Perishing Wealth
September 8, 1900. The seas were hot. The land was hot. There was no air conditioning. Most people had no electric fans. Everyone suffered. Suits were black wool. Carriages had black canvas tops and black bodies. Trains were ovens. In New York City, three children climbed out on a fire escape to find a breeze. They all fall off and die. A strange migration of crickets overwhelms Waco, Texas. Lightning strikes more people than ever before.
In Washington, Officials of U.S. Weather Bureau suffer too, as they continue to build credibility and overcome past errors and scandals. It had miscalled two deadly blizzards. Its chief financial manager had embezzled a fortune. Its weather observers had been implicated in sex scandals and grave robbing. To prevent further embarrassment the bureau had banned the word “tornado,” for fear that if used in forecasts, it would cause too much panic. Like the churches of the world, the bureau believed that centralized control reduced the risk of error, and they insisted that all storm warnings come only from headquarters. Any observer who broke that rule risked being fired.
The bureau had strung a necklace of weather stations throughout the Caribbean, but the officers, jealous of the weather observers of Cuba, ignored their warnings, and treated them as if they were offshoots. In the summer of 1900, the bureau issued a ban on any telegram in Cuba that even mentioned the weather unless authorized by the “bureau.”
A tropical storm went through Cuba, dumping “biblical” amounts of rain, but brought only moderate winds, so the bureau in the U.S. paid little attention to it. After leaving the island, the storm underwent an explosive intensification to the level of a hurricane of an intensity no American had ever experienced. Sea Captains were the first to encounter the horrors.
On the morning of September 5, the Steamer Louisiana left New Orleans under bright skies. By the next afternoon it was fighting winds of 150 m.p.h. Horizontal rain beat against the bridge with the sound of bullets against armor. The hull of the ship flexed, and the Captain watched his barometer fall to levels he had never seen. The Captain of the Pensacola called a passenger to his barometer. “Look at the glass,” he said. “Twenty-eight point fifty five. You never have, and will in all probability never see it again.” It continued to fall.
“The sky seemed to be made of mother of pearl” a visitor in Galveston Sabbath morning said. The sky was “gloriously pink, yet containing a fish-scale effect which reflected all the colors of the rainbow. Never had I seen such a beautiful sky.”
But the great swell that morning made Isaac Cline uneasy. Ordinarily, the gulf was as calm as a lake. This quality has seduced engineers into building great Victorian bathhouses on stilts well into the sea. Many years later Cline would write. “If we had known what we know now of these swells, we would have known earlier the terrors of the storm which these swells told us in unerring language was coming.
The hurricane had a forward speed of about 10 m.p.h., but its powerful winds were producing waves that moved at 50 m.p.h. and reached the Texas coast long before the storm itself. They rose within the storm as jagged ship killers, but once beyond the storm’s circle of influence, they settled into long, slow undulations. As they met the gradual slope of the Texas coast, their leading edges slowed and the trailing water piled up, creating “tidal waves” of incredible heights.
The bureau’s Central Office had at last sent orders to hoist a storm flag, but this telegram gave no cause for alarm. Such warnings in August were routine. But there was nothing routine about the sea, or the ominous feel of the morning. Isaac drove back to the beach and again timed the swells. They were heavier now and pushed seawater well into the neighborhoods nearest the beach. He returned to his office and composed a telegram to Willis Moore, chief of the bureau in Washington. He ended the telegram. “Such high water with opposing winds never observed previously.”
The city didn’t share the anxiety of the sea captains. Adults and children alike greeted the storm with delight and converged on the beach, some in bathing suits. The surf rocketing off the streetcar trestle like a fireworks display. A great crowd gathered at the Midway, a 10-block stretch along the beach with cheap restaurants and souvenir stores. The sea began to climb into the city. “As we watched from the porch,” one woman wrote. “We were amazed and delighted to see the water from the gulf flowing down the street. ‘Good.’ We thought, ‘there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach, it was right at our front gate.’” It was a wonderful spectacle until the waves stared tearing apart the bathhouses and the shops of the Midway. Suddenly, one mother recalled, “It wasn’t fun anymore.” A visiting businessman who had taken shelter in a train station wrote that he first realized the true extent of the disaster when the body of a child floated into the station.”
With all communications with the mainland cut off, Isaac went home. He walked into his house, a big frame structure on stilts five blocks from the beach. Despite his anxiety, he planned to ride out the storm at home with his pregnant wife, Cora and his three young daughters. He believed the house capable of withstanding any storm the Gulf could deliver. Others apparently felt likewise, for when he arrived, he found that 50 people had taken shelter inside.
