-Hello! I have finished Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson today*,* and wanted to share my thoughts in light of having just read The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough as well. I found a lot of similarities between the events, and also between the styles McCullough and Larson portrayed such events. Let's dive in!

- Isaac's storm, a massive hurricane which struck Galveston, Texas in the summer of 1900, turned out to be another disaster which the common folk of an up-and-coming town were wholly unprepared for. As an aside, Erik Larson and David McCullough were the first two historians I am attempting to read the entire catalog of, and really had no clue their first mainstream books were both about natural disasters. Weird. So, anyway, Larson faced the same challenge of interesting me in an event I normally don't have much passion for. It was quite intriguing reading both of these texts at the same time, and doing real time comparisons.

- McCullough and Larson are both fantastic story-tellers, yet both used unique techniques in their initial texts which make their subjects interesting. While McCullough made it feel intimate, as though you were on a tour of Johnstown and the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, Larson's strength was explaining the science behind disaster. Science that was spanking new in 1900. I guess I had only the faintest idea about the construct of a hurricane beforehand, but Larson goes to terrific lengths to make his readers quite familiar with cyclones. I came away understanding much more about the signals behind barometric pressure drop, a "brick-dust colored" morning sky, the cycles of hot air rising into colder atmospheric zones and the manner in which air is displaced among high and low pressures, and how wind plays such a massive effect on the path a cyclone travels. And what a distance it can truly travel!

- This story centers around the quiet Isaac Monroe Cline, a confident, diligent weather observer in an age when emerging interest in anything science brought about the birth of the National Weather Bureau. Isaac is a man of scientific passions, who ultimately fit in with a group of men who believed if the extremes of weather could be understood and predicted, then man might finally reach the point where he could control it. He is an agent of the Weather Bureau sent to the wonderful, burgeoning coastal town of Galveston, Texas, a city in the midst of a rivalry with Houston over who would control trade in the Gulf of Mexico. 19th century America was poppin'.

"But a new America was emerging, one with big and global aspirations. Teddy Roosevelt, flanked by his Rough Riders, campaigned for the vice presidency. U.S. warships steamed to quell the Boxers. There was fabulous talk of a great American- built canal that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific, a task at which Vicomte de Lesseps and the French had so catastrophically failed. The nation in 1900 was swollen with pride and technological confidence."

"Regardless of one’s view, the fact was that Galveston in 1900 stood on the verge of greatness. If things continued as they were, Galveston soon would achieve the stature of New Orleans, Baltimore, or San Francisco. The New York Herald had already dubbed the city the New York of the Gulf. But city leaders also knew there was only room on the Texas coast for one great city, and that they were in a winner- take- all race against Houston, just fifty miles to the north. As of 1900, Galveston had the lead. The year before, it had become the biggest cotton port in the country and the third- busiest port overall."

- I found so many similiarities between Galveston and Johnstown. As I said, both were emerging cities. Galveston was in competition with Houston over the coastal cotton trade. Johnstown saw it self as a rival of Pittsburgh as it pertained to coal mining and iron companies. Both would be utterly destroyed, never to reach the same heights of popularity again. Both cities had powerful bureaucrats who are made for the villains in each tale. With Johnstown, the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club, whose members included Andrew Carnegie and whose negligent maintenance of the South Fork Dam caused the dam to burst and murder hundreds of victims in Johnstown. In Galveston, blame can be heaped on the Weather Bureau and their arrogant leader Willis L. Moore. The Bureau had come under much heat from other sectors of the government for their inexact scientific methods, and their inaccurate predictions. Moore, a man in complete lust for government power and approval, made it his mission to dictate storm warnings and panic control. He also engaged in constant verbal warfare with weather stations in Cuba, often contradicting their weather reports in efforts to make the Cubans look inept. This petty combat would have tragic effects in Galveston, where 6,000 unwarned and unprepared citizens would lose their lives over the Weather Bureau's pride. Moore just sucks.

"Moore and officials of the bureau’s West Indies hurricane service had long been openly disdainful of the Cubans. It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba’s own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau. In August, Moore moved to hobble the competition once and for all. The War Department was then still in charge of Cuba, as it had been ever since the end of the Spanish- American War. Moore’s chief liaison on the island was H. H. C. Dunwoody (now Colonel Dunwoody), the bureaucratic intriguer who had helped undermine Moore’s predecessor, Mark Harrington. Through Dunwoody, Moore persuaded the War Department to ban from Cuba’s government- owned telegraph lines all cables about the weather, no matter how innocent, except those from officials of the U.S. Weather Bureau— this at the peak of hurricane season. It was an absurd action. Cuba’s meteorologists had pioneered the art of hurricane prediction; its best weathermen were revered by the Cuban public. Over the centuries, storm after storm had come to Cuba utterly by surprise, until 1870 when Father Benito Vines took over as director of the Belen Observatory in Havana and dedicated his life to finding the meteorological signals that warned of a hurricane’s approach. It was he who discovered that high veils of cirrus clouds— rabos de gallo, or “cock’s tails”— often foretold the arrival of a hurricane."

