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Galveston
1900by
Mike Cox
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An
important coastal city is devastated by a powerful hurricane. Thousands are believed
dead. Bewildered survivors are left with no water, food, electricity, transportation
or communication. Looters prowl the ruined community, stealing anything they can
carry away. Fires rage out of control, frustrated firefighters helpless to put
them out. Survivors swelter in the heat and humidity as they slosh through mosquito-infested
quagmires. Local officials plead for assistance as those who can leave town.
New Orleans, Biloxi, or Gulfport? No, Galveston
in the days immediately after Sept. 8-9, 1900, when a powerful hurricane left
the city in ruin.
Those who endured Hurricane Katrina’s August 29 blow
to Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama can at least take some comfort in the historical
record: What happens in the aftermath of a hurricane is fairly predictable. It
is terrible, but conditions always improve in time.
But it never seems
that way at first. A hurricane’s dying winds only signify the end of the storm,
not the end of the suffering. |
The
first book on the Galveston
storm (hurricanes didn’t get names back then) came out later the same year
the storm struck. Essentially a clip-and-paste job, “The Great Galveston Disaster”
by Paul Lester could not be called a great book, but it offers good insight into
the mindset of the people of Galveston and the rest of Texas in 1900.
“Galveston’s
stress and desolation grows with each recurring hour,” a visitor reported to an
unnamed newspaper a few days after the storm. “Pestilence, famine, fire, thirst
and rapine menace the stricken city. Each refugee from the storm-lashed island
[some of the journalistic clichés have not changed in more than a century, either]
brings tidings which add to the tale of the city’s woes.”
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The
anonymous visitor painted a word picture that could just as well describe the
Big Easy these days:
“For four days the sun has sent down its fiercest
darts. The results may be imagined. Over the city hangs the nauseating stench
of decomposing flesh. Besides the humans there are thousands of carcasses of domestic
animals scattered through the devastated portions of the city. Galveston is in
need of everything that charity and compassion can suggest.”
And those
needs clearly exceeded the ability of state and local government to meet them.
“The situation demands federal aid,” said Maj. Lloyd Randolph DeWitt Fayling,
a former newspaper correspondent deputized to help maintain order after the storm.
“It demanded it from the very first…. The disaster is so great and so terrible
no municipal authority in the country could be expected to handle it unaided.”
The
federal bureaucracy had not yet grown to include the Federal Emergency Management
Agency (FEMA), but the federal government did provide funding and regular Army
troops to augment charitable efforts and the Texas militia, forerunner of the
Texas National Guard.
One
major difference between then and now, of course, is technology. The first warning
the weather bureau in Galveston received of an approaching storm came only four
days before the hurricane struck the island city. Even then, no one had any idea
where the storm would go once it entered the Gulf of Mexico.
Today, thanks
to satellites, radar and hurricane spotter aircraft, the only uncertainty connected
to a potentially disastrous storm is the precise location it will make landfall.
And the National Weather Service is getting increasingly more accurate and predicting
that.
Another significant difference between 1900 and 2005 will be the
accuracy of the body count. In Galveston, bodies had to be buried immediately
in mass graves or burned. Because there was not time to list them all, estimates
on the number who died in the storm and during its aftermath vary from 6,000 to
twice that.
Today, though the process of gathering the victims will be
no less horrid than it was at the beginning of the 20th century, 21st century
technology will make identification of bodies much more likely.
Finally,
as surely as a community will recover from a disaster, history also shows that
in some way it will be changed.
Had
it not been struck by the killer hurricane, Galveston
might have become the South’s New York City, an island metropolis of towering
skyscrapers with its residential neighborhoods sprawling across the bay. Instead,
the storm stunted Galveston’s growth.
One the plus side, the hurricane
led to a new form of municipal government, and brought about the construction
of a massive seawall and an equally-huge engineering project to raise the elevation
of the entire city. In subsequent hurricanes, that work has saved countless lives.
Invariably, some change is decidedly worse.
Indianola,
devastated by hurricanes in 1875 and 1886, was not big enough to bother rebuilding
following the second killer storm. The people of Calhoun County voted to move
their courthouse to Port
Lavaca, farther inland and on higher ground. Indianola
soon became a ghost town, drying up faster than a hermit crab pulled from its
shell.
New Orleans and the other devastated communities will endure, but
just like Galveston,
they are not likely to ever be the same. | |
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