The Galveston Hurricane Disaster of 1900 | Episode 80 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
We've made a lot of fun of meteorologists on this show. Nope,
that's it, that's the whole intro. Hello, and welcome to

(00:21):
Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together, we are going to
rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and inspiring but
largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history
and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about
the biggest meteorological blunder in US history that went on

(00:42):
to kill a major American city. You'll hear the absolute
saddest story about orphans of all time, and you'll learn
the worst cadaver recovery and fatality management story in the
show's history. And if you were listening to this on Patreon,
you'd learn why Hurricane Gertrude and Fifi have to make
room for Vince or Tupac. You'd hear about the biggest

(01:04):
meteorological blunder in British history. Plus you would learn about
two ten gentially related local area bonus disasters, the Great
Mississippi Flood of nineteen twenty seven and the Texas A
and M bonfire disaster of nineteen ninety nine. This is
not the show you play around kids. Or while eating,
or even in mixed company. But as long as you

(01:25):
find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something
that could potentially save your life, our work is done.
So with all that said, shoot the kids out of
the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and
let's beg in. Did you know? According to the ancient Greeks,

(01:46):
the only reason hurricanes exist is because Uranus, the sky god,
and Gaya, the earth goddess, hooked up and had three
giant kids with fifty heads and one hundred hands each.
Uranus took to look at them and was all, parenting
is hard, and you guys kind of make me sick
to look at. So he cast them into the underworld

(02:08):
to Hell. He made them tartarous, this problem. That was
till Zeus broke them out of Hell so that they
could throw rocks at titans. And Zeus was so happy
with their work he rewarded them by banishing them to
the bottom of the ocean to spend the rest of
their days hucking hurricanes at humanity. Now, you know, but

(02:29):
what do we do with this information? Well, not a lot.
It matters less to us. Every day mortals about the
why and how of hurricanes than the where and the
when thing is. Of course, we don't live in a rich,
utopian society where the government arranges for the safe and
orderly evacuation of every citizen in the path of danger.

(02:51):
I don't think I would have this many episodes if
we did. And when it comes to hurricanes, it's almost
like they happen every year, cyclonic win masses scrubbing across
the Caribbean and southeastern United States like God's magic eraser.
Hurricane season runs from the beginning of June till the
end of November, and North Americans have never really been

(03:12):
held up as a shiny beacon of disaster preparedness, and
probably because the majority of hurricanes, by the time they
hit land they basically just angry tropical storms. But above
a certain threshold where the water's going to lap your
roof and the wind turns everything else into throwing stars,
people begin the inevitable and unenviable evacuation shuffle. Actually calling

(03:36):
it a shuffle is a dissurface to shuffles. It's really
more of a slog. People trying to flee places like
Florida basically at walking speed is probably the harshest example
of your government telling you we don't have a plan,
so it's all on you now. Good luck. Store shelves empty,
two hundred dollar flights suddenly become twelve hundred dollars screw jobs,

(04:00):
gas stations run out of everything, and I don't know
if you're familiar with how highways work, but you get
one broken down car and the whole thing is shot,
nothing but chaos for hundreds of miles. You may not
have heard that the fallback position of the local governments
during the most recent Floridian hurricanes was to jot down

(04:20):
your identifying information on your limbs in permanent marker, including
your next of kin, you know, for when this blows through,
and then later we're cataloging your corpses. It's a real
up yours to poor people and sick people and people
with mobility issues or mental issues or or or. Fact is,

(04:42):
two thirds of Americans wouldn't be able to cope with
a sudden five hundred dollars emergency. And it all reminds
me that we used to be a society where we
at least pretended that everybody was worth saving. But this
isn't going to turn into politics of meteorology podcast, and
we're not spending our time. I'm in Washington, or ancient
Greece or Florida. Pack your widest brimmed hat, your cowboy

(05:06):
boots made from the animal of your choice, and maybe
some beach floaties. Today we are visiting Texas Galveston. To
be exact, the Texas Coast is made up of sandy beaches,
barrier islands, and random ecosystems that stretch from Louisiana all
the way to Mexico. Galveston sits about fifty miles or

(05:26):
eighty kilometers southeast of Houston, right on the Gulf coast.
They call it a charming coastal gym where warm Gulf
breezes and Southern hospitality meets sandy shores and seaside relaxation.
With its lively piers and fresh seafood and laid back
by It's a popular and picturesque beach destination, a perfect

(05:47):
escape to unwind and feel at home by the sea.
Which two things. That was an insanely sacarine description and
if you would like an autographed vomit bag, please just
reach out. And secondly, Galveston is a city and an
island running parallel to the shore is a cigar shaped
barrier island that stretches about twenty seven miles or forty

