On this day in 1900, long before the advent of weather satellites or Doppler radar, there could be no detailed predictions about the storm’s path as it raged out of the Atlantic and grew more powerful over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. But there were warnings from the Weather Bureau in Washington, insisting that Galveston, Texas’s 40,000 residents should find high ground. The highest available was in the center of town, less than 10 feet above sea level. Thousands headed there and increased their chances of survival. Thousands of others did not.
The 1900 hurricane, equivalent to a Category 4, slammed into Galveston early in the day. The ceaseless noise from the storm was maddening, “a runaway freight train that wouldn’t stop howling” through town all day long. Debris flew through the air. Stately trees snapped. Grand mansions collapsed into heaps of kindling. No anemometer survived to take accurate wind readings; gusts likely reached 200 mph.
The sea began rising. It swept into town. Slowly at first, faster later in the day, it was inexorable and terrifying. It was everywhere. By early evening, salt water stood 10 feet deep in the city center. Then it rose higher.
Water picked up and then deposited houses, destroying neighborhoods and uprooting families. The next day much of Galveston was gone. When the floodwaters receded, they left the smell of rotting corpses and a wasteland. Approximately 6,000 people died in Galveston as a result of the 1900 hurricane, anonymous because it took place a half-century before we began naming killer storms. The hurricane and its aftermath were called the worst “natural disaster” in the nation’s history, until Katrina hit three years ago.
That label was as misleading then as it is now. Why do we build urban centers in harm’s way, along fragile coastlines, below sea level, in the path of storms, or at the foot of slopes that collapse upon us? Most often because of the fantasy that nature offers greatness without sacrifice. For New Orleans, the lure was the far-flung rivers of the Mississippi system. For Galveston, a perfect harbor seemed to guarantee a future as a trade center.
Before Sept. 8, 1900, Galveston had every reason to believe that nature would make good on its promise. The city boasted the nation’s busiest cotton port and the third-largest port overall. Galveston was an elegant place, prosperous and promising, poised on the brink of its destiny.
A day later, the city was gone.
But Galveston refused to become a ghost town. It innovated and rebuilt. Workers using screw jacks raised the city’s remaining buildings by more than 10 feet in some places. It was an extraordinary and grueling process. What came next was more so. Laborers brought in more than 10 million pounds of sand to fill in the void that yawned beneath the raised structures and the earth below. Galveston became an elevated city, safer on its sandy perch above the tides of the Gulf of Mexico.
At the same time, Galveston vowed that it would keep future floods out of its rebuilt homes. The city constructed a massive seawall, a 16-foot-thick, 17-foot-high structure standing between it and the Gulf. The seawall grew over more than six decades. It’s now more than 10 miles long. Like the Mississippi River levee system, it’s a monument to the human desire to control wild nature.
Galveston’s post-1900 landscape symbolizes the romance of a city rising from ruins. It’s more accurate, though, to think of it as an engineering marvel, a sustained act of will unprecedented in the nation’s urban history.
It’s also, in some important ways, a failure. Galveston never recaptured its lost commercial glory. It was quickly eclipsed by Houston, which was inland, safer, and closer to the rail connections and oil fields that became economically critical early in the 20th century. Today, Galveston is a beach town for Houston, a site of consumption rather than production.
In other ways, however, Galveston’s efforts have paid off. The city has survived the passing of countless storms, and it will weather this hurricane as well. The people of New Orleans — many of them forlorn and on the road once again — may want to pause for a moment to take note of Galveston’s disaster history and present. As New Orleans continues the slow process of rebuilding after Katrina, it must contemplate ways to make itself safer. At the same time, though, it should be wary because trade, the lifeblood of a commercial metropolis, always seeks higher ground.
[Author’s note: I’ve stolen most of this post from myself.]
8 comments
September 8, 2008 at 9:57 am
Vance Maverick
Why do we build urban centers in harm’s way, along fragile coastlines, below sea level, in the path of storms, or at the foot of slopes that collapse upon us? Most often because of the fantasy that nature offers greatness without sacrifice.
This explanation seems unnecessarily portentous. (Also open to the response that 6000 dead is certainly a sacrifice.) I’d venture something unoriginal about the time horizons of our thinking. And we do sometimes, as if despite ourselves, achieve greatness through collective short-term thinking — I don’t think most of our treasured urban centers were built by direct planning.
September 8, 2008 at 10:10 am
ari
That’s a fair point, Vance. But the original siting of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US cities tended to hinge on natural advantages, advantages that urban boosters usually believed could be magnified without great cost. Put another way, Galveston’s wonderful harbor was the reason the city was/is there. Nobody at the time balanced that against the potential loss of life that a hurricane might cause. Or at least if they did that equation, they didn’t leave any record of it.
September 8, 2008 at 10:16 am
Vance Maverick
I guess what this shows I don’t know is the balance of boosterism and “spontaneous” growth in the origin of Galveston (in particular, and of Western cities in general). I suppose a harbor took some planning, especially when cities were sprouting up so fast.
September 8, 2008 at 4:52 pm
teofilo
These things happen.
September 12, 2008 at 10:08 am
Vance
Try a news search on “certain death”….
September 12, 2008 at 10:13 am
ari
I’m wondering if I should re-post this given that Galveston may be largely gone by tomorrow morning. I write that without a hint of relish, by the way. My fondest wish is that Ike should calm and contract a bit, and that the storm surge should be much lower than expected. But that doesn’t look very likely at the moment.
September 12, 2008 at 12:24 pm
SEK
I’ve got a post brewing Ari. I’ll be a-linking.
September 12, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Galveston, 1900 - 2008? « The Edge of the American West
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