The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was by far the worst natural calamity in U.S. history. The city itself was almost completely destroyed, and the death toll of between 8,000 and 12,000 exceeds that of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, and the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane combined. Between the badly bungled forecast of September 6 and the tragedy at Galveston two days later lies a tale of individual courage and misjudgment, of bureaucratic envy and xenophobia.
In 1900, Galveston was the premier city of Texas, the “New York of the Gulf” as the New York Herald proclaimed. It was competing with Houston to become the dominant city of the region, on par with New Orleans. It exuded an air of terrific optimism and boasted an annual population growth of almost 3 percent. The city was built on Galveston Island, a narrow, low sandbar separating the Gulf of Mexico from Galveston Bay, its developers having ignored stories that an 1841 storm had submerged the entire island to such a depth that ships could cross it.
Sparse ship reports suggest that the storm that was to destroy Galveston formed in the central North Atlantic, about four hundred miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, on or about August 27. A ship encountering the storm the next day recorded winds of about 14 m/s (30 mph). By Thursday the thirtieth, the tropical storm was near Antigua in the Leeward Islands, where the observing station at St. Johns recorded a minimum pressure of 1010 mb (29.83”). Proceeding westward on September 1-4, the storm grazed the south coasts of Hispaniola and Cuba, inundating Santiago, Cuba with 87 cm (24.34”) of rain in just two days. Many miles of railway bedding were washed away in Jamaica as the storm passed by to its north.
The forecasters at Havana’s Belen Observatory monitored the storm with interest. Father Gangoite, the observatory’s director, issued a statement on September 1 expressing his view that the storm, while small, was of a type known to produce heavy rain in Cuba and to intensify rapidly after passing into the Florida Straits. The tropical storm crossed over western Cuba during the fourth, and the next day the Belen observers reported it near Havana, moving northwestward into the Gulf of Mexico.
It was during this time that politics threw a nasty wrench into the already shaky machinery of turn-of-the-century hurricane forecasting. Officials of the Washington D.C.-based U.S. Weather Bureau Central Office, headed by Willis Moore, had grown increasingly exasperated with Cuban forecasters, whom they regarded as inferior and alarmists. In reality, the Cubans had achieved a well-deserved reputation for skill in hurricane observation and forecasting, and the Weather Bureau sought to curtail the competition.
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Whatever its cause, the animosity of the U.S. Weather Bureau toward its Cuban colleagues no doubt contributed to serious forecast blunders made in the succeeding days. The track of the storm through late on September 5 showed it gradually turning north. Once they begin to recurve, most hurricanes continue to do so. Thus Weather Bureau forecasters were very much within their rights to predict on September 5 that the storm would move northward and pose a threat to Florida and the East Coast of the United States. They shrugged off the Cuban forecasters’ suggestion that the storm would move northwestward into the Gulf….As late as that Thursday afternoon (September 6), the Bureau was warning fishermen in New Jersey to stay in port.
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