The Storm of the Century

by Al Roker

  His idea was take a train, but on different tracks this time, in a different direction, as far as it would go, maybe all the way to the junction on the coast at Texas City. There, relief teams and insurance adjusters might board ships across the bay. They would reach Galveston by water.

  But even while Monagan was organizing this next effort to get a relief train as close to the island as possible, U.S. Army General Chambers McKibben arrived in Houston with a squadron of soldiers. Lately of the Spanish-American War, McKibben had served as military governor of Santiago, Cuba. At once an able commander and a decisive administrator, he’d come to Houston under orders from the secretary of war in aid of Galveston.

  The military man McKibben joined the civilian Monagan in getting the relief train outfitted—and as an officer, McKibben took over. An astute student of human nature, the general feared there would be thrill seekers and sightseers hoping to get into what he’d already concluded must be a horrible disaster area.

  He didn’t want that. He didn’t like the idea of any news reporters either.

  So the general gave the civilian Monagan an assignment. The insurance man was to ensure that every single person riding this train had an official U.S. Army pass, issued by McKibben himself.

  Before dawn on September 11, with Monagan checking passes, the new relief train filled up with U.S. Army soldiers under General McKibben; Texas Rangers recently arrived under the Adjutant General of Texas General Thomas Scurry; volunteer relief workers; Monagan’s insurance men; Galvestonians who had left town before the storm hit; and friends and families of those in Galveston, desperate to find loved ones.

  Monagan watched those citizens closely. He felt for the worried civilians. A mood of tense anxiety pervaded the cars.

  By dawn, the train was already moving toward Texas City on the coast. The day was beautifully clear, dry, and cool—one of those days when weather seems not only benign but actually hospitable, friendly to human efforts.

  And yet as this train too neared the coast, the disastrous extent of what weather can do became shockingly visible to the passengers. Again the rail track ended, this time well before Texas City.

  Worse yet: here on the mainland the standing water was at least two feet deep. The train came to a stop.

  General McKibben barked orders. The soldiers, insurance men, and ordinary citizens removed their shoes, rolled up their cuffs, and detrained into the water. They started wading.

  But as they slopped along toward Texas City, their journey became ever more bizarre and frightening. Corpses came floating by. The travelers could only hope that these deaths were among the few, but that wish dimmed as they kept splashing forward across the plain.

  They saw not fewer corpses in the water, but more. Now there were household items. There were parts of houses. Dead bodies of domestic animals.

  By the time Monagan arrived on the docks in Texas City, he was in a deepening state of shock.

  Not so General McKibben: without even consulting Monagan, the general abruptly commandeered a small steamship and marched his soldiers onto it. Before the insurance man knew what was happening, the steamer cleared the dock and entered the bay. The general left the civilians behind.

  Monagan began to realize he would have to make some unusual moves here on the Texas City docks if he was to get into Galveston. Stunned by what he’d already seen, Monagan was keenly aware that, as a mere insurance executive, his only real authority for entering the disaster area came from General McKibben. And the general had just abandoned him.

  Still, Monagan was determined. He felt personally responsible not only to his company but also to these many civilians filled with terrible dread for family and friends on the island. One way or another, he needed to get these poor people across the bay.

  He sighted a good-sized sailboat heading in toward the dock, a schooner. When it had tied up at the pier, Thomas Monagan—acting on no particular authority—announced that he was commandeering this boat on behalf of the Dallas and Houston relief efforts and the accompanying civilians, all of whom held U.S. Army–issued passes.

  He shepherded nearly one hundred people onto the boat. Late that afternoon, its captain steered the schooner out into Galveston Bay.

  Monagan had already seen dead bodies littered along the plain. And yet it was only on the bay that he realized the truly ghastly extent of the destruction.

  General McKibben had commandeered a steamer. But Monagan’s craft was a sailboat, and the wind, coming out of the south, was very light. The captain therefore had to tack, slowly and repeatedly, up and down the bay. The boat made the slowest, most tortuous kind of progress toward the island.

