Ike stirs memories of Galveston’s 1900 hurricane

Citizens being told to flee Hurricane Ike or face “certain death” have only to look back at the 1900 hurricane that struck Galveston to know the destructive force of a storm.

Hurricane Katrina, of course, is the benchmark in modern times, the storm of August 2005 having killed about 1,800 in New Orleans, but the 1900 Galveston tempest is said to be the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, killing as many as 12,000. (The exact totals have never been known; some estimates put the death toll at 5,000; the U.S. Weather Service says it was 8,000.)

In just one day, the town of 36,000 was destroyed. About 3,600 buildings were demolished. And a city that once fancied itself as the Wall Street of the West was gone, and with it its chances of achieving its potential as the premier deep-water port in Texas.

On Sept. 8, 1900, the storm, which is officially categorized as a Category 4 storm (some say it was actually a 5) with winds of 135 to 150 mph, hit the low-lying island 50 miles from Houston.

Geography and error seemed to have set the scene for disaster.

Isaac Cline, chief of the Galveston Weather Bureau, who is memorialized in Erik Larson’s 1999 bestseller “Isaac’s Storm,” was notified as early as Sept. 4 that the hurricane was brewing. But the weather service thought it was headed for Florida. Galveston apparently didn’t take hurricanes seriously. Indeed, nearly a decade earlier, Cline had posited that Galveston would be protected because of the shallow waters around it.

“Isaac Cline…believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms,” Larson wrote in “Isaac’s Storm.” “The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based was to him preposterous, ‘an absurd delusion.’ ”

By Sept. 7, Cline raised the hurricane flag. Still, few paid it heed. “In Galveston, reassured by Cline’s belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration,” Larson wrote. “Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky until the surf began ripping the city’s beloved beachfront apart.”

By the morning of Sept. 8, the winds were doing a dance in the Gulf of Mexico that would become a tarantella of terror.

By nightfall, two walls of water had met and surged through the city, smashing houses and leaving the city in ruins. One in six residents was killed, including 90 of 93 orphans and the 10 nuns who tried to save them.

There were so many dead that funeral pyres had to be built in Galveston to handle all the bodies. The fires are said to have burned for a couple of months, filling the air with a sickening stench.

It’s hard to believe today as you stroll through the Strand, the downtown area of Galveston. The Texas town is a popular overnight spot for those boarding cruise ships (which is why I was there), and its area of antiques shops, restaurants and hotels, done in turn-of-the-20^th-cenutry style, belie its troubled past.

Some believe, too, that Isaac Cline was a convenient scapegoat. He himself claims that he ran up and down the beach warning residents of the danger. And he also lost his pregnant wife in the storm.

But what is clear is that Galveston was not only permanently hobbled 108 years ago; it was permanently humbled.