Infinite Monster: A book review 13 years late
The other great storm.
Infinite Monster: Courage, Hope and Resurrection in the Face of One of America’s Largest Hurricanes, by Leigh Jones and Rhiannon Meyers. PenlandScott Publishers, 2010.
Don’t let the spin of the subtitle fool you. You can find courage, hope, and, if you squint, partial resurrection, but these were not what stayed with me after I read this book.
The greatest testimony I can give it is that it caused me to briefly rethink our decision to move to Galveston.
More than a century after it all but destroyed the city, the Great Storm of 1900 continues to dominate histories of hurricanes in America, and for good reason. The storm remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.
But here, the infinite monster – a phrase the authors attribute to a preacher describing the 1900 storm the day after it struck – is Hurricane Ike, which devastated Galveston and surrounding regions on September 13, 2008.
Infinite Monster seems to have received little attention when it came out in 2010. It deserved a wider audience then, and it deserves one now. It’s a carefully reported, well-written, and at times terrifying account of Ike’s toll.
But the more sobering reason we should take the book’s measure is that the city’s existing storm mitigation infrastructure, the island’s subsidence over the past century-plus, the Gulf’s present sea level, and current climate patterns are far closer to the Galveston and the Gulf of 2008 than they are to the city and the sea of 1900.
Ike resulted in $30 billion in property damage, the third costliest hurricane in U.S. history. While only six died on Galveston island, 75 percent of buildings in the city were damaged. Waves overtopped the 17-foot seawall, but most of the storm surge came from the bay to the north. The standing salt water killed 40,000 trees, including 60 percent of its oaks.
But the most telling consequence of the storm didn’t become apparent until much later. Galveston’s population was 57,000 when the storm hit; a year later, it was 46,000. One in five residents were either unable to return to their still-uninhabitable homes or decided to leave for good.
Jones and Meyers, reporters at the time for The Daily News of Galveston County, combine personal interest stories with detailed, almost forensic investigations, assisted by access to emails between city, state, and federal officials, into preparation, response, and aftermath.
For a year afterward, the authors interviewed survivors, both those who chose to stay (a third of the city’s residents ignored the mayor’s evacuation order) and those who fled the island before the storm’s landfall. Many in both groups regretted their decision. Virtually all of those who stayed admitted they underestimated the lethality of the storm; many who evacuated regretted leaving, angry that they were prevented from returning to their homes to save what they could.
The mayor, Lyda Ann Thomas, elected to keep residents off the island for almost two weeks after the storm passed. Basic services – electricity, water, sewer service, phone, internet – had been knocked out. Emergency crews were frantically searching for bodies and survivors. Thomas wanted to keep the causeway connecting Galveston to the mainland clear for first responders. Those with connections to city officials, some of them Thomas’s own friends, pleaded with her office for permission to return. Except for one day, when she allowed residents to return to the island to check on their homes and leave before nightfall, she held firm.
The accounts of those who stayed are as gripping as an adventure yarn. With water rising everywhere, would they attempt to leave at the last minute? What would they save? How would they save their pets? Themselves?
Those who obeyed orders and evacuated had different worries. What would they find when they returned? Would their house be habitable? What would remain intact inside? Usually, what they found was worse than they’d imagined.
Much of the book’s second half is devoted to documenting a seemingly unending series of delays, bureaucratic bungling, poor communication, political skirmishes at local, state, and federal levels, and the truly daunting job of cleaning up. Maintenance of an adequate number of safe and sanitary shelters proved all but impossible. Debates surrounding the condition and restoration of public housing grew ugly. Three years after its disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, FEMA again manages to come off poorly.
One near-casualty of the storm was Galveston’s University of Texas Medical Branch. Jones and Meyers devote a lengthy chapter to the pressure brought by state legislators and members of The University of Texas System Board of Regents to move UTMB, which suffered $1 billion in damages and lost revenue, off the island. Only a fierce and carefully orchestrated lobbying campaign led by state representative Craig Eiland, along with 3,000 layoffs and massive infusions of cash from the Smith & Sealy Foundation and FEMA, kept the state’s oldest medical school in Galveston.
Bad as it was, Ike’s damage would have been far worse without the seawall and grade raising, both of them direct consequences of the 1900 storm. Ike’s consequences remain to be seen.
In November 2008, the city formed the Galveston Community Recovery Committee, which by April 2009 had proposed 42 projects, most of them minor and uncontroversial infrastructure improvements. One of them was neither.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ latest guesstimate for the Ike Dike, a massive series of gates, barriers, and dunes intended to protect Galveston Bay and coastal areas from storm surges, came in at $57 billion for 20 years of design and construction. Congress has authorized but hasn’t appropriated money for the project. It might yet get built, but I doubt I’ll live to see it.
Jones and Meyers spend little time on long-term plans for Galveston, and there’s no mention of either climate change or subsidence. Their focus was on a particular hurricane and the havoc it left in its wake.
Because they were able to speak with dozens of the storm’s survivors, Infinite Monster is at times a more visceral read than even the best accounts of the Great Storm of 1900. It didn’t change my mind about living here. But it reminded me, more vividly than any book has, of its risk.
