Galveston Hurricane of 1900: Isaac Cline's Impossible Storm and a Seawall

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In 1900 Galveston was the fourth largest municipality in Texas, a cotton port called the Wall Street of the Southwest with one of the highest per capita incomes in the country. It also sat on a flat sandbar whose highest point was 8.7 feet above sea level, and residents were cutting down the coastal dunes to fill low ground for development. In 1891 Isaac Cline, head of the Weather Bureau's Galveston office, wrote in the Galveston Daily News that a serious hurricane striking the island was impossible, and a proposed seawall was never built. When a storm crossed Cuba in early September, the Belen College Observatory in Havana predicted it would hit Texas, but Weather Bureau director Willis Moore had blocked Cuban telegraph reports and Washington forecast a turn toward Florida.

On September 8 a Category 4 storm drove a surge of more than 15 feet over the island, with water rising four feet in four seconds and a wall of wreckage acting as a battering ram. Roughly 8,000 people died, about 20 percent of the population, and more than 3,600 homes were destroyed. Bodies dumped at sea washed back ashore, so they were burned on pyres for weeks, with African American men forced at gunpoint to do the work. Galveston answered with a 17 foot concave seawall and by jacking up thousands of buildings and pumping sand beneath them, and its new commission government spread to about 500 cities. Its economic lead still passed to Houston after Spindletop and the Houston Ship Channel.

• Ten passengers who left a stranded train on the Bolivar Peninsula survived in the Point Bolivar lighthouse; the 85 who stayed aboard died.
• At St. Mary's Orphans Asylum, sisters tied themselves to children with clothesline and sang Queen of the Waves; three of 93 children survived.
• The Weather Bureau's anemometer was blown off its building just after 6:15 p.m. after recording 100 mph winds.
• Clara Barton, 78, made Galveston her final disaster response as founder of the American Red Cross.
• Storm damage pushed William Marsh Rice to plan a $250,000 rebuild, hastening his murder by his valet, and his estate later founded Rice University.