Al Clark: Unlike us, sad Galveston couldn't escape what it couldn't see

From where we now stand in the heart of the Weather Channel era, it's a stretch to imagine those days not long ago when we often didn't know much about approaching storms, especially hurricanes — or at least we couldn't see them.

Today's meteorology, with its computer models, radar and the 24-hour delivery of information, via television and the Internet, has taken much of the mystery out of the changing sky. No longer do we foretell the coming of rain, wind or warmth by the pain in an uncle's bunion, a groundhog's shadow or a red sky in the morning. We don't even have to look out the window, just turn on the TV.

The mystery is gone, but what have we gained? While wistful for the days of grandpa predicting heavy storms as he sat watching the sky from his west-facing porch rocker, I am thankful for the confidence we now share in our modern-day forecasting.

Just this weekend, a massive hurricane has been swirling not that far off our coast. Had its path varied only a jag, it could have been on top of us this very morning with winds well over a 100 miles per hour.

A hundred years ago, most of us would have never known it was there — had it come ashore, we would have hardly known what hit us.

That's just about what happened in Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900. On the evening of that day, a category 4 storm — about the size of Hurricane Bill passing us in the Atlantic this weekend — swept over the low-lying coastal city.

There had been word of a storm coming, based on reports from the U.S. Weather Bureau as it was known at the time, but they were sketchy and conflicting.

The local newspaper that morning had a one-column story about it out of New Orleans. Its headline said “Storm in the Gulf” but the story said little else.

A local piece appeared under that one saying: “At midnight the moon was shining brightly ... The weather bureau had no late advice as to the storm's movements and it may be that the tropical disturbance has changed its course or spent its force before reaching Texas.”

As conditions worsened that afternoon, a Weather Bureau forecaster went through the streets of the city trying to warn residents, but without seeing there often is little believing. As the clouds came in and the winds grew, even the forecaster could not have predicted the intensity of what was to come.

The hurricane roared over the city that night. Estimates of the dead later were placed at 6,000 all the way up to 12,000 people.

It remains the worst natural disaster in the nation's history. The forecaster's wife drowned.

Something so totally cataclysmic, a night as terrifying as that one in Galveston, is hard to imagine. Today, though we live along a coast exposed to an equal potential for tragedy, we are nonetheless sheltered in ways grandpa and his bunions could never have anticipated.

Keep that in mind the next time you see the weatherman pointing to the radar on your television or computer or a satellite storm image in the paper. Then pause to recall the tragic figure of a frantic forecaster hurrying through rain-swept streets trying to warn his neighbors of the unseen terror that soon would be upon them.

Al Clark is executive editor of The Daily Reflector. Contact him at aclark@coxnc.com.