Donations came from religious groups, labor and fraternal organizations and thousands of individuals. Relief funds were raised by an organ recital in Scranton, Pa. Money was sent by the German Turnverein of St. Louis, Mo. Sunday school classes sent their collections of pennies, nickels and dimes. Along with taking care of the immediate needs of clean-up, restoration of utilities, and feeding, clothing and sheltering the survivors of the storm, the Central Relief Committee paid for the building of new houses, plus furnishing partial financial aid for the repair or rebuilding of 1, houses.
A New Form of Municipal Government As discussion began on what should be done to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster, the old Deep Water Committee resurfaced. The DWC members were the elite of Galveston's finance and business world.
McComb says, "Members of the committee and their associates directed the eight local banks, dominated 62 percent of the corporate capital, and controlled 75 percent of the valuable real estate. Dissatisfaction with Galveston's municipal government had been building during the preceding several years, especially within the ranks of financial and commercial leaders.
The sitting government was guilty not so much of malfeasance as of laxity and procrastination. Fiscal irregularities had been uncovered that were perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the official accountant did not know how to keep books. Galveston's financial situation was bleak. The city operated under a mayor-council charter, which, since the mids, provided for 12 councilmen. They were elected at large but were required to live in the wards they represented.
Two weeks after the storm, the council began discussing the need for a city government that could lead Galveston through the recovery period. The Deep Water Committee asserted that Galveston needed a stronger, more centralized, more efficient form of government to direct recovery efforts.
The DWC proposed a commission appointed by the governor and composed of a mayor-president and four commissioners. Each commissioner would administer a division of city government: finance and revenue, police and fire, waterworks and sewerage, and streets and public improvements. The committee further suggested that the state exempt Galveston from paying state and county taxes for two years and that the bonded debt be refinanced at a lower rate.
In , any changes in city charters had to be approved by the legislature, so the DWC appealed directly to the state's governing body for enabling legislation for their ground-breaking charter. The original plan called for all five commission members to be appointed. The legislature approved an amended version providing for the election of two commissioners and the appointment of three. In , under the threat of court challenges to the constitutionality of the charter, the legislature required that all commissioners be elected.
Galveston kept the commission form of city government, with modifications, until Recovery was, of course, the highest priority with the new commission, which appointed three engineers to develop a plan to protect Galveston from future storms.
The engineers presented a two-part project: To break the force of the waves, they recommended building a concrete seawall three miles long from the south jetty across the eastern edge of the city and down the beach. To protect the city from flooding, they proposed raising the level of the entire city by picking up most of the structures in the city and filling in beneath them with sand. The county agreed to pay for the seawall through a bond issue.
Initially reluctant, the Texas Legislature finally agreed to a combination of tax abatement and sales of bonds to finance the grade elevation. O'Rourke and Co. First, piles were driven 40 to 50 feet deep and set four feet apart.
They were protected from undermining on the Gulf side by sheet piling sunk 26 feet into the sea floor. Concrete was poured over the pilings, reinforced with one-and-one-quarter-inch-diameter steel rods inserted every three feet. The crew poured about feet of wall a day.
The side of the seawall facing the Gulf was concave, to absorb shock and to turn the waves back on themselves. Granite riprap three to four feet deep and extending 27 feet out from the wall added protection from erosion. Lindsay Baker, in his book, Building the Lone Star , lists the materials used in constructing the seawall: 5, railway carloads of crushed granite, 1, carloads of sand, 1, carloads of cement, 1, carloads of round wooden pilings, 4, carloads of wooden sheet pilings, 3, carloads of stone riprap and five carloads of reinforcing steel.
When the wall was finished, it stood 17 feet above mean low tide, was 15 feet thick at the base, five feet thick at the top, and three-and-one-half miles long. A brick drive extended about feet inland from the top. The city's portion, begun on Oct. Between December and October , another section of seawall was built by the federal government to protect Fort Crockett Military Reservation. Additions and modifications to the seawall were made in , , , and Today the wall is The work began in December and was done in quarter-mile-square sections, each about 16 city blocks in size.
