A weekend in September: the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the nation's deadliest natural disaster

First published in 1957, this skillfully written book collects interviews from survivors of the worst natural disaster in US history - the Galveston storm of 1900. Between 6,000 and 8,000 people in the city of Galveston had died, and estimated casualties for the entire island ranged from 10,000 to 12,000. Property damage is impossible to estimate by current standards, but contemporary figures ranged from twenty to thirty million dollars. A high-water mark of 15.7 feet and high winds had destroyed a third of the city, including 2,636 houses and 300 feet or 1,500 acres of shoreline. The sixteen ships anchored in the harbor at the time of the storm also suffered extensive damage. More violent and costlier hurricanes have struck coastal areas of the United States since 1900, but because of the death toll the Galveston storm that year was in the 1980s still called the worst recorded natural disaster ever to strike the North American continent. Out of the chaos, citizens developed the commission form of city government now used by many other municipalities. Construction began on a six-mile-long seawall standing seventeen feet above mean low tide, and that protective barrier has been extended since then. Inside the city, sand pumped from the Gulf floor raised the grade as much as seventeen feet. This work required advance raising of 2,146 buildings and many streetcar tracks, fireplugs, and water pipes. Trees, shrubs, and flowers had to be removed if the owners wanted to save them. The largest building raised was a 3,000-ton church. It was boosted five feet off the ground with jacks, then fill was pumped underneath; church services were held on schedule. The great storm that wrought all this left a long track. From Texas it traveled into Oklahoma and Kansas, turned northeastward and crossed over the Great Lakes and part of Canada, and on September 12 passed north of Halifax and disappeared into the North Atlantic.