The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  So Chief Ketchum dispatched Officer J. T. Rowan to drive the patrol wagon out to Lucas Terrace. Rowan’s mission was to evacuate the mother-in-law.

  Officer Rowan, pushing his team through driving rain, arrived on the east end to find that water was indeed rising quickly around the apartment building. He slogged in as quickly as he could.

  Once inside, and with the mother-in-law safely in tow, he knocked on other doors, including Daisy’s, to check on residents. Officer Rowan suggested to Daisy’s mother that the Thorne family take the ride uptown in the patrol wagon. Why not grab this chance to get off the flooded beach and seek safety?

  But Mrs. Thorne protested that she had a house full of guests, all the neighbors who had abandoned their frame houses and come to Lucas Terrace. She and Daisy were in the midst of making them biscuits. And the building was safe. That’s why everybody had come there.

  “These people will be hungry,” she told Officer Rowan. As Rowan drove the man’s mother-in-law through wind and rain back to town, Mrs. Thorne, Daisy, and the rest of the family stayed in the apartment in the building in the water.

  Some people were still taking the characteristically cavalier Galveston attitude in the face of wild weather. On a trolley car at lunchtime, riders didn’t even discuss the storm raging on the street. Then, at about 12:30, the trolleys stopped running.

  At Ritter’s Saloon too, the businessmen gobbled their lunches in the rowdy, smoke-filled room, making deals, trading jibes, and cracking jokes about the weather.

  And yet vacationers had spent the morning trying to flee the island. They’d been mobbing four-story, red-brick Union Station on the Strand near the bay, eager to pack onto the morning trains that crossed to the mainland on the railroad causeway. One of these trains, everybody now knew, would be the last to get off the island until the storm had passed. Meanwhile, at the harbor, captains of every kind of craft were battening down the hatches and crossing their fingers.

  Still, on some wharves, men continued loading cargo. Even as late as early Friday afternoon, a solitary group was working on a wharf. They were trying to load bags of flour onto a schooner whose prow had begun riding with each wave as high as the tops of the portside buildings.

  The ship, the flour, and workers were all soaking wet. Yet the men kept working.

  CHAPTER 9

  SATURDAY AFTERNOON: “HALF THE CITY UNDERWATER”

  DAISY WAS LOOKING OUT THE WINDOW, AWAY FROM THE beach, at the wind sweeping rain along Broadway and the water rising above the street. The officer with the rescue wagon had left Lucas Terrace. The Broadway telephone poles, rocking in the wind, had dropped their phone lines into the water. The poles themselves wouldn’t stand long.

  She watched a cottage across the street—it belonged to one of the neighbors eating biscuits in her apartment—start succumbing to the raging storm. It didn’t take long: within seconds, the house was down and gone.

  Soon the water would be high enough to pick up that shattered house and carry its timbers, along with the timbers of hundreds of other houses, turning them all into massive tonnage, a heavy tide of debris moved by the swirling flood.

  Behind Daisy, as she stood at the window, the Thorne apartment was now jammed. Some were in varying states of loud consternation. Some were calmly eating Mrs. Thorne’s food. Some hid their eyes to avoid seeing the destruction going on outside.

  Downtown near the beach, the young lawyer Clarence Howth was wading up the street to his big, solid, raised-up home with upper and lower porches, three blocks from the gulf. He’d just had his midday meal at Ritter’s, as he so often did. Then he’d tried to drive his wagon home.

  Encountering water three feet deep in the street, Howth hitched the horse and wagon to a post. He proceeded on foot.

  Now he was splashing through gulf water. In some places, it came up to his shoulders. Howth was a man who normally showed magnificent unconcern. All that was about to change.

  Gaining his front steps, Howth hauled his sodden self up onto his porch, removed his shoes, went inside, and climbed the stairs to the third floor to look in on his wife and new baby, the couple’s first. The baby had been doing fine, but young Marie Howth was often unwell; her pregnancy and delivery had been a strain, and she was confined to her bed.

