeded General Greely, who had made Isaac Cline head of the Texas section—and he made squelching Cuban forecasting one of the most important reforms he brought to the office.

  When he took over the bureau in 1895, Willis Moore was thirty-nine. Filled with careerist energy, and under pressure from his boss, Secretary of Agriculture Julius Morton, he was on a tear to make the bureau a new model of efficiency. In the recently completed Weather Bureau Building, on the corner of M and Twenty-Fourth Streets, not far from Rock Creek in Washington, Moore presided over a thoroughgoing revamping of the service.

  First, he started tracking the veracity of each U.S. forecaster. He set up a contest: a group of selected forecasters had to make predictions for the same city—not their own—based on the same set of daily and hourly reports. This kind of thing put the observers under such intense pressure, Moore bragged when testifying before Congress, that Weather Bureau workers were committed to insane asylums more often than workers in any other agency. With Moore in charge, Congress was getting its money’s worth.

  Perhaps most important, Moore tightened the rules concerning local forecasting—especially regarding storm warnings. Observers in the various state and federal weather stations had often taken it on themselves to issue local warnings when storms seemed imminent. Sometimes the area’s weatherman would pass the warning on to the local paper; often, especially near a coastline, he would hang flags, a memory of the old Signal Corps days.

  Moore believed local weathermen had been over-warning the public. There was a tendency to sow panic. It created an unhappy impression that the bureau was not fully in control.

  Now all storm warnings, from everywhere in the country, had to go to Moore at his hub in Washington. The local weatherman cabled his hourly, daily, and other regular reports to the central office: each weather station in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean sent temperature, atmosphere, and wind conditions by telegraph. Weather clerks in Moore’s office aggregated the morning data into a national weather map; the map was then telegraphed back, in turn, to each station. All warnings were issued in that manner. It was for Washington, not for local weathermen, to determine what was going on locally.

  And for fear of panicking local populations, Moore banned certain words from all official weather reports. He banned the word “tornado.” And “cyclone.” And “hurricane.”

  Moore’s new way of running the U.S. Weather Bureau clashed, not surprisingly, with the Cuban forecasters’ methods for tracking and predicting hurricanes in the Caribbean Sea. The Cubans used the word “hurricane” freely—and their predictions had long traveled through telegraph weather networks in which the United States also participated.

  In Cuba, first Father Viñes and then Father Gangoite sat at the hub of reporting that overlapped with mainland U.S. systems on the Gulf Coast. Moore wanted to change all that.

  In 1900, Willis Moore got his chance. When the United States blockaded Cuba and then invaded the island in support of revolution against Spanish control, Moore and his boss, Secretary Morton, were immediately at President McKinley’s side. The U.S. military operation in Cuba needed weathermen.

  Moore showed the president his weather maps. He offered expert advice for getting the U.S. Navy around Caribbean storms. McKinley, impressed, ordered Moore to set up a series of storm-listening posts in Mexico, in Barbados, and in the Caribbean. To establish those posts, Moore picked what he considered his best men. He put Isaac Cline in charge of the Mexican networks.

  But for the West Indies, unfortunately, Moore assigned Colonel Henry Harrison Chase Dunwoody. An old Signal Cor
ps officer, Colonel Dunwoody had made his name by scoffing at the value of meteorological science in making predictions. He’d played a role in discrediting and undermining probably the top American meteorologist of the day, Cleveland Abbe. Now in charge of weather forecasting for the Caribbean Sea, Dunwoody was ideally positioned to continue his crusade against the uses of science in tracking storms—even while advancing his own career in weather.

  The Cubans were the worst offenders, Moore and Dunwoody agreed, because they pretended that hurricanes could be predicted. And the two U.S. weathermen now had the power to put that pretense to an end.

  By the fall of 1900, the United States was in control of Cuba. The United States hadn’t annexed the island nation. That was prohibited by an amendment to Congress’s declaration of war. Still, the United States did exercise effective control. With the victory of the Cuban revolutionaries, Spain had agreed to leave the island for good. Yet even as Cubans got ready to develop a constitution and hold elections, the United States set no timetable for withdrawal. No Cubans attended the peace talks with Spain held in Paris. While the resulting treaty, signed in December 1898, made Cuba officially independent, General William Shafter, the U.S. conqueror, barred Cuban rebel forces from the surrender ceremonies held in Santiago de Cuba. A U.S. governor, General John R. Brooke, ran the island.

