Galveston Hurricane and Flood

Galveston Hurricane and Flood (1900).The Galveston hurricane and flood was by far the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. On Saturday 8 September 1900, a powerful hurricane battered Galveston, Texas, and the surrounding countryside with 120‐mile‐per‐hour winds and a storm surge (a wall of water, similar to a tidal wave) that briefly submerged the entire city. This inundation caused most of the estimated 6,000 deaths in Galveston, a city of 37,000 on Galveston Island, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricane took another 4,000 to 6,000 lives in the surrounding rural areas of the island and on the Texas mainland.

After the storm, Galveston's business and professional elites coalesced to undertake three major projects to restore confidence in the city's safety and viability. First, capitalizing on general postdisaster civic‐mindedness and emergency‐induced cooperation from the city's strong maritime labor unions, they created a new city charter that gave Galveston the nation's first commission system of municipal government. The commission system, along with the city‐manager system, spread to hundreds of medium‐sized cities in subsequent years, becoming a major part of Progressive Era urban reform. To mitigate the city's vulnerability to future hurricanes, the new city government undertook two ambitious engineering projects, building a massive, seventeen‐foot‐high seawall to protect Galveston's southern gulf front from storm surges, and raising by several feet many of the city's low‐lying sections, using sand and silt dredged from Galveston Bay. Galveston was rebuilt but never again approached the prominence it had enjoyed in the Texas economy of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, all three projects won national praise and soon became symbols of the country's Progressive Era romance with efficiency, bureaucracy, technology, and engineering.
See also Johnstown Flood; Municipal and County Governments.

Bibliography

Bradley R. Rice , Progressive Cities: The Commission Government Movement in America, 1901–1920, 1977.
Kai T. Erikson , A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community, 1994.

Stephen Kretzmann