  Howth went to his bedroom, disrobed, dried off, and changed clothes. He returned to his parlor.

  The builder had planned for floods. This house had a raised ground floor; it sat on a raised lot. Howth pulled up a chair and sat at a parlor window facing the street. Leaning back to watch the amazing show outside, he lit a cigar.

  Arnold Wolfram, to the great relief of his wife and children, did come home for lunch as he’d promised.

  But after lunch, he told them he was going back downtown to work. Both his wife and their children started crying.

  Arnold was a stubborn man. He was not to be deterred from his course by tearful pleadings. He headed back into the storm to do his job.

  Meanwhile, at City Hall, Chief Ketchum was realizing he’d be here a while. He’d gotten wet, so he called home and asked his wife to send over a change of clothes. Mrs. Ketchum quickly put together a package—heavy pants, a flannel shirt, boots—and the Ketchums’ son Henry drove a buggy through the rain to get the clothing to City Hall.

  The chief was meanwhile ordering the patrol wagon back out to the east side. Not as far as the Thorne apartment at Lucas Terrace—nobody could get that far now—but to a home closer by, where a family was evidently stranded.

  When those officers returned to the station, they brought with them nearly a hundred wet, upset people, all crowding into City Hall. The officers reported that when they’d arrived at the scene, they’d been unable to cross the water to the house. So they’d requisitioned a boat. On the boat, they evacuated not just one family but all of these other people from that entire part of town.

  With City Hall jammed now, some of the people were getting hysterical. Henry Ketchum arrived, soaked from his trip, and gave his father the dry clothes, but then, because the scene in the police station was so intense, he stuck around.

  After a while the chief realized his son was still there. He sent Henry straight home. But he said nothing more than “It’s going to be pretty rough tonight.”

  Out on the street, Henry got the message. As he tried to make his way home with the buggy, slate roof tiles were flying through the air; he had to duck as he drove. He was on Thirty-Fifth Street, a fairly high street. Yet the water was up to his wagon’s axles.

  A barn that the Ketchum family owned stood a half block from their house. There Henry left the horse in its stable and walked out into swirling water, now up to his chest. He was beginning to fear for his life when he saw a Scottish terrier standing on top of a doghouse to which it was chained. The doghouse had bobbed and floated into a fence, where it stuck. The dog barked to get Henry’s attention.

  But Henry was scared now, not sure he was going to make it home. He kept pushing through the water. He left the stranded, barking terrier behind.

  A train had left Houston for Galveston at 9:45 that morning. Around 1:00 P.M., it finally pulled into Galveston’s Union Station on the Strand. Clearly its passengers were moving in the wrong direction—onto, not off, the island. But leaving Houston that morning, they hadn’t realized what they’d be getting into.

  Now they knew. Filled with trepidation, they’d made it through the rattling wind all the way across the bay railroad causeway through rising water. They’d gained the island.

  But traveling on the island, their train had come to a full stop. The track was washed out.

  Stranded in the cars, the passengers could only sit and wait. They watched the storm rage on the flatlands through windows beaten by rain. They watched the water rise inexorably until it covered the railroad tracks. Then it climbed the wheels. How high would it go?

  After an hour or more of tense waiting, a new train arrived on a nearby track that was still intact. The stuck train started b
acking up. It backed half a mile to higher ground. There the passengers changed trains in the rain and wind, moving as quickly as they could from track to track.

  The new train proceeded toward the city of Galveston—but it traveled at pedestrian speed. Literally: the train crew was wading through the water ahead of the engine. They were moving debris out of the way.

  For the water wasn’t just rising now: it was moving, streaming, flowing, flooding. It seemed to have a fast current, running hard from east to west. And it was carrying tons of wreckage.

  Now the train passengers had arrived at their destination. But just to get to the station platform, the men had to stand waist high in the water and help the women and children disembark.

