The dawn of the 20th century ushered in many dramatic changes in the United States. The Wright Brothers conducted flight experiments at Kittyhawk, North Carolina. The U.S. population was 76 million in 1900 compared to 270 million in the year 2000. And, the U.S. government took in $567 million in 1900. At the end of the 20th century it took in $1.7 trillion.

Can this happen today? It's possible and we just saw it in New Orleans and along the Gulf States. Even though there have been great technological advances in weather forecasting the past 100 years and the city has erected an 18-foot seawall, Galveston is not invincible to such powerful storms. Since many people in the United States have moved closer to the shore, trying to evacuate the population of Galveston could take days.

In a strangely familiar tale, with the benefit of hind-sight, the 1900 Galveston Hurricane sounds very similar to what has befallen the Gulf States with Hurricane Katrina.  Let us hope that Katrina's death toll never approaches that of the 1900 killer of Galveston!

Deadliest hurricane began century

Up to 10,000 people died, so many that for months bodies were burned by Galveston's "dead gangs," their members plied with whiskey and threatened at gunpoint to keep them at their horrifying task.

Islanders call it The Storm, as if there could be no other. But despite the comforts of sophisticated computer models and round-the-clock weather channels, a monster storm just like Galveston's could form at any time during this busier-than-average hurricane season.

In a cautionary tale about complacency, author Erik Larson detailed the great hurricane of Sept. 8, 1900, in the book, Isaac's Storm. The story probes the defiance of those who wouldn't believe such a killer could strike from the sea and marvels at how few today outside this city have heard about the hurricane, which killed more people than several better-known American disasters combined.

"Maybe something this bad wasn't acceptable. It had to be bleached from the national psyche if America was to go on," Larson says.

Few are alive who remember the storm that struck on Sept. 8, 1900, in a time before hurricanes were named. But vivid reminders of the toll it took live on in cemetery headstones, old photographs, family memories and the letters of survivors who poured out terror in 25-page missives.

" They were trying to communicate to people in other places how terrible it was," says Alice Wygant, director of the Galveston County Historical Museum. "So many people died, they ended up burning the bodies. The stench could be smelled 50 miles out at sea."

Bodies were everywhere after the storm. A hundred victims hung from a grove of cedar trees, deposited in branches by the 20-foot storm surge that swept shattered buildings and houses into a pile of debris three stories high. No one knows how many bodies never emerged from the sea, but many residents refused to eat scavenging crabs and shrimp for years afterward.

An orphans home near the beach was demolished by the storm. Ten nuns and 90 children died. Days later, searchers found a child dead on the beach. When they lifted the toddler, the body of another child and then another emerged from the sand. Eight children and a nun had tied themselves together with a clothesline in an attempt to defy the storm.

Bodies continued to be found until February the next year.

City leaders turned to fire after they tried sea burials, loading 700 corpses onto a barge taken 18 miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. They tried weighing down the bodies, but scores of bloated corpses washed back onto the beach, carried on "waves like hearses," said a writer of the time.

Johnny Holmes, 46, used to listen to his great-grandmother Georgeanna, who told of seeking refuge in the attic as the sea swept across the island. One survivor described the water rising four feet in four seconds.

Bodies floated everywhere, including so many children who had been frolicking in excitement only hours earlier, before Galveston realized the rain and unusual pounding waves prefaced a murderous storm.

"Her husband had a long pole, and he was passing it to the ones floating in the water who were still alive," says Holmes, recalling Georgeanna's stories. " Going through that storm was like getting shot. You just don't forget."

In 1900, Galveston was a sophisticated seaport of 38,000, prosperous from the cotton trade and richer in millionaires than even Newport, R.I. It was the first city in Texas with phones and electricity, and its residents enjoyed a grand lifestyle: an opera house, 50 miles of streetcar track and foreign consulates for 19 countries.

But then came the hurricane and after that, a cotton crisis from the boll weevil insect that some believe arrived on the winds of the storm. Galveston never regained its earlier glory. Oil supplanted cotton as king, and Houston, about 50 miles northwest, became the new center of commerce.

Today, Galveston has about 60,000 residents. The city is mainly a playground for vacationing Texans. As in other hurricane-prone coastal resorts, newcomers have built mansions on stilts just steps from the sea on this barrier island.

"Enjoy them while you can," warns Greg Schumann, a hurricane hazards researcher at Texas A&M University. "To me, that's disposable housing ."

Galveston has a strange ambivalence about the 1900 storm. The tragedy was the city's defining moment. But a hurricane is the kind of repeatable event that civic boosters would just as soon forget.

Even so, as the 99th anniversary of the hurricane approached, The Great Storm documentary played on the hour at Pier 21, a tourist attraction in the historic downtown.

The theater's assistant manager, Patti Phillips, said descendants of survivors came from all over with storm memories and related emotions surprisingly intact.

"It's part of our heritage. For people who survived, that storm was a bond," she said.

One resident told of wedding guest lists defined by which family gave another refuge in The Storm. Another recalled two elderly Rotary Club members talking about The Storm at a 1960s meeting, when one suddenly realized that the other's father had saved him as a boy.

"There were six grown men crying," Bill Cherry said.

Yet the city's only memorial is a pink granite stone, its moss-touched inscription nearly hidden at Lakeview Cemetery: "To The Unknown Who Perished In The Storm Of Sept. 8, 1900."

Source:  By Deborah Sharp USA TODAY 2002, NOAA, NWS, and other sources