BS: Galveston Hurricane of 1900

Saturday, Sept. 8, 1900
"Saturday began in the city of 38,000 inhabitants much the same as any other weekday. People prepared for another stint in the routine of six-day workweeks then common, not even an encroaching tide disturbed them greatly. Galvestonians had become used to occasional "overflows," when high water swept beachfronts. Houses and stores were elevated as a safeguard.
The tide kept crashing further inland, and the wind steadily increased. The Weather Bureau official drove a horse-drawn cart around low areas warning people to leave. Comparatively few people had evacuated the city, however, before bridges from Galveston Island to the mainland fell, and many people along the beach waited until too late to seek shelter in large buildings in a safer area downtown, away from the Gulf. Houses near the beach began falling first. The storm lifted debris from one row of buildings and hurled it against the next row until eventually two-thirds of the city, then the fourth largest in Texas, had been destroyed. People striving to make their way through wind and water to refuge were struck by hurtling bricks and lumber and sometimes decapitated by flying slate from roofs. --- Wind gusts of 100 mph had been recorded before the anemometer blew away---. About 6:30 P. M. a storm wave, sweeping ashore in advance of the hurricane's vortex, caused a sudden rise of four feet in water depth, and shortly afterward the entire city was under water to a maximum depth of fifteen feet. This storm wave caused much of the damage. --- Around 10:00 P. M. the tide began to fall slowly, and little damage occurred after that.

"September 9 dawned on desolation. Most of the city lay in shambles. Between 6,000 and 8,000 people in the city of Galveston had died, and estimated casualties for the entire island ranged from 10,000 to 12,000. --- A high water mark of 15.7 feet and high winds had destroyed a third of the city, including 2,636 houses and --- 1500 acres of shoreline. The sixteen ships anchored in the harbor at the time of the storm also suffereed extensive damage. More violent and costlier hurricanes have struck coastal areas of the United States since 1900, but because of the death toll the Galveston storm that year was in the 1980s still called the worst recorded natural disaster ever to strike the North American continent."

"Out of the chaos, citizens developed the commission form of city government now used by many other municipalities. "
"Construction began on a six-mile-long seawall standing seventeen feet above mean low tide, and that protective barrier has been extended--- Inside the city, sand pumped from the Gulf floor raised the grade as much as seventeen feet. This work required advance raising of 2,146 buildings and many streetcar tracks, fireplugs and water pipes. --- The great storm --- left a long track. From Texas it traveled into Oklahoma and Kansas, turned northeastward --- passed north of Halifax and disappeared into the North Atlantic."

Handbook of Texas.
http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/GG/ydg2_print.html