The Deadliest Storm

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The rest of the city did not share the captain's anxiety. Adults and children alike greeted the storm with delight and converged on the beach, some in bathing suits. The surf rocketing off the streetcar trestle was easily as good as a fireworks display. A great crowd gathered at the Midway, a 10-block stretch along the beach with cheap restaurants and souvenir stores. The sea began to climb into the city. "As we watched from the porch," one woman wrote, recalling her childhood experience, "we were amazed and delighted to see the water from the Gulf flowing down the street. 'Good,' we thought, 'there would be no need to walk the few blocks to play at the beach; it was right at our front gate.'" It was a wonderful spectacle, until the waves began tearing apart the bathhouses and the shops of the Midway. Suddenly, one mother recalled, "it wasn't fun anymore." A visiting businessman who had taken shelter in a train station wrote that he first realized the true extent of the disaster "when the body of a child floated into the station."

Telegraph lines fell. The city's telephones went dead. With all communications with the mainland cut off, Isaac went home. He walked to his house, a big frame structure on stilts five blocks from the beach. Despite his anxiety, he planned to ride out the storm at home with his pregnant wife Cora and his three young daughters. He believed the house capable of withstanding any storm the Gulf could deliver. Others apparently felt likewise, for when he arrived, he found 50 storm refugees had taken shelter inside. His brother Joseph soon arrived. He lived in the house and worked for Isaac as an assistant observer. Over the years a rivalry had developed between them. Now Joseph urged everyone to evacuate and head for the center of the city. Isaac, ever confident, insisted his house was the safest place--far safer, certainly, than venturing out into the accelerating winds.

Throughout that Saturday morning, a north wind blowing along the storm's left flank had raised a storm surge along the 30-mile ellipse of Galveston Bay. The surge slowly overflowed the wharf along the north end of the city and began filling the streets of the business district with water. The same north wind, however, held another and far more dangerous surge out at sea. That afternoon, however, the wind shifted, as it must in a tropical cyclone. The Gulf sprang forward as if propelled by an uncoiling spring. A dome of water at least 20 ft. high surged ashore under rapidly escalating winds. The waters of the sea and the bay met over the city and turned rooftops into islands.

No one knows what velocity the wind reached. The bureau's anemometer blew away at 100 m.p.h. The wind neatly sliced off the top floor of a bank, leaving the rest of the building intact. It stripped slate shingles from houses and turned them into scimitars that disemboweled men where they stood. Atmospheric pressure fell so low, a visiting British cotton official was sucked from his apartment trailing a slipstream of screams from his wife. The storm surge drowned an entire train and demolished an orphanage, killing 90 children. Together, the wind and sea destroyed brand-new artillery emplacements built to withstand bombardment, and scoured whole neighborhoods from the face of the earth.

The Fire of Mourning
At 6:30 p.m., Isaac Cline, ever the observer, walked to the front door of his house to take a look outside. He opened the door upon a fantastic landscape. Where once there had been streets, there was open sea. He did not see any waves, however, for behind his house the storm surge had erected an escarpment of wreckage three stories tall and several miles long that acted as a kind of seawall. It contained carriages, furniture, the streetcar trestle and rooftops that floated like the hulls of dismasted ships. It also carried corpses, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. The wind and sea now pushed this wall toward Isaac's house. If not for the thundering wind, Isaac would have heard it coming as a horrendous blend of screams and exploding wood.

But something else caught his attention, as it did the attention of nearly every other soul in Galveston. Suddenly, as he stood at his front door, the surface of the sea rose four feet in four seconds. This was not a wave, but the tide itself. And it continued rising.

For those inside Isaac's house, it was a moment of profound terror (although Joseph claimed to have been utterly calm). Four feet was taller than most of the children in the house. Throughout the city, parents rushed to their sons and daughters. They lifted them from the water and propped them on tables, dressers and pianos. People in single-story houses had nowhere to go. The sudden rise of the sea meant death. For Isaac and his wife, as for thousands of parents throughout Galveston, suddenly the prospect of watching their children die became very real.