(06:11):
five kilometers and about three miles or five kilometers at
its widest point. It protects the Colmonner Harbor waters of
Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. Back in nineteen hundred,
Galveston was one of the most important cities in the
United States. In just the last thirty years, more than
two hundred and fifty thousand immigrants had arrived in America

(06:34):
through Galveston's busy ports, and they call it the Ellis
Island of the West. Galveston, so you know, has a
lot of nicknames, and Ellis Island being the fabled home
of the Statue of Liberty, the first port of call
for millions of immigrants to America around this time, and
of course the giant robot protector of Manhattan Island and

(06:57):
the Five Boroughs, but that is a different store. In
nineteen hundred, Galveston housed about thirty seven thousand residents in total.
It was home to Texas's first post office, its first
naval base, and it was Texas's first city with gas
and electricity. It was one of the most important and
impressive courts of call on the entire Gulf Coast. And

(07:20):
they called it the Wall Street of the South because
they did a lot of banking. Well, yes, but a
lot more than that. We could get into all the
different industries that made Galveston such a home buyer's hotspot,
but for the purposes of today's story, we're just going
to say it was a good time to be alive
and living in Texas pretty much up to the date

(07:42):
of today's story, especially if you had money. Galveston was
set up to cater to the wealthy. You think Texas,
you might think saloons and stables, But this isn't eighteen twenty. No,
I want you to imagine floral streets shaded by lush,
mature trees. Now imagine beautiful, stately, almost castle like Victorian homes.

(08:06):
The Strand neighborhood specifically, is set to bird song and
adorned with vibrant blooms of every color. It's part of
the reason Galveston was called the Oleander City. All this
opulence was bought and paid for by shipping money and
banking money and training money. They had theaters and fine
dining and opera houses, and they even had a cathedral

(08:29):
blessed by Pope Pious the Ninth himself. The wealthy of
Galveston lived rich social lives, filled with club appearances and balls.
People called Galveston the Queen city of the Gulf. These
were the snootiest of the snooty, and there is not
a snoot class anywhere that did not get that way

(08:50):
without standing on the shoulders of the Holy Pilloi for
their daily bread. And life for that working class was
quite a bit different. Imagine treeless streets of low rise
tenant buildings with washing lines running every which way and
three legged dogs in the street. These were the dock workers,
the factory laborers, and the domestic staff who kept the

(09:11):
city running. Most of them lived much more modest lives,
working long hours and often under tough conditions. And you
think you hate your job, try working a dock at
a commercial shipping port, loading and unloading ships in the
hot Texas sun all day. These were jobs for poorer
African Americans. Now, Galveston was said to be more open

(09:33):
than other places across the South when it came to
African Americans. I mean public facilities and schools, washrooms and stores,
and restaurants, and public transportation and even churches were divided
by race, and Jim Crow laws were still a thing,
So really you were free to walk down the street

(09:53):
without being purposely run down by a car. But that
was pretty much it. And I only bring it up
because it's going to get weird later, and because today's
story will be incredibly inclusive of all races and genders.
So it is said today's story takes place September eighth,
nineteen hundred. Galvestonians woke to clear skies with a pleasant

(10:16):
breeze blowing in gently from the Gulf. It was a
beautiful Saturday morning. The air was warm, which was lovely
for late summer, and the beach was still very popular.
They called it the playground of the South. People loved it,
and it was still technically summer after all. One person
who was interested in the beach but couldn't take advantage

(10:39):
because Saturday was a workday was Isaac Klein. We're going
to spend a lot of time with them today. And
he spent years studying the effects of weather and climate
on public health. He had joined the US Signal Corps
Weather Service all the way back in eighteen eighty two.
By eighteen eighty one, the Weather Service had become part
of the Department of Agriculture, which may seem like a

(11:01):
step backwards, you know, working with cows, but they got
their own building, so if anything, it was really a
lateral step sideways. On this day, Isaac Kleine wasn't just
wearing a bathing suit under his clothes that he wasn't
going to be able to use. No, he was also
the chief meteorologist at the Galveston Weather Bureau. He also

(11:21):
held a degree in philosophy, and in his spare time,
taught Sunday school, and he also sidelined as a professor
at the local medical college. He'd moved into town with
his wife, Cora may Bellou Klein, and their three and
a half children. That's because Korra was expecting and on
this day, Isaac didn't feel much like swimming anyways. It

(11:42):
was a breezy morning, so the surf was ever so
slightly more noticeable than a normal day. And in the
way that you might like cars or pokemon or Texas barbecue.
Isaac liked barometric pressure readings. A barometer, so you know,
it's like a thermometer, but it's for air pressure. It
measures the weight of air pressing down on us, and

