12/8/2023 0 Comments Galveston daily news app![]() ![]() Storm Anniversary a Celebration of Survival Although it contends with a shortage of jobs and affordable housing, the city’s air of battered gentility attracts swarms of Houston visitors each weekend. What Galveston retained-and finally grew to value-was its 19th century nature, former Mayor Barbara Crews says. The island’s limited space soon seemed antiquated by the sprawl of mainland cities. The cotton trade began to dwindle oil was struck at Spindletop, near Houston, within a year of the hurricane. Within a decade, technology to build deep water ports had brought a rival port to Houston. It wasn’t just the hurricane that made it so, but the 20th century itself. But the city the survivors wrenched back was a very different place. The city also built a sea wall-a gargantuan task that took 60 years to reach its current length of more than 10 miles. By 1911, 500 city blocks had been lifted as much as 11 feet. With funds from local and federal governments and businesses, engineers began to raise the island’s buildings, filling in the space beneath with 16 million cubic yards of sand. Those who stayed behind began rebuilding within days. Thousands of survivors fled the city for good. They burned for two months straight, filling the air with nauseating fumes. But the bodies, fixed with weights and dropped at sea, swept back ashore, so vast funeral pyres were built on shore instead. Coerced at gunpoint, 50 men filled barges with corpses after each load, the workers were given dippers of whiskey. Under martial law, all able-bodied men were forced to work. “The bodies of human beings, infants, aged and carcasses of animals are strewn on every hand-The bay is alive with them.”īut if the storm was otherworldly in its horror, the aftermath was epic in another way. “Dead, dead, dead, dead everywhere,” the Daily Times Herald of Dallas wrote Sept. When the storm finally calmed at midnight, the island was afloat with corpses, moaning victims and shattered buildings. The dog sniffed each person, seemed to realize that Cline’s wife was gone, and plunged back in the water, apparently to find her. Hours later, according to Larson, the surviving relatives were floating on an unhinged door, when the family retriever saw them and swam aboard. But his pregnant wife was pulled under and drowned. Before it toppled, his two oldest girls leaped out with an uncle, and Cline and his youngest daughter followed shortly after. The rest were swept to shore and buried under tons of ocean-swept sand.Ĭonvinced the storm would ebb, Cline stayed with his family in their two-story house. Finally it swallowed them, drowning all except three boys who scrambled free and swam away. Mary’s Orphans Asylum, 10 nuns lashed themselves to 93 small children as the water seeped up to their second-story refuge. Residents hacked holes into their floors, hoping to stabilize their piered houses, but thousands of buildings filled slowly with seawater, then collapsed.Īt St. The monstrous waves drove houses near the water inland, smashing down the structures in their path. A tidal surge as high as 15.7 feet engulfed the city. But then a Florida storm defied Cline’s predictions, turning toward Galveston, and the wafer-flat city was swamped beneath the bay and the Gulf of Mexico.īy 7:30 p.m., winds topped 120 miles an hour. At the cusp of a new century, the opinions of the dandyish, mustachioed young Cline held the weight of solid fact, writes author Eric Larson in his 1999 bestseller, “Isaac’s Storm.” Although without modern tools such as radar, Cline was a distinguished meteorologist, embodying the era’s belief that science could master the elements. ![]()
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