The Galveston Hurricane Disaster of 1900 | Episode 78

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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. 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 leave a review and tell your friends. I always thank 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 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 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 thanks for listening.