An Imagined Conversation with Isaac Cline, Who Used the Word "Impossible"

Isaac Monroe Cline is sixty-six years old in the winter of 1927–28. He has just had the best year of his career. His flood forecasts for the Great Mississippi Flood were, in Herbert Hoover's words, "absolutely uncanny in their accuracy."¹ His book Tropical Cyclones has earned international recognition.² The New Orleans Item Tribune called him an "unsung hero."³ By every available measure, he is vindicated.

He is also the man who wrote, in 1891, that the idea of a hurricane doing serious damage to Galveston was "a crazy idea." Nine years after that article helped prevent construction of a seawall, the deadliest natural disaster in American history killed between six and twelve thousand people.⁴ Among them, his pregnant wife, Cora.

The following conversation is imagined. It is grounded entirely in documented material: Cline's autobiography, his official Weather Bureau reports, Erik Larson's research, NOAA records, and contemporaneous journalism. But it never took place. The Docket does not have a time-travel bureau. We checked the budget.

What is documented and what is contested is noted throughout. What Cline actually felt is, as with all of us, ultimately his own.

You've had quite a year, Dr. Cline. Secretary Hoover said your flood forecasts saved thousands of lives. How does that recognition land?

Isaac: It lands well. I won't pretend otherwise. The Secretary was generous. But I want to be precise about something, because precision matters in this work. The forecasts were accurate because the methodology was sound. I didn't guess. I had twenty-four years of river data, tide observations, barometric readings. The science was there. The difficulty was never the science.

What was the difficulty?

Isaac: Getting it printed. The newspapers had a censorship committee. Businessmen, commerce interests. They didn't want flood warnings in print because they feared the effect on New Orleans trade.⁵ I had to go to that committee in person and tell them that if they suppressed my bulletins, the deaths would be on their hands, and I would make that publicly known.

A meteorologist fighting commercial interests that want to suppress inconvenient risk information. That must have felt familiar.

Isaac: I see what you're reaching for. And I... yes. I'm aware of the shape of it.

The shape of it.

Isaac: In 1891, I was twenty-nine. Galveston was booming. I had been there two years. I wrote what I believed to be true based on the meteorological understanding available to me. The Gulf's bathymetry, the gradual slope of the continental shelf. I believed, and I was not alone in believing, that these features would prevent a storm wave of catastrophic magnitude.⁶ I was wrong. Catastrophically wrong. But I did not write it to suppress alarm for commercial reasons. I wrote it because I was confident. (quieter) Confidence is a professional tool. Right up until it kills people.

In that 1891 article, you called the Indianola hurricanes "accidental" and wrote that it would be "impossible" for a cyclone to materially injure Galveston.⁷ That word. Impossible.

Isaac: I know the word I used.

Do you think about it?

Isaac: Every day of my life. I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because you asked and I owe you an honest answer. I used the word impossible about a thing that happened nine years later and killed... we don't even have an accurate count. We never will. Somewhere between six and twelve thousand people.⁸ My wife among them. My unborn child among them. In a city where a seawall might have been built, had a young meteorologist not published his confident opinion that one was unnecessary.

On September 8, 1900, you breached Weather Bureau protocol and issued a hurricane warning without authorization from Washington.⁹ In your autobiography, you also describe personally riding along the beach that morning, warning residents to move to higher ground.¹⁰ Erik Larson's research found no eyewitnesses who corroborated that account.¹¹

Isaac: (very still) I know the dispute. I issued the warning. That is documented. The flag went up. As for the beach... I was on that beach. I took measurements. I observed the swells. Whether I... the exact nature of my... (stops)

I am going to tell you something I have not said to a journalist. I was on that beach. I remember the water. I remember the color of it. Brown, not the usual green. Brown with sand already churning from the bottom. I remember knowing something was wrong. What I cannot tell you with the certainty I would like, and I am a man who prizes certainty, is whether I spoke to the people I remember speaking to, or whether I have, over twenty-seven years, constructed a version of that morning in which I did everything I could. I want to have done everything I could. You understand?

That's an extraordinary admission.

Isaac: It's an honest one. There is a difference. Though I grant you, at my age, the difference may be smaller than I'd prefer.

After 1900, you spent decades studying tropical cyclones. You were the first to establish that storm surge, the water itself, was the primary killer in hurricanes. Not wind.¹² That finding came directly from studying the Galveston storm.

Isaac: Yes.

The storm that killed your wife became the dataset.

Isaac: (silence) The science needed doing. Someone was going to do it. I had particular motivation to ensure it was done correctly.