Each section in turn was enclosed in a dike. In addition to structures, utility lines within the dike — sewers, water and gas lines, streetcar tracks, fire hydrants and telephone and telegraph poles — had to be lifted.
Fences, sidewalks and outbuildings also had to be repositioned. Some frame structures had been built on stilts because of the city's periodic flooding. Many of them sat high enough to accommodate the increased height in ground level. All buildings that weren't already on stilts — about 2, buildings — were raised with jacks. Even the 3,ton St. Patrick's Church was lifted five feet with jackscrews.
Sand for the fill was dredged out of an area between the jetties at the entrance to Galveston harbor, which had the benefit of deepening the approach to the harbor.
To transport the fill to the areas being raised, the contractor built a canal 20 feet deep, feet wide and two-and-a-half miles long through the residential district. About houses had to be temporarily relocated so that the canal could be dug. A slurry of water and fill sand, dug out of the harbor channel by dredges, was sailed down the canal to discharge stations, from which the mixture was pumped into the area to the desired level.
The water then drained away, leaving the sand behind. New foundations were constructed for the buildings on top of the fill, and the structures were fastened to their new bases. While the work was being done, people walked about on catwalks as high as eight to ten feet in the air. The area immediately behind the seawall was raised just over The grade decreased one foot for every 1, feet west to Galveston Bay, so that the city's streets drained into the bay.
A side benefit of the grade raising was that the city's sewer system, which had never worked right, finally had enough slope to enable it to operate properly. When the job was finished in , city blocks had been raised from a few inches to more than 16 feet by the use of The first major test of the seawall came on August 16, , when a large hurricane pushed the tide to three inches higher than in The storm destroyed 90 percent of the buildings outside the seawall and flooded the downtown area.
However, only eight people lost their lives in Galveston, compared with elsewhere. Tornadoes accompanying Hurricane Carla in destroyed buildings and killed six people, but the hurricane's wind, rain and tide were not devastating. Engineering technology appears to have saved Galveston from an encore of the devastation of Anyone who lives in Texas knows Hurricane Harvey.
Harvey, which made landfall in southern Texas on August 25, , was the last major hurricane Category 3 storm or above to hit the Lone Star State. The immediate recognition of Hurricane Harvey has a lot to do with its recent date but also because many view the storm as a once in a lifetime event. These byproducts of hurricanes can lead to the decimation of coastal communities and can potentially reach far inland. Such storms, which are now believed to have been hurricanes, continued to enter the written record from the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century as these storms continuously sank ships and claimed countless lives.
With the onset of the nineteenth century came the first records of hurricanes moving inland. One of the earliest such accounts details how in September , colonists along the Texas coast noticed the signs of an approaching storm. They, however, thought it was nothing more than just that, a storm, which was a normal occurrence, they did not give it much thought. Another hurricane, which still holds the title of the most deadly hurricane in United States history, struck Galveston again in It is estimated that roughly 8, lives were lost in the city of Galveston, and a staggering 10, lives were lost across Galveston Island as a whole.
Charting hurricanes throughout history now suggests that there has been an uptick in major hurricane activity in the North Atlantic since the s, a conclusion greatly aided by the use of satellite technology to track hurricanes starting in the s. This quantifiable increase in hurricane strength suggests that Texas may not necessarily be at risk of more frequent hurricane activity, but rather an increase in the intensity of the hurricanes that make landfall along its coast.
It was not until that another hurricane, Hurricane Ike , overtopped the seawall. The Great Galveston Storm of is famous among major U. Historians documented this storm with many eyewitness accounts and enough memorabilia to create a museum in downtown Galveston.
Follow me on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram. Open in Our App. Download it here. By Meteorologist Mary Wasson Texas. What You Need To Know The hurricane took many by surprise because of poor communication The death toll was about 8, people A seawall helps protect Galveston today. Catastrophic hurricane damage on Sept.
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