Isaac's Storm: The Drowning of Galveston - 8 September 1900

Read by the author 3 cassettes, approx. 5 hours Now a New York Times bestseller, Isaac's Storm is the superb narrative of the extreme hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, on a late summer day in 1900, leaving at least 8,000 people dead. On that day, a wall of water surged across the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the burgeoning city of Galveston. The nameless hurricane remains the deadliest natural dissaster in American history, its final toll greater than the combined tolls of the Johnstown Flood and the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906-- yet the event has all but dissappeared from natural memory. Isaac Cline, one of the first professional weathermen emplyed by the government, has gone on record as declaring that no storm could damage Galveston. Such fears, he wrote, were ''an absurd delusion.'' By the time the hellish event was over, Cline would see whole portions of the city scraped clean of all structures and all life, and would himself endure an unbearable loss. The other main character is the storm itself. Issac's Storm tracks the hurrican from its birth as a small plume of warm air over Africa, through its journey across the ocean as it drinks in vast amounts of energy, to its arrival at the unsuspecting city. The audiobook describes how the city, especially its children, welcomed the storm and the great deep-ocean swells that it cast upon their beach--until extraordinary things began to happen. Isaac's Storm is based on our latest understanding of the physics and meteorology of hurricanes, on Cline's own formal reports and detailed personal account of the storm, as well as the recollections of scores of other witnesses. It is an unforgettable and timely story of the conflict between human hubris and the last great uncontrollable force--a cautionary tale for the millennium. "At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf.". "In Galveston, reassured by Cline's belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky - until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. Isaac's Storm is based on Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last great uncontrollable force. As such, Isaac's Storm carries a warning for our time."--BOOK JACKET. "On September 8, 1900, the deadliest hurricane in American history ploughed into the unprepared port of Galveston, Texas. One-hundred-and-fifty mile an hour winds shredded clapperboard houses with the force of dynamite. The sea followed, a solid wall of water twenty feet high. The city's highest point was nine feet above sea level. Overnight between six and ten thousand people lost their lives, houses were reduced to matchwood, and bodies were strewn miles inland across the prairie. It was, and still is, the worst natural disaster ever to strike the United States. At the turn of the century the new US Weather Bureau had the finest forecasting technology at their disposal. With this 'perfect science' they were confident they were in control of the world, that the new century would be the American century. And in Galveston, Texas they had one of their most dependable meteorologists, Isaac Cline. Cline, like the rest of America, believed that man's ingenuity had tamed nature. He believed there was nothing to fear. Fatally, Cline failed to read the signs until it was too late. By then, the bath-houses on the sea-front were being crushed by rolling breakers, children were playing unawares in the rising water, the railway line was underwater, and ships in the bay were fighting for their lives." From jacket THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT of Friday, September 7, 1900, Isaac Monroe Cline found himself waking to a persistent sense of something gone wrong.