(12:05):
we use those measurements to help us predict the future
about what the wind or clouds are thinking. It's pretty clever.
When you live along the Gulf of Mexico, your tides
are basically locked to it. Obviously, you just go with
the flow, so to speak. And the tides there are
semi diurnal. That means they get two high tides and
two low tides every day, and ignoring lunar cycles and

(12:28):
a lot of other factors, there's generally only about a
three to four foot difference between the low and the
high tides. And that's pretty average for the planet. I mean,
parts of the Baltic and Caribbean and Mediterranean seas only
get about a foot of rise and fall. And here
in Canada, smack between Brunswick and Nova Scotia sits the
Bay of Fundy and maybe you heard of it. This

(12:49):
thing rises and falls up to fifty feet every day.
It's the greatest tidal range anywhere in the world. Well,
hearing Alveston, the tide was just a little high, not
enough to call for any kind of real chair straightening
or anything. Isaac Kleine had certainly been through more serious
and life threatening situations than this, and usually he just

(13:11):
walked away with a metal pin to his chest. This
is a guy who had predicted the collapse of a
dam in Austin that saved thousands of lives from floodwaters.
He had even created a storm warning system along the
Mexican coast that helped protect the US Naval fleet from hurricanes.
This is the kind of guy that you would want
a shadow during a disaster, or technically just before would

(13:34):
work better. In eighteen ninety one, just nine years earlier,
the Galveston Daily News published an article that he had
written specifically about their geographic immunity to storm damage. Long
story short, he believed that the continental shelf along the
Gulf Coast facing Galveston was too shallow to produce waves
tall enough to really damage the town. And in the

(13:58):
last century before Galveston had eaten all kinds of hurricanes
and tropical storms, and you'll notice we never did an
episode on any of them. We described Florida as being
situated like America's semi domesticated tropical paradise and Dong just
hanging out there in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico,
and as all dong owners know, you hang your dong

(14:20):
in public like that, and it's gonna get smacked. And
sure enough, when it comes to hurricanes, Florida takes almost
half of all direct US landfalls every year, while Texas
maybe only one in ten ever hit Texas, and Texas
is kind of a big target. Let me say that
like this. If the entire world's population today, not in

(14:43):
nineteen hundred, I mean today, if all eight point two
billion of US were to drive to Texas carpooling with
seven of us per Dodge caravan, if we parked bumper
to bumper, we would fill a five two hundred and
forty seven square mile parking lot. I'm not even going
to bother translating that to square kilometers because it's just

(15:03):
so much easier to understand as Dodge caravans. Obviously, if
Texas was paved over, it would be a two hundred
and sixty eight thousand, five hundred and ninety seven square
mile parking lot. And that is enough room for just
under sixty billion Dodge caravans. I did the mat three times,
fifty nine billion, eight hundred and eighty nine million, six

(15:25):
hundred eighty nine thousand, three hundred and eighteen Dodge caravans
to be exact, which is all just a roundabout way
of saying that Texas is unimaginably large. It absorbs only
a small percentage of American hurricanes, like we said, and
Galveston itself only makes up a tiny fraction of that
entire coast. But as you will see, close does not

(15:48):
only count in horseshoes and hand grenades. Sometime in mid
to late August nineteen hundred, a tropical wave emerged off
the coast of Africa, and it turned into a little storm,
and a few ships took readings of it as it
puttered its way slowly across the Atlantic towards the Caribbean.
But news travels slow. In nineteen hundred, as the morning

(16:09):
progressed in Galveston, the wind started to pick up and
great waves began to break against the shore with thunderous
pounding weight, which didn't exactly detract the curious. If anything,
it encouraged them. Whatever this was was ending a sweltering
heat wave that had some people dancing in the streets.
And that said, there was something about the water that

(16:31):
was making Isaac's Spidey sense go off. He described a
kind of restlessness he couldn't quite explain. Each new wave
did seem to be lapping higher than the last, which
got gums flapping around town. Of course, in an age
before phones or texts or social media. I would like
to also remind you what forecasting was like at the

(16:51):
turn of the last century. No satellites, no radar, no
computer models, just a bunch of sorcerers standing around a
cauldron and throwing in bits of toads and newts. I'm
only kidding, of course, weather forecasting was much closer to voodoo,
just a bunch of thermometers and barometers and chicken bones
and stuff and whatever they came up with. They then

(17:14):
had to tippy tap it all off on a telegraph
and hope for the best. The whole thing was painfully
slow and inaccurate. Today, computers run complex models based on
real time satellite data and radar systems, and they churn
out forecasts hour by hour, and you can access it
anytime you light on a little shiny rectangle you keep

(17:36):
in your pocket. Back in nineteen hundred, guessing the weather
more than a day or two out was pure fantasy.
By noon, the streets had become submerged ankle deep with
sand and water from the beach, and parents began pulling
their children indoors. Everyone who'd gone to the shore with
their blankets and picnic baskets were eating sand and rain,

