HURRICANES
LESSON 1
Task 1: Read the article
Eventually, the residents of the biggest, most populated city in Texas would call it "The Great Storm," but that was years after the tempest was born off the coast of Africa in the late summer of 1900. It travelled stealthily, almost without notice, across the Atlantic Ocean. It struck Antigua, Cuba, and then the Florida Keys. American weather forecasters ignored the warnings of Cuban meteorologists as the storm careened across the Gulf of Mexico. It greeted the residents of New Orleans with heavy damage before turning its unrelenting eye toward the rich, vulnerable, soon-to-be-destroyed island of Galveston, Texas. It was Saturday afternoon, the 8th of September, when the warning came. The shifting storm teased the residents — yes, it will hit; no, it will not. By Sunday morning, the storm was gone, and so was most of the city.
"The wreck of Galveston was brought about by a tempest so terrible that no words can adequately describe its intensity, and by a flood which turned the city into a raging sea."
— Richard Spillane’s first-hand account, published in The New York Times,
September, 1900
You may read this online here, or in your packet on Page 2.
It was the deadliest natural disaster to ever hit the United States before or since, and it killed approximately 8,000 people — one in every five residents of the city. We don’t know how fast the wind was blowing because, after recording a wind speed of 100 mph, the measuring device was destroyed, and only estimates could be made. But it wasn’t the wind that did the killing. It was the water.
Galveston, basically a large sand bar, had an average elevation of fewer than nine feet above sea level. The storm surge that baptized the island was more than 12 feet high. All telegraph equipment was destroyed, and it took two days for word to begin to get out that Galveston and its residents were devastated.
In the picture at left, residents pick through the ruins of their houses, searching for anything they can salvage.
At first they tried to dump the bodies at sea because there were too many to bury, but the currents of the Gulf of Mexico brought them back to the island, where they washed up on the beach. For weeks after the storm, men collected and burned the bodies in funeral pyres.
Recovery took years, and Galveston never regained its place of prominence. The Great Storm ensured that Houston, not Galveston, would be the most important port city in Texas. In the picture at right, you can see the construction of the seawall, built after the devastation storm
to protect the island.
The Great Storm was a hurricane — one of nature’s most fascinating and destructive phenomena.