You collect art now. Paintings, porcelains. You restore them.¹³

Isaac: I do. Fragile things. Yes. I can see you composing the metaphor already. A man who failed to protect a city spends his evenings restoring small, breakable objects. I'm not unaware of how that reads. I also simply enjoy beautiful things. Not everything requires interpretation.

Fair enough. When you thought you were drowning on the night of September 8, you've written that your last thought was, "The world will know that I did my duty to the last."¹⁴

Isaac: That is what I have written, yes.

Is that what you thought?

Isaac: (looks away) It is what I remember thinking. And I have just told you what I think about the distance between remembering and wanting. So you may draw your own conclusions.

I will say this. I was underwater, in the dark, with wreckage pinning me. My wife was already gone, though I didn't know it yet. My children were somewhere in that water. I decided to let the water enter my lungs because I could not hold my breath any longer.

Do you think you'll write about all of this someday? A memoir?

Isaac: I've considered it. There are things I would want the record to reflect. My work on the river forecasts. The cyclone research. The methods I developed.

And the 1891 article?

Isaac: I don't know what purpose that would serve. The facts of 1900 are well established. My error is not hidden. Anyone can find it. I don't know that rehearsing it in my own hand would accomplish anything. For anyone.

For you?

Isaac: (very quietly) I have accomplished what I can with the years I was given after. The forecasts speak. The science speaks. I don't know that my words would add anything the work hasn't already said.

Cline did write his autobiography. Storms, Floods and Sunshine was published in 1945, when he was eighty-three. The 1891 article is not mentioned.¹⁵ The Indianola storms are not discussed. The beach-warning claim appears without qualification. His last thought while drowning is rendered exactly as he stated it above, or rather, as he would state it seventeen years after this conversation never happened.

He died on August 3, 1955, at ninety-three, as a new hurricane approached the Gulf. His brother Joseph, who had pulled Isaac's daughters from the water that night in 1900, died five days later.¹⁶

The National Weather Service's highest honor is called the Isaac M. Cline Award.¹⁷

Footnotes

1. Herbert Hoover's praise of Cline is documented in NOAA's 200th Anniversary profile and Government Executive, "Isaac's Legacy" (October 2005). https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/isaac_cline/1927flood.html ↩

2. Cline, Isaac Monroe. Tropical Cyclones (1926). NOAA NWS Heritage Virtual Lab profile. https://vlab.noaa.gov/web/nws-heritage/-/isaac-monroe-cline-the-cyclone-pioneer ↩

3. New Orleans Item Tribune, July 3, 1927, "Doctor Cline, Unsung Hero of Big Flood." Referenced in Galveston Monthly. https://galvestonmonthly.com/whoswho/isaac-cline.html ↩

4. Wikipedia, "1900 Galveston hurricane." Death toll estimates range from 6,000 to 12,000; 8,000 most commonly cited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane ↩

5. NOAA 200th Celebration, "Isaac Monroe Cline: Great Flood of 1927." https://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/isaac_cline/1927flood.html ↩

6. Cline's 1891 reasoning is summarized in Larson, Erik. Isaac's Storm (Crown, 1999) and Wikipedia, "Isaac Cline." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Cline ↩

7. Cline's 1891 article in the Galveston Daily News. Quoted in multiple sources including Wikipedia and Larson. ↩

8. Wikipedia, "1900 Galveston hurricane." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane ↩

9. Galveston & Texas History Center, "Storm FAQs." https://www.galvestonhistorycenter.org/research/storm-faqs ↩

10. Cline, Isaac Monroe. Storms, Floods and Sunshine (Pelican, 1945). Beach-warning claim appears in Chapter 8. ↩

11. Larson, Erik. Isaac's Storm (Crown, 1999). Larson's dispute of the beach-warning claim is summarized in Wikipedia, "Isaac's Storm." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac%27s_Storm ↩

12. NOAA NWS Heritage Virtual Lab. https://vlab.noaa.gov/web/nws-heritage/-/isaac-monroe-cline-the-cyclone-pioneer ↩

13. Galveston Monthly, "Isaac Cline — After the Storm." https://galvestonmonthly.com/whoswho/isaac-cline.html ↩

14. Cline, Storms, Floods and Sunshine. Analyzed in "Galveston oh Galveston" (Substack), March 31, 2024. https://galvestonohgalveston.substack.com/p/isaac-cline-1900-and-the-ghost-town ↩

15. The autobiography's omission of the 1891 article is noted by multiple sources, most thoroughly in the "Galveston oh Galveston" Substack analysis. ↩

16. Wikipedia, "Isaac Cline." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Cline ↩

17. NOAA History, "Dr. Isaac M. Cline." https://www.history.noaa.gov/nwsbios/clinei.html ↩