The impact of Hurricane Katrina to that of the Galveston hurricane of 1900
Mills, Nicolaus
WHEN WE THINK Of New Orleans and its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the comparisons that come to mind most often are Chicago after the fire of 1871 and San Francisco after the earthquake of...
...Galveston's disaster story began on September 8, 1900, when the city was struck by a category four hurricane that took an estimated 6,000 lives, one-sixth of the city...
...and to accommodate the new fill, all the streets of Galveston needed repaving...
...Donations poured in from across the country...
...Houston dredged Buffalo Bayou to let deep-water ships get to its ports, while Galveston ceased being the Texas Gulf Coast town of the future...
...In September 1902, following an overwhelming approval vote on a bond issue, the city authorized J.M...
...In the process 2,156 structures, including the three-thousandton St...
...Journalist William Randolph Hearst sent $50,000...
...The following week, American Red Cross founder and president Clara Barton, who had gained fame during the Civil War, took charge of what would be, at age seventy-eight, her last great relief effort...
...But as the recovery of New Orleans languishes and its scattered poor struggle to take root elsewhere, there is a third city— Galveston, Texas—that we ought to consider when thinking of post-Katrina New Orleans...
...Instead, it settled into a period of quiet but steady growth as a banking and medical center...
...For months, the railroads gave free passage anywhere in the nation to victims of the hurricane, and there was plenty of work to go around...
...At a time when even liberals are talking about making the best of a bad situation by giving the diaspora of New Orleans two years of living expenses and forgetting about restoring the city to its pre-Katrina status, neither of these solutions can count on broad public support...
...At the same time, under the command of Brigadier General Thomas Scurry, two hundred militiamen from the Texas State Volunteer Guard came and put an end to the scattered looting that had occurred...
...At the turn of the century, Galveston was the biggest cotton port and the third-busiest port overall in America...
...Some buildings needed as much as thirteen feet of fill to protect them from flooding, and even with individual property owners paying for their houses to be jacked up, expenses were enormous...
...It became a beach town for Houston...
...The answer is unclear, but the stakes are not...
...A canal had to be dug through the center of the city in order to get the enormous dredges that were brought in to work efficiently...
...Patrick's Catholic Church, were raised, and every tree and shrub in Galveston was replaced...
...Two days later, the mayor confiscated all foodstuffs and made sure that they were sold and distributed at reasonable prices...
...and caused $30 million in damage...
...Thus, New Orleans has become a test case for the future of ecological politics in America...
...With help from the Texas legislature, which allowed Galveston to sell $2 million in 5 percent bonds and avoid paying a variety of state taxes, the city found a technological answer to both questions...
...To bring back the families of the Lower Ninth, the state and federal government will have to do what is most costly: either erect levees that protect the most vulnerable areas of New Orleans from flooding or build extensive, mixed-income housing in the higher parts of the city...
...WHEN WE THINK Of New Orleans and its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, the comparisons that come to mind most often are Chicago after the fire of 1871 and San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906...
...Galveston's relief effort started immediately...
...What the rebuilding could not do, however, was bring back the future the city seemed to have in 1900...
...Every municipal structure, from streetcar tracks to water pipes, would be lifted before the filling was over...
...If New Orleans is rebuilt along the same lines it maintained when it was evacuated, then at risk will be an area like the Lower Ninth Ward, which in 2005 was 96 percent black, 34 percent poor, and had an unemployment rate of 13 percent...
...The Phoenix-like rise of these two cities seems like nothing so much as a lesson in how to rebuild after a disaster...
...O'Rourke and Company to erect a massive sea wall...
...The work began in 1904 and was not completed until 1910...
...Improved and added to, the sea wall has helped Galveston survive the numerous hurricanes, including Carla in 1961 and Alicia in 1983, that have come its way since 1900...
...Its population stopped growing...
...destroyed 3,600 homes...
...From nearby Houston, the steamer Lawrence bore several tons of provisions and 100,000 gallons of fresh water...
...Or will the new New Orleans make room for the historic diversity of the old New Orleans...
...Work began a month later, and by February 1904, after 471 days of construction, with time off only on Sundays, the project was completed...
...It acquired all the sorrows of modern urban life, but none of the density and vibrance...
...There was, however, no way the city could support itself for long, and soon help arrived...
...In November, the Red Cross left Galveston, satisfied with the job it had done, and by February 1901, the Central Relief Committee closed its commissary...
...Will it turn into a smaller, more touristy version of itself as a result of Hurricane Katrina...
...Forty-five steamship lines served the city...
...The luxurious mansions on Broadway, Galveston's main street, were vivid testimony to its wealth...
...A bazaar at the Waldorf-Astoria netted $50,000...
...6 DISSENT / Summer 2006...
...After the hurricane, Galveston was a marked city...
...I S A SIMILAR FATE in store for New Orleans...
...As an island-city on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston had two overriding, New Orleans–like problems: how to keep out the surrounding water in the face of future hurricanes and what to do about its low-lying buildings, which were vulnerable to flooding...
...Galveston paid wages of $1.50 to $2.00 per day plus food and housing...
...It was the worst natural disaster in American history...
...On Sunday, September 9, one day after the hurricane, Mayor Walter C. Jones appointed a Central Relief Committee, made up of Galveston's leading citizens, who took charge of each of the city's twelve wards...
...It had consulates from sixteen countries and had been labeled "the New York of the Gulf' by the New York Herald...
...And, all too often, the most humane options before us are going to be the most expensive...
...As Erick Larson observed in Isaac's Storm, his best-selling 1999 account of the Galveston hurricane, "A silence settled over Galveston...
...New York State sent $94,000...
...NICOLAUS MILLS is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College...
...As we enter a period of sustained global warming, rising tides, and the increased likelihood of natural disasters, more large-scale, government interventions will be necessary to preserve life in this country as we know it...
...Galveston now faced the more difficult, long-term question of how it would rebuild...
...He is currently at work on a book about the Marshall Plan and the politics of rescue in America...
...The wall took 5,200 carloads of crushed granite, 1,800 of sand, and 1,600 of pilings to build the sea wall...
...Four months later, oil was discovered at Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas, and Houston, a railroad center closer to the oil and safer from hurricanes than Galveston, quickly began to prosper...
...What followed was a successful relief effort...
...Money was no object...
...But raising the buildings of Galveston to a safe height posed an even greater challenge...
...In contrast to Chicago and San Francisco, Galveston offers a cautionary tale that suggests recovery from a disaster can, even with the best of intentions, be limited in scope and close out rather than open up opportunity...
...By the end, Galveston was taller than it had ever been, with ten million more cubic yards of soil than it had in 1901...
...Galveston was now protected by a concrete and DISSENT / Summer 2006 5 crushed-granite sea wall 17,593 feet in length that rose seventeen feet above low tide and weighed twenty tons per linear foot...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