(17:58):
and it was enough to send most people home or
at least to the mainland. Recognizing what was coming and
seeing the danger for what it was, he was supposed
to talk to the central office, you know, share his findings,
outline his case for a hurricane warning, and then be
told that he wasn't allowed to scare people by actually
using the term hurricane, which, yes, was a real policy,

(18:18):
but urgency was crucial and rules be damned. He didn't
like jump across a desk or anything, but he did
ignore protocol and he dictated a sternly worded warning, which
was then tippy tapped out as quickly as possible. He
then ripped his shirt off, mounted a horse, and rode
along the beaches along the low lying areas of the city,

(18:40):
warning residents about the approaching storm. People returned home to
board up windows and battened down the hatches as the
wind howled and the tide swelled higher and higher, they
felt safe, like whatever this was, as frightening as this was,
was just going to blow through town and just become
some footnote in a dusty old history book. But as

(19:01):
the afternoon wore on, the storm intensified without pause. Galveston's
buildings had withstood everything nature had ever thrown at them. However,
what no one could have known at the time, not
even Isaac Cline, was that the storm that was whipping
through their town was becoming an exceptionally powerful and devastating
Category four hurricane. By four in the afternoon, strong gusting

(19:26):
winds had settled into a sustained roar, with winds up
to a hundred and fifty six miles or two hundred
and fifty one kilometers an hour. It was like something
out of the Bible, like the town was being hosed
down at full force. Water was quickly pouring in from
the sea, washing through town, and half the homes along
the shore line had been ripped off of their foundations

(19:48):
and smashed into kindling. Trees were bent to the ground,
and eyewitnesses reported seeing bricks and timber and other heavy
objects just flying horizontally through the air like cannon shells.
Around this time, measuring instruments were ripped off the meteorology building,
and minutes earlier, the people in that building watched as
a horse was speared by a telephone pool. I did

(20:11):
not make up any of that. Around seven thirty, Isaac
and the others were still in the Weather Bureau office
watching as a surge of water rose four feet in
an incredible four seconds and just rolled across a city
like a steamroller. And you have to remember, it's not
just this endlessly fast moving surge of sea water roiling

(20:31):
through town. You've got waves on top of that that
act like battering rams. Survivors who were able to climb
from the water flung exhaustedly to anything that floated. You
can barely understand the forces that were at play here.
In a page out of our recent Wahemi Fairy disaster.
Most people, once exposed to the outside, were rendered clotheless

(20:54):
from the experience. People became trapped and pinned by debris
or corpses, human, aim and animal. The number of dead
skyrocketed by the minute. People were blown to their deaths
by the wind, or dragged beneath the waves by debris,
or crushed and scizzared as they were battered and bashed
against other homes. Imagine having your teeth punched out by

(21:16):
someone's flying severed arm Artists renditions looked like something between
Picasso's Guernica and bad Ai. One survivor said, houses fell
upon houses, Whole blocks of homes fell upon blocks of
homes like dominoes. Inside those houses there were people, families
huddled together, who were then cast from the safety and

(21:38):
security of their houses into the dark, tumultuous waters. It
was about this time that people said the collective panic
of the area could be heard over the screaming of
the storm. Imagine watching as the waves and the wind
blow past your windows, and your neighbour's house just lifts
up and floats away, And I ask, is there anything
more unnerving than the unexpected weightlessness of your house leaving?

(22:03):
You would be petrified, convinced that every creak and groan
you here means that you are next. They said. The
houses cried, children calling for their mothers, women screaming for help,
men begging for mercy from God, each getting louder as
their buildings floated by, and quieter as they You know,

(22:24):
there are thousands of sad and horrific details of families
ripped apart before their tears soaked and unblinking eyes. But
since Kleenex won't sponsor me, I am not going to
share any of them. There was nothing anyone could do
to help. They could barely help themselves. And I forgot
to mention in case you were wondering how this could

(22:46):
get worse. As all this was happening, the sun was setting,
it was getting dark, and the storm was only getting worse.
Another wall of water, this time five feet taller, washed
over Galveston. Entire buildings collapse as the water crushed and
flattened just about everything, from a humble mailbox to a

(23:06):
majestic church steeple. The city was breaking apart and washing away.
Now remember, hurricanes are not just wind and water and waves.
Their wind and water and waves and rain. And they
were getting nine inches of rain during all of this, which,
in the absence of a hurricane to explain it would
be its own news story. By nine at night, Galveston

(23:30):
would sit under more than fifteen feet of water. For reference,
a telephone pole can set neatly under fifteen feet of water,
and worth pointing out, this swamped the city's highest point
by more than six feet. Pretty Much all public infrastructure
and utilities had been wiped out. One portion of downtown
was messed all the hell up, but spared from complete destruction,

