By Juan Montoya,
Various Sources
Previous to Hurricane Franklin coming ashore of the Mexican coast off Veracruz, meteorologists with the Weather Channel and local weather forecasters issued predictions of its landfall using different models.
There were Canadian models, European models, USGFS models, etc., that predicted, with small deviations, where the storm was headed.
But back in 1900, before such models were available, the U.S. government's attitude towards such storms was far more arrogant than it is today.
The U.S. Weather Service did not even like to use the words "hurricane" or "tornado," as Erik Larson details in his book about the disaster, "Isaac's Storm."
"Issac" refers to Issac Cline, the U.S. Weather Service forecaster in Galveston.
Researchers say that officials then did not want to panic anyone, a problem that still exists today in other forms – even though we now name our storms well in advance and spend days warning people to prepare for the worst.
U. S. forecasters were overly confident in their primitive, even though back then there was no satellite or doppler technology. And a deep-seated xenophobic distrust of predictions by Cuban meteorologists blinded them to the fact that they had far more experience assessing the strength and predicting the paths of hurricanes than U.S.-based personnel had.
In fact, they were disdainfully distrustful of Cuban forecasters. Before the 1900 storm, U.S. forecasters had a policy of ignoring or downplaying warnings from Cuba, even though the island generally experiences storms well before the U.S.
Various historians have asserted that in 1900, the Weather Bureau was in its early days, and only recently separated from the Army's Signal Corps. The bureau was rife with internal competition and corruption. It was also engaged in an antagonistic rivalry with the Cuban weather forecasters, who had considerably superior knowledge of Atlantic hurricane patterns. Initially, the Americans were confident that the storm, which had built in the south Atlantic, would move northeast and back out to sea.
The Weather Bureau in Washington projected the storm to travel up the east coast of Florida and then north; the Cubans knew it was going west.
One author states that "Striving to monopolize forecasting, the bureau took its cues from its chief, Willis L. Moore, whose insecurity matched his pomposity. Moore wanted his staff to look confident, soothing and precise; he forbade use of alarming words like 'hurricane' unless authorized from Washington.
His pettiness trumped his judgment when, at the peak of the 1900 hurricane season, he halted all telegraphed weather communications from Cuba. He would not admit that men he regarded as excitable Latins might have an edge on his Weather Bureau, even though Havana's Belen Observatory had been systematically studying hurricanes for 30 years."
The results of the xenophobia of the day that prevented the Cubans' warning of the dangerous Category 4 hurricane to go out to the residents in Galveston? It is estimated that between 8,000 to 10,000 people died in the United States – the worst in U.S. history – and that included 93 children whose bodies were found near St. Mary's Orphanage where they lived.