In September of 1900, a major hurricane came ashore at Galveston, Texas. Thousands died, and it remains the worst natural disaster in US history. This book provides a broad, sweeping background to that event, the author seeing in what led up to it and what followed signs of the times as well as a simple historical reckoning.
The Weather Bureau of the time was even more defensive than it is now, and with good reason: they weren't very good at forecasting the weather. Isaac Kline, their man in Galveston, was one of their best, and he even believed that his adopted city was topographically safe from such a disaster. Meanwhile, the Bureau stifled the native Cuban forecasters, who had many years of experience in predicting hurricanes. The result is almost an Aristotelian tragedy, as the hubris of Kline and his agency lead to disaster.
Larson provides a background on numerous levels. The most straightforward one would be (and is) the Weather Bureau itself, which had just undergone a major reorganization and cleanup in response to massive corruption found in the local field offices. (One meteorologist filed all his observations for the week on Monday and took the rest of the week off; another turned his office into a photographic studio and took nude photographs of women; still others had to make his observations at the pawn shop because he'd hocked the equipment for gambling debts.) Now tightly controlled, the Bureau would be as good or as bad as the man in charge. Moore, however, is an autocratic leader who wants to centralize control and seems to see promising subordinates, like Kline, as rivals.
Another background is on Kline himself, a disciplined, ambitious man, trained to the weather service and eager to make a name for himself. Given charge of the entire Texas region, he works hard to meet the demands of his job.
Then there's Galveston, at the time an up-and-coming city, fighting with Houston for the privilege of being the major western port on the Gulf of Mexico while being one of the fastest-growing cities in the country between 1890 and 1900.
There are also the people of Galveston, and Larson picks out a few citizens, seemingly no one special, to describe in detail.
Finally, there are hurricanes in general. Forming in the Atlantic or the Gulf from causes only roughly understood, they are among the most formidable forces in nature. Even today, as Larson relates, we do not understand why one tropical wave dissipates while another turns into Hurricane Andrew.
The hurricane of 1900 in fact formed well out in the Atlantic, passing over Cuba on its way to the Gulf. The Weather Bureau confidently predicted that the storm would turn north and in fact issued warnings to North Atlantic fishermen of the approaching storm. Even when this error was realized, the storm was not considered to be significant. The Cuban weathermen, meanwhile, somehow recognized that this storm would be a major one, but, being natives, they were not listened to. (Even after the disaster, there were those at the Bureau who insisted that the Cuban storm and the Texas one were totally separate.)
The stage is set for the disaster itself, which Larson relates in agonizing detail. He describes the ships at sea that encounter the storm, as well as Isaac himself walking along the beach and realizing that something is approaching. The winds blow, the waves rise, the sea comes to blanket Galveston as the townspeople first fight to save their property and then to save their lives. Eventually, the town is devastated and thousands are dead. Larson describes the spread of bodies and the horrifying cleanup afterwards.
Though Isaac is chastened at that point, Moore at the Weather Bureau blithely takes credit for warning of the oncoming hurricane, even though the only warning authorized is for high winds.