(23:53):
ironically by the wall of debris that had been piling
up before it, which, by complete fluke acted as a
kind of a breakway. Any structure still standing that was
filled with people desperately clung onto one another in prayer
for this to end, and eventually it would end. The
winds finally died down around midnight, and a bright full

(24:13):
moon appeared. Where there used to be blocks and blocks
of houses, there was nothing but water. By the time
the storm passed, Galveston was in ruins. Of the thirty
six hundred buildings in Galveston, two thousand, six hundred and
thirty six had been completely destroyed, and the damage was
estimated at thirty four and a half million, which is

(24:33):
closer to one and a quarter billion to day. Families
were torn apart, and the death toll was unimaginable for
a city of Galveston's size. As many as twelve thousand
lives had been lost in a single day, that's basically
one in three. Survivors waded through the wreckage searching for

(24:55):
loved ones, shelter, and a sense of what to do next.
So you're getting ready for the holidays, when it starts
to get a little dark and windy outside and one
of those spinny weather wheels that measure windsbyed just flew
by your house, would you know what to do? Let
us embrace the season and celebrate our fellowship by pointing

(25:19):
out how preparing for the holidays is good practice and
not that dissimilar from prepping for a hurricane, whether you're
expecting high winds, power outages and flooding, or high emotions,
power struggles and a flood of passive aggressive comments. Don't worry,
We've got you first. Everything begins with decorating your house.

(25:41):
You dig around in the garage or basement looking for
all those old boxes you haven't seen in a while,
camping gear, flashlights, drinking water, batteries, emergency radio medicines, you know,
the kind of comfort things that you're going to want
on hand for when the in laws arrive. It's a
good idea to have all this stuff ready before the occasion,
But if you haven't thought to stock up on diapers

(26:02):
or pet food or lumber, you're gonna have to do
a little shopping, and by shopping, I mean pressing through
crowded stores at their busiest looking for the same hot
ticket items as every one else. Make sure you have
enough for all those unexpected guests dropping by, because you
do not know when the stores are gonna open up again,
and you don't know how long all of this festivity

(26:25):
is going to last. And here's a tip about presents.
I'm such a poor rapper that one year I threatened
to just spray paint any cellar wrap presence, and I
realize now sell a wrapping presence and heat sealing them
makes them waterproof, so you can take comfort knowing they
will be haplessly floating around your living room instead of

(26:45):
helplessly be composing under your tree. So, whether you're shopping
for a presents or bulking up on survival supplies, basically
think of how you would keep your home and family
safe and comfortable for an extended period if you found
yourself cut off from all the things that you take
for granted about the outside world, like running water and electricity,

(27:07):
and maybe the sounds of in laws arguing, which reminds
me boarding up your windows, sandbagging the doors, and even
spray foaming or flex sealing your place are becoming popular
options for the holidays, I mean for hurricanes. This is
the holiday season and that means taking some time off
work to huddle with the family, listening to emergency broadcasts

(27:28):
on a hang cranked radio by candlelight, and softly singing
your favorite hymns. Oh and if you didn't have time
to get a tree for your living room, do not
beat yourself up about it. I can tell you that
a lot of people riding out hurricanes end up with
a tree or parts of a tree in their living rooms,
delivered for free, just a little Christmas magic. And as

(27:50):
long as you are good cutting up a turkey while
standing in several feet of water, you should be good
to go. So what happen? Well, I'll tell you what happened.
And in case you couldn't tell, Galveston was targeted by
a category for hurricane and that's not fully accurate, let
me rephrase that Galveston was wiped out by the deadliest

(28:14):
natural disaster in US history. What began as a tropical
disturbance rose up, tore through the Gulf of Mexico, and
the only ones who knew what was about to happen.
Were any time travelers who showed up to eat a
little sand and saltwater on their popcorn, Well them and
the Cubans. As early as the fourth of September, Galveston's
weather bureau had been receiving warning reports from Washington that

(28:37):
a tropical disturbance was being reported over Cuba. Think of
it this way. Cuba basically invented hurricane prediction. They'd only
been studying Atlantic hurricane seasons for the last five hundred
years or so, and they were also home to one
of the world's most advanced meteorological offices. But here is
the thing. There was this little thing called the Spanish

(29:00):
American War where the United States went to war with
Spain to free Cuba from Spanish rule, but that they
just kind of turned around and cracked on Cuba. Anyways.
The US looked down on Cubans as goofy Latinos, and
rather than challenging them on their predictions, they just went
ahead and blocked all telegraph reports from Cuba. US officials

(29:22):
believed that the hurricane was going to curve towards Florida
before heading harmlessly out to sea. Today, people in the
know consider this to be the biggest meteorological blunder in
US history. Twenty five years earlier, in eighteen seventy five,
about three hours west of Galveston, a hurricane destroyed the

