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“Looking North from Ursuline Academy, showing wrecked Negro High School Building, Galveston, Texas,” stereograph card, ca. October 19, 1900.Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
The old saying “lightning never strikes twice in the same place” does not apply to hurricanes. They can and do strike the same areas repeatedly. For example, Galveston, Texas, has suffered many landfalls over the past century. In fact, the Galveston area averages approximately one hurricane every nine years. Two of Galveston’s major hurricanes—the Hurricane of 1900 and Hurricane Ike in 2008—offer an interesting study in similarities and contrasts. Both hurricanes shared nearly identical paths. After being spawned in the warm Atlantic waters off the coast of West Africa, both hurricanes reached the eastern Caribbean in September, ripped across the islands of Santa Domingo and Cuba, gained strength in the Gulf of Mexico, and then moved steadily toward the Texas coast.
The similarities between the two hurricanes end there. While the Hurricane of 1900 surprised the residents of Galveston (at the time, there was no technology capable of locating a hurricane or predicting its path), Hurricane Ike was detected early and tracked relentlessly by satellites and “hurricane hunters,” airplanes that fly into the center of a storm to gather detailed meteorological information. In 1900, Galveston officials were informed that the hurricane had passed over Santa Domingo and Cuba only one week before it hit the Texas coast. On the evening of September 8, the full force of the hurricane slammed into Galveston with devastating results. The hurricane was estimated to be a Category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale (sustained winds over 130 miles per hour) with a storm surge of more than 15 feet. The houses lining the shore of Galveston Island were completely destroyed and their debris carried inland, stripping clean a 1,500 acre swath of land. Many buildings, such as the African American high school (shown above) were demolished by the combined effects of the wind and the storm surge. The buildings that remained standing were surrounded by a 30-foot-high, three-mile-wide expanse of debris extending the full length of the island. The Hurricane of 1900 killed 6,000–8,000 people (the third-highest of any Atlantic hurricane) and caused an estimated $20 million in damage (in today’s dollars, more than $700 million).
The impact of the Hurricane of 1900 carried well beyond its initial destruction. Before the hurricane, Galveston was a growing city of 37,000 residents and a bright future. The storm’s destruction set the community back several years and it never fully recovered. As the Gulf Texas oil industry began booming in the early twentieth century, Galveston was still rebuilding. When Houston constructed a wide sea canal to the Gulf to enable ocean going ships to dock there, Galveston was left behind.
This article was written by Greg Timmons, freelance writer and education consultant, Missoula, Montana.
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