Terrorists Can’t Hold a Candle to Bureaucrats
On September 11, 2001, terrorists rammed their stolen jetliners into the World Trade Center, killing 3,000 people and changing the world forever.
They were amateurs.
Let’s turn the clock back 101 years and 3 days, and move the locale from Manhattan to Galveston, Texas.
The United States government had a relatively new agency: the U.S. Weather Bureau. The same one you get on your cable TV, or that your local newscast quotes when telling you to wear your raincoat or your galoshes. That Weather Bureau.
It was a new science, forecasting the weather. Oh, people had been predicting the weather for centuries. See a hairy caterpillar in October? Bad winter coming. Did the June bugs show up in late April? Long dry summer on tap. You know the routine.
But now, in 1900, weather forecasting was finally recognized as a science. They used instruments. They studied the barometer. They contacted outposts in all directions to track storms. They were the newest of the new, these weather forecasters.
And they protected their turf.
We’ll get back to them in a minute, but first let me tell you a little bit about Galveston, because these days it’s dwarfed in its own home state by Dallas and Houston and San Antonio—but back then, in 1900, it ranked behind only Houston as the major city of Texas. Not only that, but in the entire country it was second only to New York City as an entry point for immigrants. In fact, it was nicknamed the “Western Ellis Island.”
How big was it? Well, the population was always in flux due to immigration, but the best estimate was 30,000, give or take. The climate was pleasant, the land was lovely, property was inexpensive, and though it was on the water everyone knew it was safe from typhoons and hurricanes and the like. And if they didn’t know, the Weather Bureau was only too happy to tell them so.
The shining light of the Galveston Weather Bureau was a gentleman named Isaac Cline. He was their superstar. Cline was quoted as saying that it was “an absurd delusion” for anyone to think Galveston could possibly ever suffer serious damage from a hurricane.
He based this conclusion on two erroneous beliefs: first, that any high surf or storm tide would flow over Galveston into the bay behind it and then into the Texas prairie, doing no lasting damage at all; and second, because of the shallow slope of the Gulf coastline, the incoming surf would be broken up and made much less dangerous.
Cline was so sure of this that he ridiculed the notion of building a sea wall to withstand storms, and because he was, for all practical purposes, the voice of the United States government on this particular subject, the wall was never built.
Now, the Weather Bureau was still in its infancy, but the people manning the Galveston division were pretty confident in their skills. Certainly more confident then they were of the skills of the Cubans they had defeated just two years earlier when Teddy Roosevelt led his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill. The Cuban weathermen meant well, decided the Galveston Weather Bureau, but after all, they were just illiterate peasants, right?
So when, on September 7, 1900, Cuba began reporting that the biggest storm anyone had ever seen was heading right toward Galveston, the Weather Bureau was so sure they were totally mistaken and panicking needlessly that they refused to make the Cubans’ warnings public.
After all, everyone knew that Galveston couldn’t suffer serious damage from a storm. Either it would turn away before reaching shore, or it would pass right over and blow itself out somewhere over the vast Texas prairie.
But by the morning of September 8, it became apparent to Cline and his co-workers that the storm wasn’t going to turn away and miss Galveston. In fact, it was apparent to everyone in the city. All they had to do was look to the south and east and see what was approaching.
Should they evacuate the city, they wanted to know.
Certainly not, Cline and the Weather Bureau assured them. This is Galveston, not some shanty town that’s likely to get blown away by a strong wind. Our houses are well built, we’re sitting right on the slope of the Gulf coastline, and haven’t you ever seen a thunderstorm before?
So the people—most of them, anyway—trusted their government bureaucrats and stayed put.
At least until the water became knee-high, and then waist-high, and then neck-high. Pretty soon those who hadn’t fled the town were perched on their roofs.
And pretty soon after that there weren’t any roofs, because the houses began collapsing, and boats capsized, and bodies—infants and the elderly at first, then men and women in their primes—began floating down the streets, through the windows, over the vanished roofs.
And still the storm continued.
At one point a train from Beaumont entered the town, but halted well short of the station. The passengers wanted to leave and find some high ground, or at least some rooftops, for safety. The conductors, hearing the reassurances of the Weather Bureau, urged the passengers to remain where they were. After all, this was a train, a massive thing of steel. Surely no storm can harm it or wash it away, and you don’t have to take our word for it; just ask the Weather Bureau.
Ten passengers looked out the window, said, in essence, “Bullshit!,” and waded and swam through the rampaging water to try to find some safe haven. 85 passengers believed the bureaucrats of the Weather Bureau and stayed with the train.
By the next morning, all 85 were dead.
I should add that this wasn’t entirely the fault of Cline and his Galveston bureaucrats. They were in contact with a branch of the Bureau in the West Indies, which was anxious to show up the Cubans—their recent enemies—and to prove that these Spanish peons were pressing the panic button needlessly.
Of course, back in Galveston, by the time it became clear that, if anything, the Cubans were underestimating the danger, no one could find the panic button. It was hidden under tons of water.
So did help rush in, as Americans have always helped their own and others?
Nope.
You see, Cline was in control of the forecasting, but his immediate superior, Willis Moore, was in control of the whole damned Galveston Bureau, and Moore was more concerned with Galveston’s—and his Bureau’s—image than with saving citizens that he had convinced himself weren’t really in all that much danger to begin with. So a call for help never went out.
The city’s newspapers colluded with the Bureau, and downplayed the story. In fact, an unpublished editorial in the Galveston Tribune the morning after the storm hit assured the public that there was very little danger from the storm, and “no possibility of serious loss of life.”
Why (I hear you ask) was it unpublished?
Because the press floated out to sea before the issue could be printed.
All the phone and telegraph wires were dead by 4:00 PM, and Galveston was effectively cut off from the rest of the world. By 7:00 PM the winds were over 120 miles an hour, and some were as high as 200 mph before midnight. Contact wasn’t re-established with Galveston for another 28 hours, until 11:30 PM on September 9. In the interim, the closest any train had been able to approach the city was 6 miles. Anything beyond that was too dangerous.
When it was over, it was estimated that Galveston had lost between 3,000 and 4,000 houses and buildings.
It was always going to lose them. The people were something else again. If the bureaucrats of the Weather Bureau had simply told the truth, had shared the information they’d been sent from Cuba, had not been so pig-headed in their certainty that no storm could ever damage Galveston…
No one knows exactly how many people died in New York on September 11, 2001. The best estimate is 3,000, out of a population of more than seven million. That comes to four ten-thousandths of one percent.
No one knows exactly how many people died in Galveston on September 8 and 9, 1900. The best estimate is 10,000, out of a population of about 30,000. That comes to 33 percent.
Terrorists can’t hold a candle to bureaucrats.