"As John Blagden sat in his office, powerful bursts of wind tore off the fourth floor of a nearby building, the Moody Bank at the Strand and 22nd, as neatly as if it had been sliced off with a delicatessen meat shaver. Captain Storms of the Roma had practically bolted his ship to its pier, but the wind tore the ship loose and sent it on a wild journey through Galveston’s harbor, during which it destroyed all three railroad causeways over the bay. The wind hurtled grown men across streets and knocked horses onto their sides as if they were targets in a shooting gallery. Slate shingles became whirling scimitars that eviscerated men and horses. Decapitations occurred. Long splinters of wood pierced limbs and eyes. One man tied his shoes to his head as a kind of helmet, then struggled home. The wind threw bricks with such force they traveled parallel to the ground. A survivor identified only as Charlie saw bricks blown from the Tremont Hotel “like they were little feathers.”

- I am always amazed at how our species handle insane situations. This book is littered with these instances. Like McCullough, Larson introduces you to several families and their daily lives until you become quite familiar with them. Then he lays down the reveals about their deaths or survival within the catastrophe, and the heartbreak or joy leaves you speechless. In Johnstown it was the Heisers who owned the General Store and their son Victor, Reverends Chapman and Beale, and little Gertrude Quinn (oh my heart!). In Galveston, in addition to Isaac and his brother Joseph Cline, and their family, we follow August and Louisa Rollfing, Anthony Credo and his family, Dr. Sam Young, and more. What happens to Judson Palmer and his family gave me nightmares as a soon-to-be new father myself. And, what happens to the children's orphanage on the coast... it is truly difficult to comprehend how such suffering and sadness are allowed to occur if their exists a loving God.

- Everyone loses someone here. The event of the hurricane- I just could not imagine how people did it. Whole families literally raft surfing on doors or porches, being blugeoned by whipping debris, surviving or dying in the darkness of the most powerful hurricane to hit the Gulf. That people survived at all is incredible. I think of disasters of today in places like the Philippines, and how those survives are some of the only living people who can relate to what the people of Galveston and Johnstown went through. It is an incredible extreme of human experience. Larson will pull at your heartstrings retelling these traumatic events.

"At another address, Mrs. William Henry Heideman, eight months pregnant, saw her house collapse and apparently kill her husband and three- year- old son. She climbed onto a floating roof. When the roof collided with something else, the shock sent her sliding down into a floating trunk, which then sailed right to the upper windows of the city’s Ursuline convent. The sisters hauled her inside, dressed her in warm clothes, and put her to bed in one of the convent cells. She went into labor. Meanwhile, a man stranded in a tree in the convent courtyard heard the cry of a small child and plucked him from the current. A heartbeat later, he saw that the child was his own nephew— Mrs. Heideman’s three- year- old son. Mrs. Heideman had her baby. She was reunited with her son. She never saw her husband again."

- Isaac suffers ultimate loss, and in the aftermath, like all the other survivers in shock, moves amongst the wreckage searching. Like Johnstown, people come from all over in relief, and the horror of it all is on full display. Larson drenches the last bit of the book in dread and decay.

- On a lighter note, in Johnstown 1889, I was introduced to the absolute titan that was Miss Clara Barton. Everyone should learn about her. But...Surely, I wouldn't find another like her in this book-

"When Clara Barton arrived the next week, she found the silence striking. People moved as if dazed, she said; there was “an unnatural calmness that would astonish those who do not understand it.” People grieved, but without demonstration. “You will hear people talk without emotion of the loss of those nearest to them,” Father Kirwin said. “We are in that condition that we cannot feel.”

No way.

"Clara Barton arrived to look after everyone, and immediately telegraphed home: “Situation not exaggerated.” She had expected many orphans, but found few. The storm had been hardest on the small. She came with a trainload of carbolic acid and other disinfectants supplied by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. "

No fucking way.

"Among the contributions that moved her (Clara) most was $61 from workers at the Cambria Steel Company, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. They made no mention of the ordeal they had gone through eleven years earlier after the failure of a dam at a rich- man’s club high above town."

Full circle.