  In September 1900, when the island was hit by the tropical depression that Father Gangoite was observing, the first Cuban elections had just taken place, back in June. But in those elections, only local mayors, treasurers, and prosecutors were chosen. Elections for delegates to a representative general assembly were scheduled for September 15, and, thanks to rules set by Governor Brooke, the electorate was tightly restricted.

  So there was not, in September 1900, a politically independent Cuba. The U.S. government administered the island. That gave Willis Moore in Washington and Colonel Dunwoody in the Caribbean a means of silencing Cuban hurricane forecasting.

  Moore and Dunwoody’s problem with Cuban traditions in weather forecasting was that the forecasts seemed hysterical and primitive overreactions to weather—despite those traditions’ extraordinary history of accuracy, based on Jesuitical empirical and experimental science. To the Americans, Cuban knowledge was nothing but the superstitious lore of a backward people, lacking the Yankee grit and know-how that was making America a great leader on the world stage.

  And nobody could forecast hurricanes anyway. As Colonel Dunwoody put it, the sources, progress, and ultimate courses of hurricanes might as well be “a matter of divination.”

  So Moore and Dunwoody appointed one of their own to assert a big, strong, guiding American presence in Cuban forecasting. That appointee was William B. Stockman, a veteran of the bureau going back to the Signal Corps days. Under Dunwoody and Moore, Stockman set up shop in Havana and took charge of all of the U.S. weather stations in the region.

  In one of his early reports to Moore, Stockman simply eradicated the entire history of the Cuban weather networks. He told Moore that Cubans had never heard of such a thing as forecasting. The locals were “very very conservative,” Stockman reported, “. . . and forecasting the approach of storms, etc., . . . was a most radical change.” Fortunately, the United States was here to set things straight.

  Stockman may have actually believed what he was saying. He may have been entirely ignorant of the advances made at Belen; he may not have known about Father Viñes’s networks.

  Or maybe Stockman was a smart careerist. He knew Moore and Dunwoody would take happily to the notion that the Cuban weather service, which had so often been right, didn’t have any real expertise.

  In any event, with the United States in charge of Cuba, and with Moore’s Weather Bureau dazzled by its own prowess in rationalizing the locals’ primitive systems, it was especially important, Stockman advised Moore, that the bureau not be guilty of causing “unnecessary alarm among the natives.”

  And there was yet another problem with the Cuban weathermen. Father Gangoite’s Belen Observatory in Havana, Stockman claimed, had been secretly piggybacking on U.S. reports. Agents in New Orleans, he reported to Moore, stationed at the College of the Immaculate Conception there, nabbed copies of the daily weather maps coming out of Washington. The agents then sent the U.S. maps by undersea telegraph line to Havana. Such shifty shenanigans allowed the Cubans, as Dunwoody put it, “to compete with this service.”

  In other words, according to Stockman and his bosses Dunwoody and Moore, the Cubans never got things right, but when Cubans did get things right, it was because they stole U.S. data. Having pinched good reports, the Cuban forecasters whipped a silly, uneducated, overemotional population into a frenzy with overblown warnings of monster storms.

  As far as Director Moore was concerned, all this had to stop. In late August of 1900, just as a certain tropical wave was forming off West Africa, he decided to put his foot down. He would deal once and for all with these Cuban annoyances.

  Hurricane season was well under way. This was the perfect time, Moore calculated, to shut down all communication between Cuban weathermen and the people of the United States.

  It would take some string pulling. Fortunately for Moore, the U.S. War Department controlled all of Cuba’s government-owned telegraph lines. Those were the same lines over which Father Viñes had established his fabled hurricane-warning system, not for Cuba alone but for the entire region. That system was about to become a thing of the past, if Moore had anything to say about it.

  And he did. From Washington, Moore contacted Dunwoody, his top operator in the West Indies. Moore ordered Dunwoody to ask the U.S. War Department to formally ban from Cuban government telegraph lines any and all messages referring to weather.

