On September 7, 1900, Galveston, Texas was the wealthiest city per capita in the state and the largest cotton port in the nation. Thirty-eight thousand people lived on a barrier island that rose, at its highest point, eight and a half feet above the sea.
On September 9, the city was unrecognizable.
The hurricane of September 8, 1900 killed between eight thousand and twelve thousand people in a single night. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history. The storm surge reached fifteen feet on an island that averaged four feet of elevation. The Gulf drove water across the island from the south. The bay drove it back from the north. They met in the streets.
Art of Storm: Galveston, 1900 begins one hundred miles to the south, fifty-six years before the hurricane, in a port town called Indianola. Indianola was destroyed by hurricane in 1875. It rebuilt. It was destroyed again in 1886. It was abandoned. The site is now underwater.
Galveston knew about Indianola. The two cities sat on the same coast, faced the same water, and shared the same elevation. In 1891, the chief meteorologist of the Galveston Weather Bureau published an article in the city's newspaper stating that it would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave that could materially injure the city. He called the possibility an absurd delusion. The seawall proposals that had been circulating since Indianola's destruction went quiet.
Nine years later, on the morning of September 8, that meteorologist stood at the beach before dawn and watched swells arrive from a direction the forecast did not account for. The published forecast placed the storm near Florida. The only observatory tracking the hurricane from its origin had been cut off from the national forecast network by order of the Weather Bureau's chief in Washington.
The twelve-word forecast that reached Galveston that morning read: "Rain Saturday, with high northerly winds; Sunday rain, followed by clearing."
Twenty-five centuries before this storm, the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu wrote about how battles are won and lost - not through superior force, but through preparation, intelligence, and the calculations a general makes before the first soldier leaves camp. His principles describe the conditions under which a position falls: when it is unfortified, when its intelligence is severed, when rapidity and terrain allow force to arrive faster than the defender can respond.
Art of Storm: Galveston, 1900 is the first volume in The Art of Storm series.
Sun Tzu's strategic principles provide the framework.
The storm provides the facts.
The reader provides the verdict.
