A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes

American arrogance and dismissal of Cuban weather warnings resulted in the dire effects of the hurricane in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The Weather Bureau grossly underestimated the inclement weather conditions which began on September 8, 1900. The Weather Bureau chief, Willis Moore, ignored the Cuban warning that a storm of hurricane proportions was heading to Texas, deeming that the “Cubans were governed too much by their passions, instead of cold, hard reason, and that they were too quick to label any serious storm a hurricane” (87). He also wanted his bureau to be at the forefront of weather forecasting and staked the unsubstantiated claim that the Cubans were stealing American data and weather maps. He subsequently asked the War Department to ban Cuban meteorologists from using telegraph lines. This meant that the Americans cut themselves off from the Cubans’ warnings that a hurricane would hit Texas.

Isaac Monroe Cline, Galveston’s resident meteorologist, contributed to the Weather Bureau’s state of denial when he claimed that large-scale hurricanes could not occur in Texas, because “the coast of Texas is according to the general laws of the motions of the