(29:43):
town of Indianola, Texas, which was painstakingly rebuilt, only to
be redestroyed just eleven years later in eighteen eighty six
by another hurricane. This got the people of Galveston talking
about the need for maybe putting in a protective seaball,
but that's expensive, and Klein used his powers of charisma

(30:04):
to help quash the idea. They were so sure it
wasn't needed that throughout the eighteen nineties, naturally protective sand
dunes along the shore were actually removed to make room
to build more houses. On what houses, you asked, looking
around skeptically exactly by the afternoon of the disaster, even

(30:24):
Helen Keller, who lived twelve hours away in Tuscumbia, Alabama,
was all, that's clearly a hurricane. Unfortunately, for the thirty
seven thousand people who lived in Galveston, landline telephones were
still relatively new at the time. Most news was delivered
by mail or newspaper, and the fastest way to share

(30:44):
it reliably was again by tippy tapping it out on
a telegraph, but again not everybody spoke tippy tap, and
not everyone owned a telegraph. When the water finally receded,
it revealed unimaginable devastation and loss. About ninety percent of
the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed. Like we said,

(31:04):
entire neighborhoods were simply gone, many with families who had
been trapped inside their homes who, once the water started
rising so quickly, found themselves unable to escape to higher ground,
which didn't exist anywhere. One of the most heart breaking
stories took place at Saint Mary's Orphanage. It was a
Catholic home for children built right on the shore line.

(31:25):
The nuns had been terrified by the rising seas, and
they tethered themselves to their children in groups of ten
and had them sing and old French sailor's hymn Queen
of the Waves, which I am not going to read
the whole lyric sheet out for, but the basic gist
of it is, Merry Mother of Jesus, why you got
to let us die like this? The nuns were determined

(31:46):
to protect the little ones no matter what, and one
listener familiar with the tale, shared that to her, the
most upsetting detail of this entire story was how the
nuns and children were all later found quote roped together
in a horrible, tragic necklace of drowned corpses. They were
found this way, buried in the sand, dug up, and revealed,

(32:07):
one at a time, still tied together, ten nuns and
ninety three orphans. By the time the howling winds died
down and the ocean had reclaimed itself. I can barely
tell you how unimaginable the world before and after would
have been for residents climbing from the debris. You've been
half drowned and slapped silly, and you emerged, dazed and

(32:30):
confused into a world that you just don't recognize. The
streets were filled with mountains of indescribable debris. A mountain
of garbage made of houses and buildings and animals and
people and all kinds of ornate architectural garbage, stretched for
about three miles, and in some places was as high
as a two story building. Every bridge connecting the island

(32:53):
to the mainland was gone. Three schools and a university
on the island were nearly completely destroyed. And of the
thirty nine churches in Galveston, twenty five were completely missing.
City hall too, and because the infrastructure was gone, they
actually had to find a working boat and sail to
the closest telegraph office to call for help, which was

(33:14):
in Houston, fifty miles or eighty kilometers away. It took
two days to get the word out, and what rescuers
found was a city in name only as shocking to
the modern eye as driving to New York City and
seeing nothing taller than a single story. The quote area
of destruction, that is, the area where nothing was left standing,

(33:35):
was nineteen hundred acres or fourteen hundred football fields or
a parking lot big enough to hold six hundred and
sixty two thousand, one hundred and twelve Dodge caravans. More
than ten thousand people were left homeless. Add that to
the deceased, and that's more than half the population. And
when they arrived, rescuers also found the survivors who had

(33:58):
been coping with the task of rescue who they could
and burying the rest all by themselves. Finding and rescuing
those trapped in the mass of debris field was an
impossible task. We've described the claustrophobic torture of being trapped
in the ruins of a building before, but never on
this kind of scale. The true horror came as the

(34:18):
cries for help slowly faded away. So what did they
do with all the bodies? Well, I'm glad you asked.
Are you familiar with Monty Python and the Holy Grail
were during the plague, They'd push a wagon around town,
clanging a bell and saying, bring out your dad. Well,
it's pretty much that dead gangs walked the cities for days,

(34:40):
collecting bodies which were loaded onto a barge, brought out
to sea, and unceremoniously dumped into the ocean. And who
did they get to do this Why black men, of course,
remember them. And why because it was perfectly legal to
appoint a gun at them and just make them do stuff.
And would it make you feel any better if I

(35:02):
told you that their bodies found new purpose as a
new refline developed along the coast. Well, that's not what happened.
The bodies all ended up washing back on shore. So
giant bonfires were built. And I'm telling this story and
I'm thinking to myself about giant funeral pyres burning up

