How Is a Disaster Made? | Lapham’s Quarterly
▻https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-disaster-made
n September 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, one hundred miles downriver from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 miles per hour there, at the town of Burrwood, Louisiana, where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment. As the storm moved upriver, the aneroid barometer at Tulane University plummeted to 28.10 inches. The rain gauge filled with 8.36 inches of precipitation in twenty-one hours. Even in a region accustomed to hurricanes, these were extraordinary measurements. Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau in New Orleans, reported that the storm was “the most intense hurricane of which we have record in the history of the Mexican Gulf coast, and probably in the United States.”