  The trip took all the rest of that day, and it was during those long hours that Monagan and the others came to realize, with mounting dread, the scope of what they were really encountering here. The entire bay was clogged. There were broken houses, broken furniture, and broken personal effects everywhere in the water.

  But that was nothing. There were also the bloated corpses of men, women, children, and babies. In every direction, Monagan and the other passengers on the boat saw hundreds of bodies in the bay. And so this agonizing ride, tacking up and down across Galveston Bay, became a slow-motion tour of heartwrenching, overwhelming loss.

  With evening falling, the passengers at last arrived in sickened, terrified silence at the ruins of what had been Galveston’s wharves. They saw the docks collapsed, boats wrecked. The greatest shipping port in Texas, one of the grandest in the nation, even in the world, had no wharf.

  No living people could be seen on land. A light flickered from the darkness on shore, then disappeared.

  Those on the sailboat who had family members in Galveston began leaping out of the boat in desperate anxiety. They splashed and climbed wildly ashore. In minutes, they had disappeared into the darkness on the island.

  Monagan and the remaining crew stayed on the sailboat. Their plan was to wait till morning before setting foot on the island and entering the next stage of this awful journey. But as they anchored for the night, amid sights that made any sleep unlikely, they noticed something new.

  A stench.

  It drifted out over the bay. It was sickening, poisonous, impossible to ignore. The smell of putrefying corpses.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE PILE

  PERCHED ON THEIR MAKESHIFT RAFT IN THE DARKNESS OF the night of horrors, the Cline family had been driven out to sea by nature’s force. Then, at last, they felt the wind and tide change again. Soon they found themselves riding back toward Galveston. And as they approached the location of the island, they could tell the seas were less rough. The water level was lower. Debris in the air and the sea was less violent.

  Some parts of the few remaining houses were visible. Here and there, some houses even had lights on.

  Storms can’t last forever, of course. Even the worst move on. They go and wreak their havoc somewhere else.

  The Cline house had turned over at about 8:00 P.M. Now it was nearly midnight. The whole day had felt like an eternity, but the past four hours especially had seemed to occur somewhere unworldly, somewhere outside of normal time. The hurricane, Isaac and Joseph knew, was finally leaving Galveston, Texas.

  Their raft ran up against a solid structure.

  This seemed to be the ruin of a house—but it felt solid. The raft hung up on the building and got stuck.

  There seemed to be people alive inside the house. The Clines and the little girl they’d rescued banged on the walls for help.

  From inside this house, people began opening windows. People let them in.

  Daisy Thorne could hardly comprehend that she was still alive. The sun rose over Galveston on the morning of Sunday, September 9, 1900, to reveal a day that promised to be one of the clearest and calmest of the summer. The humidity had broken. The sky was blue.

  Daisy’s neighbors the McCauleys had fallen with Mrs. Thorne’s room into the sea. And yet in the Lucas Terrace building, one room remained
standing. Only one room: it teetered on some wreckage of the ground floor, but it was semi-erect. The rest of the building had long since collapsed, but in this last room—Daisy’s bedroom—were packed Mrs. Thorne, Daisy’s sister, brother, and aunt, and nearly the whole crowd of neighbors who had sought refuge there. They had ridden out the climax in what amounted to a rickety, nearly toppled tower.

  When they could tell it was over, they’d climbed down in the dark from their precarious perch, soaked and chilled.

  Now they were all sitting outside the building. The thunder and lightning and slashing rain had stopped. Even one of Daisy’s cats had survived, hiding in a drawer in that room.

  By first light, the wind had died, and the gulf water, which had risen past the second story, had receded. The beach was revealed again, and the gulf itself lay beautifully calm in the morning sun.

