Isaac's Storm: Part II

With no advance warning from the Weather Bureau, it jettisoned thirty inches of rain in six hours.

Some while later he proposed to her, if a mite obliquely. "Don't you think, Louisa, we could always be happy together, and that we should get married?"

In mid-August, Moore put Baldwin on mandatory furlough, without pay.

In mid-August, Moore put Baldwin on mandatory furlough, without pay.

"It was at first very difficult to interest the various peoples in the warning service," Stockman wrote to Moore in a voluminous June 1899 report on the Indies service's first full year of operation, "as the inhabitants of the islands are very very conservative and it is most difficult to get them to adopt any measures that radically differ from those pursued by their forebears..."

"Nevertheless I am constrained to say that if the Official in Charge at Havana could curb a tendency toward verbosity and avoid iterations and reiterations in successive communications of matter that is irrelevant and immaterial to the subject heads, a great deal of time and labor would be saved both at Havana and the Central Office."

Stockman and the observers in his network took special pains to avoid using the word hurricane, except when absolutely necessary or when stipulating that a particular storm was not a hurricane.

They sent clipped telegrams in a code that did not allow for conjecture or expressions of instinct, yet in their seeming precision produced the same sense of mastery over the weather that daily weather journals gave to men like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.

Modern technology helped perpetuate this ethos.

The storm did not grow through some gradual accretion of power; it exploded forth like something escaping from a cage.

The Gulf was hot to begin with because of ambient high temperatures and because so far in that season there had been no other hurricanes to roil and cool the waters.

Once again the ship righted, but now something profoundly peculiar occurred that piqued great excitement among seekers of the Law of Storms.

The Atlantic theory had been a compelling one, however—so much so that a vestige of it survived at the Galveston station well into Saturday morning, despite Isaac's experience on the beach.

Stockman had typed the Cuban forecasts and the corresponding U.S. advisories verbatim, with dates and times, so Dunwoody and his critics could see for themselves.

All in all, Stockman felt, it was an excellent letter: muscular, understated, full of detail.