  The War Department responded quickly. Martial law effectively prevailed in Cuba, so the weather-telegraph ban went into effect in the last week of August. That same week, ships’ captains out in the Atlantic, not far north of the equator, first sighted the storm that would drench Cuba and head toward Galveston.

  But Moore went further. Even among U.S. stations there must be no direct communication. No weather information in the U.S. Weather Bureau’s office in Havana could travel to the office in New Orleans. That was in keeping with the director’s long-standing preferences. Despite the proximity of Havana and New Orleans, everything from Havana must go directly to Washington. Washington would filter the Havana reports and decide what information to give New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast.

  Moore went further still. He reached out to Western Union, the commercial telegraph company. That company’s lines weren’t under government control. Moore wanted to ban private Cuban weather-related cables as well.

  He knew he couldn’t demand that Western Union literally censor private messages. But he could ask the company to manage what a later age would call bandwidth. He requested first priority for U.S. Weather Bureau transmissions. Next would come any non–weather-related messages. Cuban weather messages should get the lowest priority.

  Western Union showed a patriotic willingness to cooperate with the government. It gave all non-weather content superior privileges. Any private telegraphs from Cuba to the United States regarding weather would be slowed, bumped, and in many cases, Moore hoped, discarded. His blackout of Cuba was almost total.

  Father Gangoite had correctly predicted the arrival of heavy rain in Cuba. He had called those rains, correctly, “a cyclonic disturbance in its incipiency”: that is, a hurricane in the making. (“Cyclonic” was just the sort of word the U.S. bureau frowned on.) And he’d predicted—again correctly—an increase in violent force as the storm left the island and entered the Straits of Florida.

  And yet thanks to the triumphant dictate of Willis Moore and the U.S. War Department, accomplished only days earlier, banning direct weather communication from Cuba to the United States, Gangoite’s predictions could not legally travel off the island. With the storm now raging in the straits and moving quickly toward the United States, only Washing
ton could tell Galveston anything.

  That week, Isaac Cline, along with Joseph Cline and another assistant, John Blagden, went about their daily rounds in Galveston. On the roof of the Levy Building they took readings.

  They looked out across the vast, still, blue gulf sky. They observed the characteristically mild surf on the gulf beaches.

  They made their periodic and daily reports to Washington. They made and considered daily weather maps based on information from Washington. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  The bureau in Washington did, of course, report to Galveston on the progress of the disturbance coming out of Cuba. “Not a hurricane,” Moore called it (evidently you could use the word as long as you put “not” in front of it). The course of this non-hurricane, as the bureau saw the situation and reported it back to the gulf stations, would not affect Galveston. The storm would instead go into a classic “recurve.” This recurve effect was among the many laws of storms, according to the United States. Exiting the Caribbean on a northerly trajectory, storms simply cannot, these laws held, continue on a northwestern track. A storm thundering out of Cuba over the Florida Straits must turn toward Florida.

  The inevitable turn toward Florida was a good thing, the Weather Bureau believed. For a number of other predictable things would then have to happen. Arriving at the Florida peninsula, the storm would start sweeping a surface turned not horizontally against it, like a wall, as on the Gulf Coast and its offshore islands. The storm would instead be coming up against the vertical orientation of the peninsula. Broken coastline on the Florida gulf side would prevent the storm from hitting any land mass with head-on force.

  So as this supposedly mild storm coming out of Cuba continued on its supposedly northerly path, it would have to turn east, and then it would lose what little power it had.

  That was the official U.S. prediction. The system, the bureau telegraphed New Orleans, was “attended only by heavy rains and winds of moderate force.” There would be rain and high winds along the Florida coast, with some damage to moored ships and shoreline property. The storm would then move northeastward, through the southeastern states, weakening as it went. New Orleans and points eastward were authorized to hang the red-and-black storm-warning flags, letting captains know of moderately disturbed seas. (Captain Halsey saw one of those flags as he crossed the bar at Port Eads, Louisiana.) But any residual action in the gulf would quickly dissipate. And no warnings were in order west of New Orleans.