  But Daisy, her family, and their neighbors confronted a sight as shocking as anything they’d endured overnight. The intimate horrors of the storm experience were over. Now they faced new horrors, on an impossible scale.

  As Daisy and her family and neighbors, huddled on wreckage, looked around at their city, what they saw seemed fantastical, something out of epic biblical prophecy, out of nightmare. Yet it was real. There seemed to be no city left at all.

  In every direction, from the gulf to the bay, and as far east and west as the eye could see, the city of Galveston had been knocked down. Where a house or office building did remain standing, it stood out starkly against the bright blue sky. Even many of those hulking shapes turned out to be nothing but vertical wrecks.

  The wreckage had created a new landscape. Piles of deeply, chaotically stacked debris, formerly buildings, along with everything formerly in those buildings, made hills, knolls, and mountains of randomly strewn beams, timbers, windows, lath, and brick, giving way to flattened plains of further wreckage, with personal items strewn about them too: toys, beds and bedding, dinnerware, tables and chairs.

  Uprooted trees were in the wreckage, twisted poles and tracks, machinery. Galveston was sheer mess. It stretched on and on. It piled up high.

  As she looked around in bewilderment, Daisy could feel soaked lime from the walls stinging her skin. Crumbled mortar and plaster clogged her red hair. She’d lost her shoes.

  Other survivors began emerging that morning, all over town, from wherever they’d been lucky enough to end up. Nobody felt lucky. Stunned, awestruck with grief and deep, unshakable bewilderment, people couldn’t even get their bearings. They couldn’t tell, at first glance, uptown from downtown. People cast desperately about for some familiar landmark, some way to know which way was which and where they had ended up.

  Nothing was recognizable. Overnight, the Galvestonians’ physical world had become horribly flattened, a weird landscape of endless wreckage where their great city had stood.

  What happened to cause this particularly gruesome effect, not only on the lives of so many dead Galvestonians and their loved ones, but also on the city itself, had largely to do with the relationship between two factors. One was the surge that occurred when the cycling wind finally got behind the tide. It sent a massive wave farther and higher into town than anyone had ever seen before.

  The second factor, interacting with the first, was the island’s high ground, around Broadway. For as that surge rolled quickly northward across the island out of the gulf with monumental force, it pushed many tons of debris before it—all the wreckage that the tide and the wind and rain had brought down on the low ground. That massive wreckage flowed uptown toward Broadway, and then began to pile up there, rising against the spine of land that had made Broadway seem the safest place to run.

  The wreckage became a hard dam of wood and iron and shingle, stacked on top of the high ground. Behind that levee of ruination, the water that created it rose to heights it could not otherwise have reached. Then, pushed by the gulf wave behind it, the sea poured over the top of the dam. The water inundated the high ground, putting it under a flood.

  The gulf used the ruins of the city’s buildings to destroy the rest of the city. When the water receded, it left behind a new world of deep debris.

  And it deposited human bodies in the debris—many times more of them than even the wildest rumors reaching Houston had foretold. To the survivors, the grief and shock that first morning were overwhelming. Anyone alive in this terrifying landscape of ruination was also someone terribly bereaved. Evidence of death was as palpable as could be.

  Lying about the vast desert of wreckage was a multitude of corpses. These bodies, hard to take in, brought back all the horrors of the night. Almost everybody had expected to die. That some were alive and others killed, their bodies tossed upon these piles of debris, represented the height of randomness, sheer chance.

  On that first morning alone, survivors saw many things they would never forget. Most of the corpses were stark naked: the water had torn their clothes from them. Some had died in positions of beseeching prayer. Dead mothers lay grasping their dead babies and children; other children’s bodies lay alone, tossed.

  Flying debris and falling walls and roofs had ripped people completely apart. Severed body parts were all over the piles.

  There were bodies in vacant lots, bodies in standing pools, bodies piled up and bodies broken. Bodies hung in groups from broken railroad bridges.