  There were still some hacks waiting at the station to haul the passengers through the floodwaters, pulled by horses belly-deep, to hotels and homes. But hotels and homes didn’t seem so solid at that moment. Fearful of venturing out, fearful of the water rising so quickly on the station’s ground floor, they went up the station’s stairs to a bare room on the second floor.

  They hauled their baggage up those darkened stairs and huddled up there. They were cold and wet yet determined to wait out a storm that, they still believed, would no doubt be memorable, but would probably be fine in the end.

  Then, below the stairs, they saw a body float into the first floor of the station.

  A dead child.

  A tourist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, was standing on one of Galveston’s high sidewalks near the harbor and watching the stream rise to cover his feet. When the deep streets were full, the sidewalks themselves began to join them underwater. The tourist was beginning to get nervous. When he looked uptown, toward the wharves, he saw ships’ prows weirdly high—competing with the heights of warehouses. Big horse turds rushed by in the river that had so recently been a street.

  He saw a wading man slip in the water and fall. The tourist watched as the fallen man was borne quickly away, through the stream, laughing all the way.

  Dr. Young, the amateur meteorologist and head of the Cotton Exchange, had realized earlier in the day that the U.S. Weather Bureau had placed the storm on the wrong track. Earlier that week, Young had already questioned the complacency of the Weather Bureau regarding the Cuban storm. Friday night, he’d noted the bizarrely high tides rising inexorably against a high north wind that should have been holding them back. This morning he’d gone out again to look at the beach, and then he knew this was a hurricane.

  Immediately he walked up to the Strand, entered the Western Union Office, and telegraphed his wife, who was with the children aboard a Southern Pacific sleeper on their way home. This cable, he knew, would find her during a scheduled stop in San Antonio. It warned her to stay in San Antonio until she heard from him. A great storm, Young told his wife, was arriving in Galveston.

  Now, a little after 1:00 in the afternoon, Young was wading to his house near Isaac Cline’s, just a few blocks from the gulf. He could take satisfaction, at least, in having kept his family from riding into the storm. And like Clarence Howth’s, Young’s house—indeed his whole property—had been set up to resist bad storms. The entire lot was raised five feet above sea level; even the front sidewalk was four feet up, with a deep curb into the street. The house sat on brick pillars rising four feet high.

  And yet all over Young’s stormproof lot was gulf water—at least a foot deep already. That meant the sea was at least six feet above its normal level on the gulf side of town. And the wind was still out of the north, holding the tide back.

  Young sat alone on his first-floor porch and watched the water rise until the entire bottom porch step was underwater. But he knew how high his house sat. While he understood this was a hurricane, and was glad his family wasn’t riding into it, he still had no fear that any water would actually come into his house.

  At 2:30, Joseph Cline went up to fight the howling wind on the roof of the Levy Building and take readings. How much rain had fallen was now impossible to determine: the rain gauge had left the building, blown into the sky by the howling wind.

  But the barometer was still falling, signaling that the worst was still to come. Joseph returned to the frantic office below. The Levy Building was well positioned to withstand a storm.

  But now he received a phone call that confirmed his darkest fears.

  Mollie Cohen had swept up the fallen plaster that the blast of wind had shaken loose. And yet outside Mollie and the rabbi’s darkened home on Broadway, the wind kept roaring. The house continued to shake in the blasts. Plaster kept falling.

  Rabbi Cohen pushed open his front door. Broadway was underwater.

  This was the high ground. This had never, everyone believed, happened before.

  The line of drenched people was still slogging along the Broadway sidewalks through the flood, carrying their treasured belongings. But any high ground remaining in Galveston was quickly disappearing.

  Cohen watched the water rise over the bottom step to his porch. He closed the door quickly so the children wouldn’t see.

  Mollie began playing the piano: songs from Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan. The Cohen family sat in their dark house and sang.

