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He brought in telegraph reports and newspaper clippings.įrom these data, Viñes created a system for understanding storm formation and making predictions. He jotted down snippets of conversations with ship captains. He filled a storm notebook with descriptions of clouds, cross-referenced to instrument readings. He soon made the small Havana observatory the hub of a forecasting network for the entire Caribbean Sea. One year, a hurricane removed the observatory’s entire zinc roof.įather Viñes hoped not only to advance meteoro-logical science but also to aid humankind. Its tropical vegetation, wrought-iron balconies and painted stucco houses were routinely subjected to torrential downpours and violent wind.

#HOWARD STORM IT WAS VERY IMPORTANT TO THEM HOW TO#

There couldn’t have been a better place to learn how to forecast bad weather than Havana. An extension of a Jesuit preparatory school, the observatory benefited from the long Jesuitical tradition of inquiry, experimentation, publishing and teaching. The Belen Observatory, founded by Father Benito Viñes in Havana in 1858, was perhaps the most advanced in the world. Meteorology, like much other science in Cuba, was the province of Jesuit priests. Weather Bureau, which had stations in the Caribbean, resentment and disdain for Cuban forecasting had become entrenched. government still administered the island, and within the U.S. Weather Bureau know that? The grim answer to that question had to do with a highly problematic relationship between the United States and Cuba following the Spanish-American War.Ĭuban revolutionaries, assisted by the United States, had won independence from Spain in 1898.

They were perhaps the best in the world at assessing and predicting the tracks of hurricanes, and they knew the storm had grown into an unmistakably violent one headed for the Texas Gulf Coast. As early as Monday, September 3, the storm was being observed by meteorologists in Cuba. Nobody, one might assume, knew anything in advance about the hurricane’s strength or track.īut that’s far from the truth. But Moore’s notice was so wrong-about the nature of the storm and its direction-that it seems to suggest both meteorology and international communications remained in a primitive state. The unnamed storm is still the deadliest in American history.Īccurate long-range tracking of hurricanes was hard to come by in 1900. Three days later, with no official warning, a Category 4 hurricane leveled Galveston and claimed at least 10,000 lives. It was simply signed “Moore.” That was Willis Moore, director of the United States Weather Bureau. The notice was datelined “Washington, D.C.,” September 4.

On Wednesday, September 5, 1900, the Galveston Daily News ran a tiny, 27-word squib in its weather section: A tropical disturbance was moving over western Cuba and heading for the south Florida coast. Its illustrious past seemed to bode well for its future-until the deadliest hurricane in U.S. Residents had bragging rights to a number of Texas firsts: the first medical college in the state, the first electric lights and streetcars and the first public library all belonged to their city. LOCATED ON A NARROW island that separates Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston, Texas, in 1900 was a prosperous port of 37,000. Blown Away: Galveston Hurricane, 1900 | HistoryNet Close

Howard storm it was very important to them