Isaac's Storm Analysis

Erik Larson wrote a gripping account of the Galveston hurricane in a 1999 book called “Isaac’s Storm.” The protagonist is Texas’s chief weatherman Isaac Monroe Cline, who led the Galveston observation office of the United States Weather Bureau when the storm hit and lost his wife to the storm surge. For a full decade leading up to the devastation, Cline insisted publicly that the idea Galveston could ever be “seriously damaged” by a hurricane was “simply an absurd delusion.”
“It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which would materially injure the city,” Cline wrote in a piece for the Galveston News. That op-ed helped dissuade city fathers from investing in a sea wall that could have saved thousands of lives when the

storm came.
Cline was once on his way to Mexico for a work trip when his steamship encountered a low-intensity hurricane. Rather than counting his blessings, the meteorologist concluded (insanely) that hurricanes were more survivable than conventional wisdom depicted.
He believed he was an especially gifted, even brilliant, scientist. But, Larson writes, “he did not know there was such a thing as the jet stream, or that easterly waves marched from the coast of West Africa every summer, or that a massive flow within the Atlantic Ocean ferried heat around the globe. Nor had he heard of a phenomenon called El Nino.”