Isaac's Storm

Here, Larson introduces two new individuals whose experiences he will use to detail the horrors of the 1900 Galveston hurricane. The first is Louise Rollfing, a German immigrant who lives in a house two-and-a-half blocks from the beach with her husband August and their two children, Helen and August Otto. The second is Dr. Samuel O. Young, the secretary of Galveston's Cotton Exchange and a meteorology-enthusiast with a fair bit of expertise for an amateur. He lives one block North of Isaac with his wife and children, who are away for the summer but scheduled to return the weekend of the storm.

Larson goes on to detail the tense and dysfunctional state of the US Weather Bureau's West Indies hurricane service in Cuba, often the vanguard for coming storms. Moore, still the head of the US Weather Bureau in DC, is deeply mistrustful of Cuba's own meteorologists, despite the fact that many Cubans helped pioneered the art of hurricane detection: “It was an attitude, however, that seemed to mask a deeper fear that Cuba's own meteorologists might in fact be better at predicting hurricanes than the bureau" (102). In hopes of hobbling the competition, Moore dispatches H.H.C. Dunwoody to Havana, the same politically savvy individual who helped orchestrate Harrington's ouster in 1891.