Great Galveston Hurricane
The Great Galveston Hurricane made landfall on the city of Galveston, Texas on September 8, 1900. It had estimated winds of 135 miles per hour, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, similar in intensity to Hurricane Andrew in 1992.The storm caused great loss of life. The death toll has been estimated by some sources as 6,000, and by others as 12,000. The number most cited in official reports is 8,000, giving the storm the third-highest number of casualties of any Atlantic hurricane, after the Great Hurricane of 1780, and 1998's Hurricane Mitch. The Great Galveston Hurricane is to date the deadliest natural disaster to strike the United States.
The hurricane had no official name, and is referred to under various descriptive unofficial names. Common names for the storm include the Great Galveston Hurricane, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, and the 1900 Galveston Hurricane.
Warning signs
The city of Galveston at the end of the 19th century was a booming metropolis with a population of 38,000, and the center of trade in the state of Texas. However, this prosperity came with a sense of complacency.
On September 4, the Galveston office of the US Weather Bureau began receiving warnings from the Bureau's central office in Washington, D.C that a hurricane had moved northward over Cuba. Ship reports were the only reliable tool for observing hurricanes at sea, and because wireless telegraphy transmission was in its infancy, these reports were not available until the ships put in at a harbor. The Weather Bureau forecasters had no way of knowing where the storm was and where it was going.
In the early morning hours of Friday, September 7, the Weather Bureau office in New Orleans, Louisiana issued a report of heavy damage along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts. Details of the storm were not widespread due to damage to telegraph lines limiting communication.
By the afternoon of the 7th, large swells from the southeast were observed, and clouds at all altitudes began moving in from the northeast. Both of these observations were consistent with a hurricane approaching from the east. The Galveston Weather Bureau office raised its double square flags; a hurricane warning was in effect.
Early the next morning, the swells continued despite only partly cloudy skies. Largely because of the unremarkable weather, few residents heeded the warning. Few people evacuated over Galveston's bridges to the mainland, and the majority of the population was unconcerned by the rain clouds that had begun to roll in by mid-morning.
The local legend that Weather Bureau section director Isaac M. Cline took it upon himself to travel along the beach and other low-lying areas warning people personally is based on Cline's own reports and has been called into question in recent years.
By early afternoon, a steady northeastern wind had picked up. By 5 pm, the Bureau office was recording sustained hurricane force winds. That night, the wind direction shifted to the east, and then to the southeast as the hurricane's eye began to pass over the island.
The last message that reached the mainland was from Cline at 3:30 pm, reporting "Gulf rising, water covers streets of about half of city." After that, the telegraph lines were cut.
The highest measured wind speed was 100 mi/h (160 km/h) just after 6 pm, but the Weather Bureau's anemometer was blown off the building shortly after that measurement. The eye passed over the city around 8 pm. Maximum winds were estimated at 120 mi/h at the time, but later estimates placed the hurricane at Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
By 11 pm, the wind was southerly and diminishing. On Sunday morning, a 20 mi/h breeze off the Gulf of Mexico greeted the survivors as they put aside the terror of the storm, and realized the horror that would be the cleanup.
The storm continued on, and was tracked into Oklahoma. From there, it continued over the Great Lakes, and passed north of Halifax, Nova Scotia on September 12. From there it travelled into the North Atlantic where it disappeared from observations.
At the time of the 1900 storm, the highest point in the city of Galveston was only 8.7 feet (2.7 m) above sea level. The hurricane had brought with it a storm surge of over 15 feet (4.6 m), which washed over the entire island. The surge knocked buildings off their foundations, and the surf pounded them to pieces. Over 3,600 homes were destroyed, and a wall of debris faced the ocean.
As awesome as the damage to the city's buildings was, the human cost was even greater. Due to the destruction of the bridges to the mainland and the telegraph lines, help was days late to arrive. Among their number was American Red Cross founder Clara Barton.
What they arrived to find was a city destroyed. Eight thousand people had lost their lives, a fifth of the island's population. Most had drowned or been crushed as the waves pounded the debris that had been their homes hours earlier. Many survived the storm itself, but died after several days trapped under the wreckage of the city, with rescuers unable to reach them.
The bodies were so numerous that burial was not a viable option. Funeral pyres were set up wherever the dead were found. Their fires would burn for weeks.
More people were killed in this single storm than have been killed in the over three hundred hurricanes that have struck the United States since combined.
Development shifted north to Houston, which was enjoying the benefits of the oil boom. The dredging of the Houston Ship Channel in 1909 and 1914 sealed Galveston's fate as a former industrial center.
To prevent future storms from causing the destruction of the 1900 hurricane, many improvements to the island were made. The first three miles (4.8 km) of the 17-foot (5.2 m) high Galveston Seawall were built beginning in 1902 under the direction of Henry Martyn Robert. An all-weather bridge was constructed to the mainland to replace the ones destroyed in the storm. The most dramatic effort to protect the city was its raising. Dredged sand was used to raise the city of Galveston by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. Over 2,100 buildings were raised in the process. The seawall and raising of the island were jointly named a National Historical Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2001.
In 1915, a storm of similar strength and track to the 1900 hurricane struck Galveston. The 1915 storm brought a 12 foot storm surge which tested the new seawall. Although 275 people lost their lives in the 1915 storm, this was a great reduction from the thousands that died in 1900.
The Galveston city government was reorganized into a commission government, a newly devised structure where the government is made of a small group of commissioners, each responsible for one aspect of governance. This was prompted by fears that the existing city council would be unable to handle the problem of rebuilding the city.
Today Galveston is considered the playground of Houston. Homes and other buildings that survived the hurricane have been preserved, and give much of the city a Victorian look. The seawall, since extended to ten miles, is now an attraction itself, as hotels and tourist attractions have been built along its length in seeming defiance of the possibility of a future storm.
Modern observation and forecasting help ensure that if another storm of similar strength threatens Galveston, the city will not be caught by surprise.
The storm
Destruction
Rebuilding
Previous to the major storm, Galveston was a beautiful and prestigious city, and was known as "the New York of the South." Only the nation's wealthiest were allowed to live here. Many people say that had it not been for the Storm of 1900, Galveston would be one of the nation's biggest and most beautiful cities.External link