Washington Silenced Havana, Then Galveston Drowned

On September 3, 1900, Father Lorenzo Gangoite, director of the Belén Observatory in Havana, watched a hurricane move past Cuba into the Gulf of Mexico and tried to send a telegram north. He had every reason to think someone would listen. Belén, run by Spanish Jesuits, had been the best hurricane-tracking office in the Western Hemisphere for thirty years. His predecessor, Father Benito Viñes, had built a network of observers across the Caribbean and worked out, decades before anyone in Washington, that storms could be tracked by their cirrus plumes.

The telegram did not get through, or if it did, no one acted on it. Two years earlier, after the Spanish-American War, U.S. Weather Bureau chief Willis Moore had decided that Cuban forecasting was a national embarrassment. He could not legally censor private weather cables, so he leaned on Western Union: Cuban weather traffic to the United States was given the lowest priority, slowed, bumped, or simply dropped. The Bureau in Washington issued its own forecast for the same storm — it would curve north and head for the East Coast.

Isaac Cline, the Bureau's man in Galveston, started doubting the official line on September 7. He raised hurricane flags on the bureau roof and walked the beach telling people to move inland. Most did not. The city sat on a sandbar three metres above sea level with no seawall.

The hurricane came ashore the night of September 8 with sustained winds estimated at 145 mph and a storm surge that wiped flat the southern half of the city. The most cited death toll is 8,000, in a town of 38,000. It is still the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Moore kept his job for another thirteen years. The Cubans, denied the satisfaction of saying so out loud, had been right.