In 1900, TVs and radios didn’t exist. News traveled slowly from one place to another. There were weather stations and weather forecasters, but they didn’t have the equipment that we have today. It was very hard to predict the weather.

Galveston was the largest city in Texas. It was also one of the richest in the country. The city was on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that was twenty-seven miles long. Bridges and train tracks connected the island to the mainland.

Downtown Galveston was bustling in 1898.

Galveston had one of the busiest harbors in the country. Almost all the cotton in the country shipped out from its port.

In 1900, 40,000 people lived in the city. Tourists visited its beautiful beaches and admired the elegant houses that lined the streets.

Most hurricanes happen from June to November, when ocean water is warmest. On September 4, 1900, the weather service sent word that a tropical storm that had begun off the coast of Africa had hit Cuba.

Some hurricanes are over 300 miles wide!

Storms turn into hurricanes when their winds are over 74 miles per hour. The winds push the storm thousands of miles across the ocean. When a hurricane passes over warm water, it gets more powerful. Because the earth turns, hurricanes move in a circle.

On the morning of September 7, no one in Galveston was worried about a storm. People didn’t know that a massive hurricane was headed their way.

Galveston was only eight feet above sea level. For years, people had talked about building a seawall around the city to protect it from flooding. They decided not to. They even removed sand dunes to give the city more land.

The hurricane traveled over Cuba and west of Florida before it hit Galveston.

The Hurricane Hits

On September 8, the hurricane slammed into the city with winds over 140 miles per hour. A fifteen-foot storm surge flooded streets and destroyed train tracks and bridges that linked the city to the mainland. Nothing was safe from the awesome power of the storm.

A storm surge happens when strong winds push a huge amount of water on land.

Before telephones, people sent messages by telegram. The messages traveled through electrical lines. Because the wind had blown down all the telegraph poles, there was no way to get news out of the city. Galveston was cut off from the rest of the world.

Terror at Night

As night fell, the wind blew harder, and the water rose higher. Buildings toppled over, and people huddled in terror on roofs as their houses blew out to sea.

Many people showed amazing courage. Mother Mary Joseph Dallmer was one of them. She was a nun who was head of the Ursuline Academy, a Catholic girls’ school.

Mother Mary Joseph had just welcomed her new students for the fall. When the hurricane hit, water rose nine feet on the school’s first floor. Mother Mary Joseph told everyone to run to the second floor. As people huddled together, wind blew out the windows.

Mother Mary Joseph stayed calm. She and her nuns stood at the windows with ropes and threw them out to rescue people from the flood. They rang the big school bell so survivors could find them in the dark.

Two nuns ran to the kitchen for supplies. When they didn’t return, everyone thought they’d drowned. But they were found the next day. They had stayed alive by floating on a big bread tray!

After the storm, the nuns took care of anyone who made it to the Ursuline Academy. They saved more than a thousand people! Mother Mary Joseph was a hero of the Galveston Hurricane.

Three women gave birth to babies at the academy that night.

This high school was one of the many buildings destroyed by the hurricane.

Destruction Everywhere

The hurricane lasted about eight hours. In the morning, people crept out to find their beautiful city was gone. Buildings looked as if a giant had smashed them. Experts think that 6,000 to 12,000 people were dead or missing.

The hurricane destroyed 3,600 houses and most of the buildings in Galveston, including schools, churches, and hospitals.

After the Hurricane

Galveston was in crisis. There was no shelter for anyone. There was no food or water. People didn’t have clothes or medicine.

On September 9, a ship from Galveston harbor managed to reach Texas City, a short distance away, carrying news of the disaster. Word spread to the governor of Texas and the U.S. president. News-papers all around the country alerted people that Galveston had gone through a terrible disaster.

Texans everywhere pitched in to help. Workers from Houston arrived with clean water and food for the 30,000 people who were homeless. A great number of survivors took shelter in white army tents.

There were so many army tents on Galveston Beach that people called it the White City on the Beach.

After the Storm

To keep floods from ever happening again, workers hauled in millions of tons of sand to raise the whole city seventeen feet aboveground. They managed to pack the sand under 2,146 buildings!

St. Patrick Church weighed over 3,000 tons. It took 700 jacks to lift it up so people could put sand under it.

They also built a strong seawall. But even though Galveston got back on its feet, it was never again the powerful city it had been before the hurricane.

The Galveston seawall is ten miles long.

The Galveston hurricane killed more people than any hurricane in U.S. history. There are many books, movies, and songs about this one unforgettable night in Galveston.