That afternoon, the Gulf sprang forward as if propelled by an uncoiling spring. A wall of water 20 feet high rushed ashore. The waters of the sea and the bay met over the city and turned rooftops into islands. No one knows what velocity the winds reached. The bureau’s anemometer blew away at 100 m.p.h. The wind sliced off the top floor of the bank. It stripped slate shingles from houses and turned them into flying blades that disemboweled men where they stood. A visiting British cotton official was sucked by the wind from his apartment while hearing his wife scream. The storm drowned an entire train and demolished an orphanage, killing 90 children. The winds and water destroyed artillery emplacements built to withstand bombardment, and swept whole neighborhoods from the face of the earth.
6:30 P.M. that evening, Isaac Cline walked to the front door of his house to take a look outside. He opened the door upon a fantastic landscape. Where once there had been streets, there was open sea. He did not see any waves, however, for behind his house the storm surge had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long that acted as a seawall. It contained carriages, furniture, the streetcar trestle and the rooftops that floated like the hulls of ships. It also carried corpses, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. The wind and the sea now pushed this wall toward Isaac’s house. If not for the thundering wind, Isaac would have heard it coming as a horrendous blend of screams and exploding wood.
But something else caught his attention, as it did the attention of nearly every other soul in Galveston who was still alive. Suddenly, as he stood at his front door, the surface of the sea rose four feet in four seconds. This was not a wave, but the tide itself. And it continued rising. For those inside Isaac’s house, it was a moment of profound terror. Four feet was taller than most of the children in the house. Throughout the city, parents rushed to their sons and daughters, lifting them from the water and propping them on tables, dressers and pianos. People in single-story houses had nowhere to go. The sudden rise of the sea meant death. No jokes where now heard. People were finally praying. Judgment day had come. It was the judgment for a city. The judgment of many thousands. For most it was to late. But for some-for all who would—it led to eternal life as they cried out to God. Our ever pitying Savior heard their cries.
The houses fell gracefully at first. One witness said houses collapsed into the Gulf “as gently as a mother would lay her infant in the cradle.” It was when the current caught the structure and swept them away that the violence occurred, with bedrooms erupting in a tumult of flying glass and wood, rooftops soaring through the air like monstrous kites.
The barrier of wreckage pushed before it an immense segment of the streetcar, which struck Isaac’s house with terrific force. Isaac was in the center of the room with his wife and six-year-old daughter Esther, whom he always called his “baby.” A wall came toward him. It propelled him backward into a large chimney. He entered the water, and something huge caught him and drove him to the bottom. Timbers held him and he lost consciousness. He woke to rain hitting him in the face like shrapnel. He was afloat, his chest caught between two timbers.
September 9, 1900. The U.S. weather bureau in Washington telegraphed—“Do you hear anything from Galveston?”
There came the ominous reply: “We have been absolutely unable to hear a word from Galveston since 4 p.m. yesterday” and then—“First news from Galveston just receive by train, which could get no closer to the bay shore than six miles, where prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About 200 corpses counted from train. Large steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston.”
The words give you a strange feeling. “Nothing could be seen of Galveston.” Like Jerusalem and the Titanic, it was a symbol of the world that we are now in. May God give us a sense of the shortness of time and the value of a soul!
Sunday morning, so many corpses littered the landscape that civilized burial was deemed impossible. Galveston’s relief committee ordered the bodies dumped at sea with weights on their legs. But hundreds of them came back ashore, so they were burned. The nights were rimmed with orange light of countless piles of burning bodies. Human ash sifted from the sky like slowly falling snow.
Isaac survived Saturday night-barely. He had found his daughters alive in the waters, but his wife Cora, had vanished in the storm.
For a time the message of the storm seemed to be heeded. But memory faded quickly, and today grand new houses rise on stilts on the Island’s west end beyond the protection of the seawall. The once barren sea-level prairie that stretches from Galveston through Houston is now home to about 3 million people. To hurricane experts, it’s one of the most vulnerable regions in America, where even today an intense hurricane could cause mega-scale death. Today its meteorologist know a lot more about hurricanes than Isaac Cline did in 1900, but this knowledge, has led them to recognize that hurricanes remain inscrutable giants capable of tricks that can defy even satellites and computers-like suddenly intensifying in the hot waters off Cuba and catching a city by surprise.
While many are “playing church” the prophet of God cries out. “Satan’s power upon the human family increases. If the Lord were not soon to come and put an end to his cruel work, the earth would ere long be depopulated.”
CTBH 150
Do you comprehend that? Will there be a World War III?
What will help God’s poor church members to forget “who’s the greatest,” and perfectly unite to meet the horrible storm ahead of us—working together to save souls? This will-“A storm is coming, relentless in its fury. Are we prepared to meet it? We need not say: the perils of the last days are soon to come upon us. Already they are come. We need now the sword of the Lord to cut to the soul and marrow of fleshly lust, appetites, and passions. Minds that have been given up to loose thought need to change. ‘Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ…. But as He which hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation. Because it is written, Be ye holy, for I am Holy. RC 311
JM