(35:23):
and down the shore for miles, and thinking why do
they call it a bonfire? Well, turns out it comes
from Middle English meaning bone and fire, literally a fire
of bones. This time the men were plied with whiskey
to help mask the existential horror of handling water log corpses,
many of which had sustained gruesome and highly visible injuries

(35:46):
before dying. And this went on for weeks, weeks and
weeks of burning bodies day and night to cremate everyone,
and the wind made sure that no one there would
ever forget smell. So imagine you're now homeless, and as
many as seventeen thousand surplus army tents are now set

(36:08):
up along the beach to help with the immediate housing crisis,
and you have giant stacks of burning neighbors to keep
you warm. But none of that made it into the
newest nickname, the White City on the Beach, Galveston and nicknames,
so many nicknames, and ironically, the town of so many

(36:28):
nicknames was destroyed by a monster with no name. They
didn't actually start naming storms until nineteen fifty. Donations to
rebuild float in from around the world, and people of
Galveston rebuilt and fortified, and how they constructed a sea
wall bolstered by granite boulders seventeen feet high and six

(36:51):
miles long to face the Gulf as their spanking, brand
new first line of defense against future storms. They also
dredged fifty eighteen million cubic yards of sand from under
the shipping channels to pomp under the city. Try to
get your mind around this. The entire island rose by
as much as seventeen feet near the sea wall. Anything

(37:12):
that could be jacked up off its foundations was And
remember this was all in an age before caterpillar tractors.
Of all of the remedies or rebuilds that we've discussed
on this show before this, this this has to be
the most stunning from an engineering point of view, and
it was a hell of a feat. As of September eighth,

(37:35):
nineteen hundred, Galveston had been set to become one of
the world's great international cities. As of September ninth, nineteen hundred,
most of its population were dead or homeless. Isaac Kleine
himself narrowly escaped death. Together with the staff they'd ridden
out the storm at the Weather Bureau office. They kept
sending Washington all the latest updates. That was until the

(37:58):
telegraph lines went dead. And at this point, together with
his brother, who I forgot to mention, worked and lived
with him, decided to fight their way back home to
try to save Isaac's pregnant wife and three and a
half daughters. But imagine opening your door and finding fifty
of your neighbors riding out the storm with your family.
That is until an entire railroad trestle crashed through the house,

(38:22):
basically exploding it and exposing and throwing everyone to the
wind and water outside. They were able to save his
three daughters, but sadly, among the victims that day were
his wife and their unborn child. In nineteen o one,
the forecasting center was moved from Galveston to New Orleans,

(38:42):
and Isaac and his daughters moved with it. Isaac Leine
had done good things before the Galveston fuck up, and
he would go on to do good things after it too.
He successfully forecasts significant floods in nineteen twelve, nineteen fifteen,
and nineteen twenty seven, saving untold number of lives. He
was also the chief meteorologist in New Orleans during the

(39:05):
Great Mississippi flood of nineteen twenty seven. We won't remember
Isaac Kline for his one fi up and he did
freak up, And we won't remember him as the man
culpable in the deaths of as many as twelve thousand people.
We will remember him as a man who was passionate
about improving storm detection and warning systems, about saving lives.

(39:29):
I want you to remember him as mouth breathingly agog
about making people safer. If you can't, if you can't
help it, side with the thousands and thousands and thousands
of victims, then I'll give you this. Remember when he
Paul revered up and down the beach warning people about
the approaching storm. Well, that heroic and historical tidbit came

(39:51):
from Klein's autobiography and nowhere else outside of his own book.
There was no evidence that this ever happened, because as
no one remembers seeing him actually do it. So we're
gonna leave this episode carrying a real mixed bag of
emotion about him in our hearts. I'm sure even with
the limited technology of the age, there were still so

(40:13):
many chances to warn the people. There were those sightings
from several ships as it made its way across the Atlantic,
but communication was so slow, And then there were the
Cuban forecasters, but sadly that communication was prohibido. The storm
itself continued over Central Texas, passed through Oklahoma all the

(40:33):
way to Buffalo, New York, right in time for the
upcoming Pan American Expo, which it took a moment to
unceremoniously bash with eighty mile per hour winds before heading off,
and the storm was last seen dying somewhere near Iceland.
Fifteen years later, in nineteen fifteen, a storm almost as
powerful hit Galveston. This one brought only twelve feet of

(40:57):
storm surge and one hundred plus mile per wins. So
how did Galveston's beefed up new defenses do well? Fifty
three died, which is awful, but compared to twelve thousand
from the last time, that is a ninety nine point
six percent improvement, you know, on paper. And fast forward
to nineteen sixty one when Hurricane Carla struck. This time,

