Posted on 09/08/2014 6:08:29 AM PDT by eastforker
In 1900 Galveston was the largest and fastest growing city in Texas. Prospects were bright for the shining city by the sea.
The port was important and growing as both exports and imports were rising rapidly with the move westward in America. Houston, on the other hand, was a smaller city still trying to find the path to destiny.
The 1900 hurricane season had been unusually quiet through most of August – no storms at all in the Atlantic or Gulf. In late August a disturbance moved into the Atlantic from Africa and began its trek to the west. The storm moved through the northern Caribbean islands and exited Cuba into the Gulf on September 4th. It then went through what we now know as rapid intensification over the warm waters of the eastern Gulf as it approached its date with history.
(Excerpt) Read more at click2houston.com ...
Bush’s Fault!
Amazing that a hurricane can travel back in time and change history.
It certainly was in terms of destruction of lives in a concentrated area. One must remember, however, both the warning systems and structures were not advanced for dealing with such things. Lots of errora were made, besides. Likewise, I guess the area populated was very small, so not as much destruction as there could have been if more lived around the coast and just inland.
For me, today is the anniversary of my sister’s death. :-/
You mean that there were hurricanes before AlGore invented Global Warming?
8.7 feet: The highest elevation on Galveston Island in 1900.
• 15.7 feet: The height of the storm surge.
• 28.55 inches: Barometric pressure recorded in Galveston, 30 miles from where the eye of the storm is best estimated. At the time, this was the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded.
• 6,000 to 8,000: Number of people estimated to have died during the storm.
• 37,000 people: Population of Galveston in 1900.
• 3,600: Number of buildings destroyed by the storm.
• 130 to 140 miles per hour: Speed meteorologists estimate the winds reached during the storm.
• $20 million: Estimated damage costs related to the storm. In today’s dollars, that would be more than $700 million.
The eastern portion of th island was elevated on the debris left by the storm, where the seawall is. When you drive the island, you will see basement windows on the older homes. These are actually the first floor of the structure as it existed before the hurricane.
It’s impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten 100 years ago.
Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher.
The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in 1901 to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place.
Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.
The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb.
The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston’s ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes.
Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain.
Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised.
McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising.
The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised.
By 1911, McComb wrote, 500 city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet.
http://www.1900storm.com/rebuilding/
It's easy to see why Texans would commemorate a huge and tragic event like this.
From the 2nd floor of the beach house you can see the foundation of the old courthouse 200 feet offshore in Matagorda bay.
The town was wiped out by 2 hurricanes in a row and the people abandoned it.
The cemetary is particularly sad. It sits just inches above the high tide line.
The Indianola storm push a storm surge 20 miles inland. As it left, it scoured away everything in its path.
It is not a matter of if, but when the next storm of that size arrives somewhere.
This storm is part of my family history. My paternal grandfather survived this storm. He was a young carpenter who had just arrived in Galveston during the summer of 1900. After he finished his assignment, of picking up bodies and burning them on the beach, he moved to Houston. We grew up on stories of the storm. I was so young when I started listening to him talk about it, I feel like I was there.
If you have read the book Issac’s Storm, it was like he dictated parts of it.
Have you seen pictures of the island after the storm? It was almost totally destroyed.
There is a great book called “Isaac’s Storm” about this storm. One of the tidbits gleaned from it was that the average elevation of Galveston Island was something like 5’ above sea level.
After the storm, the moved in fill and raised the elevation to about 30”. The jacked up buildings and filled in under them.
I wonder why New Orleans did not learn from that...
My grandmother was born in Indianola and her family lived there through 2 hurricanes before moving to Rockport. Lucky that she survived or I would not be here. :)
“Isaac’s Storm”
Great Book to teach how much human arrogance contributed to the death toll.
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raised the elevation to about 30”
Some areas were raised 11 foot.
Sorry that was supposed to be feet not inches.
I didn’t think there is any point of ground on the Island that is 30 feet high?
I am very aware of the story, including the tragic orphans tied to their nuns in the debris.
It was horrible, but a lot of that destruction is due to simple structures lacking real strength against winds and tides, as surely as the huge death tolls in so many 3rd-world nations today in earthquakes is because they do not build for earthquakes as we do.
Galveston County Coastal Ground Elevations
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/images/hgx/tropicalwp/GalvestonElevation.pdf
Note: large file
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