On the way out the door on Thursday morning I randomly grabbed something to read on my commute. The book my hand landed on happened to be Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm – a highly readable, if traumatic, account of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 – the greatest natural disaster in American history.
It was only when finishing it on the train this morning that I realised that today is the 114th anniversary of the storm. Almost one hundred and fourteen years to the minute before I closed the back cover of the book the people of Galveston were going to bed, unaware that before the next day was out somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 of them would be dead or dying, and their city lying in ruins.
Spooky stuff.
