The Deadliest Storm

(4 of 4)

The houses fell gracefully at first. One witness said houses collapsed into the Gulf "as gently as a mother would lay her infant in the cradle." It was when the current caught the structures and swept them away that the violence occurred, with bedrooms erupting in a tumult of flying glass and wood, rooftops soaring through the air like monstrous kites.

The barrier of wreckage pushed before it an immense segment of the streetcar, which struck Isaac's house with terrific force. Isaac was at the center of the room with his wife and his six-year-old daughter Esther Bellew, whom he always called his "baby." A wall came toward him. It propelled him backward into a large chimney. He entered the water. Something huge caught him and drove him to the bottom. Timbers held him. He lost consciousness.

He woke to turmoil. Rain struck like shrapnel. He was afloat, his chest caught between two timbers. He coughed water. He sensed there was something he had to do. It was like waking to a child's cry in the night, then hearing only silence. He sensed absence.

On Sunday, the U.S. Weather Bureau in Washington telegraphed this question to the manager of the Western Union office in Houston: "Do you hear anything from Galveston?"

First came this ominous reply: "We have been absolutely unable to hear a word from Galveston since 4 p.m. yesterday..." And then this report: "First news from Galveston just received by train, which could get no closer to the bay shore than six miles, where prairie was strewn with debris and dead bodies. About two hundred corpses counted from train. Large steamship stranded two miles inland. Nothing could be seen of Galveston ..."

Sunday morning, so many corpses littered the landscape that civilized burial was deemed impossible. Galveston's relief committee ordered the bodies dumped at sea. Crews loaded corpses by the hundreds into a large barge, but by the time the barge reached its dumping ground 18 miles into the Gulf, darkness had fallen. The crew spent the night among arms and legs brought back to life by the gentle rocking of the sea. In the morning, they weighted the bodies and cast them into the water.

But the bodies came back ashore. The relief committee now ordered that all corpses be burned upon recovery. The fires began almost at once, with the assistance of the city's fire department. Soon the nights were rimmed with the orange light of countless pyres. The air stank of death for weeks. Human ash sifted from the sky. Emma Beal, 10 at the time, watched one of the "dead gangs" burn bodies near her house. As one body entered the fire, an arm shot up as if pointing into the sky. Emma screamed, but kept watching, and paid for it with nightmares that left her writhing in the dark.

Isaac survived Saturday night--although barely--and only after experiencing his own unbearable loss. He had found his daughters alive in the waters, but his wife Cora had vanished in the storm surge. While the children prayed for their mother's return, he knew his wife had perished. Each evening he toured likely places where her body may have lain. But he would not find her till Sept. 30, when relief workers discovered a dress tangled in the debris of what they concluded was Isaac's house. Within the clothing were the remains of a woman. He recognized her only from a wedding ring and the diamond he had given her at their engagement.

For a time the message of the storm seemed to have been heeded. Galveston built a seawall, then raised the elevation of its streets and surviving buildings, even its cathedrals. But memory faded quickly. Today grand new houses rise on stilts on the island's West End beyond the protection of the seawall. The once barren sea-level prairie that stretches from Galveston through Houston is now home to about 3 million people. To hurricane experts, it is one of the most vulnerable regions in America, where even today an intense hurricane could cause megascale death. Today's meteorologists know a lot more about hurricanes than Isaac Cline did in 1900, but this knowledge, far from conjuring the hubris expressed by Cline, has led them to recognize that hurricanes remain inscrutable giants capable of tricks that can defy even satellites and computers--tricks like suddenly intensifying in the hot waters off Cuba and catching a city by surprise.