Even today, they still call it The Great Storm. It was the deadliest natural disaster to ever strike the United States. When it was over, somewhere between 6,000 and 12,000 were dead. To put that into perspective, consider that 1,836 died during Hurricane Katrina.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Galveston was a growing, prosperous city. There were about 37,000 residents, and it was the largest city in the state of Texas. The city was vulnerable, however: it sat on a strip of low, flat land, unprotected from the ocean. The highest point of the city was only 8.7 feet above sea level. There had been talk from time to time about building a seawall, the project had never been accomplished. Most of the people in Galveston considered it unnecessary.
The residents of Galveston expected that all future storms would be pretty much of the magnitude of the storms they had weathered in the past. This wasn’t just the opinion of the uninformed — Isaac Cline of the Galveston Weather Bureau had written an article for the local paper in 1891, stating that the prospect of a serious hurricane striking the island was an absolute impossibility. He said that building a seawall was a “crazy idea.”
We don’t know a lot about the origins of the storm. Technology was much cruder then, and most information about storms at sea came from the ships that had been in the middle of it. The ships weren’t able to make their reports until they had put in to port, and by then the details were often a moot point.
By September 4th, however, it was known that a serious storm was moving over Cuba, and by the 6th it had hit just north of Key West. On the morning of September 7th, the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi reported damage. The Weather Bureau put out storm warnings for the coastline, stretching from Pensacola, Florida, to Galveston. The word didn’t get out quite as well as one would have wished, however. Too many of the telegraph wires had been taken down by the storm.
The Weather Bureau didn’t want to create a panic, so it avoided words like “hurricane” or “tornado.” This was simply a heavy storm, and they expected it to head northeast.
Meanwhile, in Galveston, it was obvious that something was going on, and some of the residents left the island and headed for the mainland. At about noon on the 8th, Isaac Cline issued a hurricane warning, although he did not have permission from the Weather Bureau to do so. He also rode along the beach areas and warned people personally — or so he said in his autobiography. No witnesses have ever come forward to confirm that he issued the personal warnings to the beach residents.
By 5:00 p.m. the winds had reached 84 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 100. We don’t know how strong the winds were after that, because the anemometer blew away. Cline’s best guess was they reached up to 120 miles an hour, but judging from descriptions others furnished — of timbers and bricks being blown almost horizontally, for instance — it is likely that the winds were much stronger than that.
At about 6:30 a sudden surge of water hit the city, raising the water level four feet instantly. Soon the water reached a depth of 15 feet over Galveston. Many of the buildings that hadn’t already been blown apart by the winds were destroyed by the sudden waves. Cline’s wife, who was pregnant at the time, was killed when the building she was in collapsed. Cline managed to save his six-year-old daughter. His brother saved Cline’s 11 and 12-year old girls.
The next morning, the storm had receded, and the damage was obvious. At least 6,000 people were dead, and probably many more. No reliable estimate of the number of deaths could be compiled, because in many cases whole families had been wiped out, with no one left to report the deaths. Many bodies had been washed out to sea. There were also many vacationers in the city, of whom no record existed at all.
As far as property damage went, about a third of the city had been destroyed, estimated at 20 to 30 million dollars at the time.
In the immediate aftermath, it was next to impossible to get word out as to what had happened in Galveston. The bridges to the mainland were gone. The telegraph wires were down. Finally, a ship that had survived the storm — one of the very few — made it to Texas City and sent telegrams to the Governor and to President McKinley. They estimated that 500 were dead. It was, at the time, considered an exaggeration.
The first job awaiting the survivors was the disposal of the remains of the dead. Searchers drenched handkerchiefs with camphor and tied them around their noses to mask the stench, and were given free whiskey to get through the ordeal. When there was a shortage of volunteers for the job, men were coerced at gunpoint.
To begin with, the bodies were loaded onto barges, where they were weighted and taken out to be dumped at sea. When those bodies started washing back ashore, the residents turned to cremation. The funeral pyres burned until November 10th.
There were also 30,000 homeless in Galveston. Some of them set up surplus Army tents along the beach, so many of them that the area was called “The White City on the Beach.”
The first reporter on the scene was a woman, Winifred Bonfils, who worked for William Randolph Hearst. When Hearst got her report, he sent relief supplies by train.
Clara Barton also made a trip to Galveston, in the company of the Red Cross, an organization that had only existed for 19 years. It was Barton’s last field operation — she was 78 at the time.
In 1902, construction on the Galveston Seawall began. The level of the city was also raised, by up to 17 feet in some areas. In 1915, another hurricane hit Galveston, of almost equal force, and with a 12-foot surge. 53 lives were lost in that storm, but it was a vast improvement over the disaster of 1900.
Sources: Chase’s Calendar of Events, 2011 Edition: The Ultimate Go-To Guide for Special Days, Weeks, and Months, Editors of Chase’s Calendar of Events; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September 8; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galveston_Hurricane_of_1900; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Cline; http://web.archive.org/web/20070209050501/http://www.history.noaa.gov/stories_tales/cline2.html; http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ydg02; http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/icline2.htm; http://www.1900storm.com/redcross/; http://web.archive.org/web/20080928063930/http:/www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/storm/; http://education.texashistory.unt.edu/lessons/psa/Galveston1900/.