  And everything, human and inanimate alike, was soaking wet and covered with a weird slime, as thick and stubborn as grease.

  Then horror surged higher. Survivors began to realize they were hearing muffled cries. The cries came from deep within the piles of debris. Buildings had fallen, so there were even more bodies under the wreckage than could be seen on top. And some of those bodies were still alive.

  The survivors tried, on that first, desperate morning, to dig with their bare hands. They held out a hope of freeing those buried alive.

  But the wreckage was too heavy and wet, the survivors too tired, weak, and not organized for work. The debris was fifteen feet deep in some places. There was nothing to do for the dead, and nothing to do for those still dying.

  As the first morning brightened with the sun, new problems began to take immediate, pressing form. Galveston was cut off, the dazed survivors began to realize. They were alive, but the bridges and wharves were gone, the boats smashed, the cable and phone lines down.

  There was no electric light. There was little food. There wasn’t much drinking water: the pumping station that brought fresh water in from the mainland was shattered.

  There was no way to escape the island, no way of letting help get in. Those who had survived the night could not, without some immense effort, survive much longer. And nobody in Galveston knew whether anyone outside Galveston was coming to help.

  If little Louise Bristol and her family had been brave enough to leap into the water with the mattress and try swimming across to the neighbor’s house, they might all have died. Then again, by staying in the room, they’d risked death too. Still, when the water started receding at about 11:00 on Saturday night, they were all alive.

  And thanks to Cassie Bristol’s forethought and energy, they had food, water, and even light upstairs.

  Then, as they sat there on the morning of the ninth, with the floods gone and nothing but wreckage all around them, they heard the back wall of their own house fall. They went out on the porch to look at the damage.

  Everything that had once been on the rear side of the Bristol house now lay in the yard next door: the stove, the contents of two bedrooms, the dining room furniture, all ruined. The entire back wall was down.

  This house was Cassie’s living. The ruined things in the yard represented everything she’d worked for in a ceaseless effort to keep her children out of poverty, proud and genteel.

  One look told Cassie Bristol she was going to have to start all over again. New debts. Many more years of constant work against bad odds.

  “Oh God,” Louise heard her mother say. The despair and bitterness
she heard filled the little girl with sorrow.

  “Why couldn’t we have all gone with it?” Cassie Bristol asked.

  As the first morning after the storm went on, all of the urgent problems that kept arising were pushed aside by something even more urgent. The smell.

  By now, the morning sun was directly hitting the wreckage. The day was getting warmer. The bodies were beginning to putrefy. And that meant rampaging disease and death were not far behind.

  Worse: most of the rotting bodies were deep under the pile, seemingly immovable. New fears began to rage in Galveston.

  Sorrow could not become the main thing. Along with somehow treating the sick and injured, and somehow housing the homeless, and somehow getting food and fresh water, the people of Galveston now faced the immediate task of somehow removing all of these corpses—both the ones on top of the pile and those buried under it—from the island.

  If that effort should fail, further deaths would quickly start to ensue. There was no choice about this sickening task. There was no quarter. There was no time.

  Nobody could say yet how high the death toll would be. The visible bodies alone were everywhere in their grotesque arrangements; many more were invisible, festering below the wreckage.

  Galveston couldn’t wait for help. Removing bodies required digging out right away. This project needed to be organized, it needed to be led. There was no time to mourn.

  Leadership in Galveston took strange new forms. First thing Sunday morning, Mayor Walter Jones sent messengers to important citizens, calling an emergency meeting at the city’s best hotel, the Tremont. That building, though badly damaged by water, was standing.

  The meeting brought together the city’s best-known and, in many cases, richest citizens. The Deep Water Committee had continued to exist, and to influence policy, long after the channels had been dredged. Some of its key members attended. Ike Kempner, son of the late Harris Kempner, a founder of the committee, was there. So was the committee founder John Sealy. Colonel J. H. Hawley, one of the best respected men in town, began playing an important role.