Roker’s ‘Storm’ has many layers
NBC icon digs into the science behind the catastrophe
The human drama and complex natural history of the hurricane that leveled Galveston, Texas, on Sept. 8, 1900, has been told and retold. Striking at the dawn of modern meteorology, it remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history, killing more than 8,000 people.
And its cautionary tragedy should haunt us now more than ever as climate change and extreme weather imperil the future.
In The Storm of the Century, popular NBC meteorologist Al Roker doesn’t hype the relevance of Galveston’s misfortune so much as deliver a fascinating, multifaceted story.
Researching the lives of several survivors to impart flesh-andblood immediacy, he portrays grocer Arnold Wolfram, police chief Edwin Ketchum and firstgrader Louise Bristol in their desperate hours. But none of their travails resonate as strongly as those of Isaac Cline, Galveston’s resident weatherman, an ambitious member of the fledgling U.S. Weather Bureau caught in the literal and political crosswinds of the storm.
Cline’s story is at the core of this historical drama, which led a craftier storyteller, Erik Larson, to focus on it so effectively in his 1999 book, Isaac’s Storm. Admirably, and with acknowledgement, Roker’s big-picture approach seeks to build on Larson’s bestseller, providing a wealth of cultural context and meteorological depth.
Roker is at his best on his home field: meteorology. His deeply knowledgeable descriptions of how hurricanes form are well-written and interesting to the lay reader who hasn’t a clue as to why air masses converge, spiral and wreak havoc. We learn that the science of weather forecasting we take for granted today was well in place more than a century ago.
Shockingly, Galveston didn’t benefit from the hurricane warnings that preceded Sept. 8. At the time, the United States controlled Cuba, and in a sorry show of bureaucratic bad faith, the U.S. Weather Bureau refused to heed the warnings of Cuban meteorologists who predicted the severity of the storm. Cline was forbidden to warn his fellow Galvestonians of the storm’s scope — and the rest is history.