Isaac's Storm - Eric Hansen

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Category: non-fiction, history, biography Acquired: gift from Mom Voelker, Dec. 2007 Read: Dec/Jan 2007 Briefly: when Galveston was surprised and devastated by a hurricane in 1900, the US Weather Bureau came under severe criticism for their failure to forecast it. A lot of the heat fell on their local station manager, Isaac Cline, who had actually done the best he could, despite the Bureau's total lack of knowledge about hurricanes, coupled with a stifling bureaucracy. This book follows Cline through his formative years in the Bureau, portrays the events leading up to the failed forecast, and then provides hour-by-hour detail as the disaster unfolds. It's almost like reading about Pearl Harbor - there were adequate chances to avert disaster, but as you watch the web of human failures grow, you know full well how it's going to turn out.

Comments: I always enjoy books that explore the history of technology, particularly when the human element is involved. The technology here is the science of weather forecasting, and the human element is the fledgling U.S. Weather Bureau, under attack at the turn of the century for being very poor at actual weather forecasting. They've responded to these attacks by drawing inward, creating a paranoid bureaucracy where all forecasts and warnings are issued from Washington, D.C. only, and where individual forecasters have virtually no authority to act on their own. The inevitable results, documented here, remind me why I'm so hesitant to see crucial social functions removed from the private arena and entrusted to the federal government.