(41:20):
only forty three people died and the Army Corps of
Engineers estimated over a hundred million dollars in damages. Then,
in two thousand and eight, Hurricane Ike struck. So really
the story is it's all about the battle to protect
Galveston from storms that continues to this day, and that
really is the point. It's all about upping their seawall
and their floodgate game. Really, this whole story isn't about

(41:44):
one guy's massive gup that killed twelve thousand people. It's
about Galveston's resilience. They could have just folded up and
wallowed in, but instead they said, what's our fault in this?
And what can we do better next time? Of course,
it was also a story about the display between the
haves and the have nots, between the people who ride
out disasters in well insured yachts and those who sit

(42:07):
in rafts made of two liter pop bottles and lottery tickets.
It's also the story of how Galveston was forever changed.
Let me say it like this. It was supposed to
become the Paris of the Gulf, but today Houston has
three Applebee's and Galveston has none. Take your four or
five favorite disasters from the show's history and put them

(42:28):
all together, and they likely don't even begin to touch
the death toll from today's story, unless you're counting our
Sicilian forty disaster sode or our Saint Pierre Volcanic bioswarm episodes.
And the scariest thing is that the actual number of
people who lost their lives that day in Galveston will
never truly be known. They were born, grew, lived lives,

(42:50):
they knew joy and pain and all the things that
make us human, and then any trace of their existence
was permanently erased the storm, like they never existed, like
they never counted. And this storm took place at a
time when the Weather Service didn't even name storms. But
even without a name, the Galveston Hurricane of nineteen hundred

(43:14):
will never be forgotten. I have a mild preference for
stories where the actions of an individual become crucially linked
to a disaster, and not because I like shaming or
blaming people. Frankly, the idea of the responsibility for a
colossal death toll resting in the hands of a single

(43:35):
individual horrifying. And this was truly an insane death toll.
It's very rare for one of our stories to kill
into the thousands like this, And like most disasters, they
result from a combination of factors all working together for
the worst collective outcome. Even with the tarot cards and
voodoo spells available at the time. This could have been

(43:58):
avoided if the Weather Bureau hadn't been blinded by normalcy bias,
if the American government didn't look down on Cubans and
censor their superior forecasting, if shipping observations had been shared
in a timely manner, if any one of these had
fallen out of place, there's a chance none of this
ever would have happened. And as a result. Listener and

(44:19):
supporter of the show, Andy's grandmother Jackson used to say,
the best thing to do in Galveston is leave. And
maybe if ISAA Cline had ripped the shirt off and
rode the beaches to warn people, maybe they would have. Well,
never know. All we know for sure is that I
rip off my shirt before every recording. And if you
like the idea of me being able to replace those shirts,

(44:42):
why not consider doing something fashionable like becoming a supporter
of the show. You would really be helping fulfill my
dream of doing this full time. And if you and
a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck
or two, you would really help keep the show and
frankly me alive. Now before I tell you about Patreon.
If you are into it but aren't looking for a
whole relationship, you are more than welcome to visit me

(45:05):
at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash doomsday and
just buy me a coffee. And those of you ado,
I appreciate you deeply. But if you think that getting
episodes a little early, with no sponsor interruptions and with
additional ridiculously interesting material in each new episode is worth it,
you should come to Patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo.

(45:26):
And this is not a complete list, but I'd quickly
like to shout out Amber Rayborn, Tyler Williams, Miranda, Devin Austin,
Travis Means, Melissa full, Kenny Jones, Chris Ralton, Greg Greening,
Net Jennings, Duke Buckenberger. Don't ask about that. It's a
call sign and it has to do with chickens, Akshatta Gibson,
Amy Hughes, April and Chantel Rasmussen for supporting the show.

(45:48):
All of you are welcome to reach out to me
on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook at Doomsday Podcast or fire
an email to Doomsday pod at gmail dot com. I
do love hearing from you. But fair warnings. Sometimes I'm
a little slow to respond. Older episodes can be found
wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please
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(46:08):
all my Patreon listeners, new and old, for their support encouragement,
but I also ask if you could spare the money
and had to choose to consider making a donation to
Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of
Canadian volunteers offering assistants around the world to aid in
the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first
and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to

(46:30):
people in life threatening situations, and to date they have
helped over five point one million people across eighty seven
different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic
dot Ca. On the next episode, what are you asking
for for Christmas this year? Looking for a new bike?
Hoping for diamond earrings, maybe a puppy with the perfectly

(46:53):
appropriate number of limbs. You know what's an incredibly unpopular option.
Acute radiation syndrome. Just as the people of Prippiat, Ukraine.
That's right, it's a very doomsday Christmas Chernobyl Soude of
nineteen eighty six. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off, and

(47:15):
thanks for listening.

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The Galveston Hurricane Disaster of 1900 | Episode 80

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Galveston Hurricane Disaster of 1900 | Episode 80