  After the unflappable young lawyer Clarence Howth left Ritter’s Saloon and went home to smoke a cigar, other businessmen were still sitting around there eating oysters, puffing cigars, drinking beer out of big steins, trading jibes, and making deals. A storm couldn’t scare them.

  The wind rattled the front windows without stopping. They made jokes about it.

  What they didn’t know: that same driving wind had entered the building on the floor above, through open windows there. The upper floor was home to a print shop. Over their heads, the wind was pushing hard on the building’s walls, bending them back and forth like paper.

  The joists supporting the second-story floor couldn’t stay put. At last the joists let go. The entire first-floor ceiling fell down into the restaurant.

  With the ceiling came everything on the second story, sliding down and falling from above. That included the printing presses.

  In Ritter’s, two men were crushed in mid-joke. They died right away.

  Three critically injured started dying more slowly on the saloon floor.

  Others were only badly hurt: a waiter was quickly dispatched into the driving storm for a doctor. He was never seen again.

  Annie McCullough had told Ed to take her mother in the dray, along with the rest of the family and their luggage. She could walk the few blocks to the school uptown, past Broadway. Annie still wasn’t scared, just being sensible.

  And yet as she slogged her way northward to the corner of Ninth and Broadway—only a block from the school at Tenth—she ran into a wind that pushed her backward. By now Broadway was not only full of water but also full of high waves, a streaming ocean.

  Across that sea, toward the north side of the street, she caught a glimpse of Ed and the family on the flat wagon. But Annie stopped.

  She couldn’t cross. She was cut off. Now she was scared.

  Louise was helping her mother and her older sister Lois, along with one of her older brothers, rapidly empty kitchen cabinets. After water had poured across her garden, Cassie Bristol had realized the danger the flood was about to cause her family and the entire house that was their living.

  Now the garden was deep underwater, and Louise knew how hard her mother worked, how little time she had to do things like gardening. It upset Louise to think that her mother’s work was all ruined.

  Briskly, Cassie was now directing a decampment to the second floor with as much food and valuables as the family could carry. Louise, as little as she was, helped with the lighter items. Her eldest brother had not yet arrived—but now Louise saw him, through the window, wading slowly and with difficulty toward the house.

  The water was so high now that he was holding his arms away from his sides, trying to steady himself against the swirling currents. The sight scared Louise.

  Louise h
ad a little Maltese kitten. It was acting skittish. It kept following Louise as she worked.

  Then water started flowing in under the front door. It was almost time to get upstairs. But first her mother did something that startled Louise.

  As the little girl watched, Cassie went into a shed attached to the house, where she normally chopped wood for the stove. She grabbed the axe and returned to the kitchen. She swung the axe over her head and began chopping holes in the kitchen floor.

  Then she went into every room on the ground floor and chopped holes in those floors too. She was hoping to save her house by giving the water a controlled way in, easing the pressure from below. This way the rising water might not lift the house off the foundation.

  The water was coming in under the door faster than it went down the holes. Its speed amazed little Louise. Her mother was still reaching down into the water to pull items out of the lower kitchen cabinets, but at last she had to stop: when bending, she couldn’t keep her head out of the water. Finally the Bristol family retreated upstairs with everything they could move.

  Annie McCullough crossed the ocean waves on Broadway the only way she could: carried in the arms of a big man who had stopped to help her. When the man had waded her across to the north side of the street and put her down, she saw Ed’s dray floating now, the mule swimming.

  Annie clambered onto the dray. The mule swam, pulling them. Everybody was soaked from the rain and the ocean. The men lay flat on their bellies on the wagon, holding the small children to keep the wind from blowing them into the water.

  At last they arrived at the school. The water there was a bit lower. And yet as they left the horse and the dray and entered the building, the wind was so strong that it threw people about. The wind kept forcing the doors open, admitting gulf water in waves and rain water in sheets. Men were leaning against the doors, trying to hold them shut.