America's Deadliest Natural Disaster Wasn't Katrina — It Was a Hurricane in 1900 Most People FORGOT

At half past three on Saturday the eighth of September, 1900, the head of the Weather Bureau office in Galveston, Texas, Isaac Cline, waded through water up to four feet deep to reach the telegraph offices and found every wire off the island down. His last report went out over a single telephone line to Houston: the Gulf was rising, and water covered half the city. By the next morning at least six thousand people on the island were dead. Nine years earlier, the same man had called the idea of Galveston being seriously damaged by a hurricane an absurd delusion. This is the full story of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in American history, deadlier than Hurricane Katrina and the Johnstown Flood put together. We follow the rich cotton port on a low island of sand, the seawall that was talked about after Indianola and never built, the Cuban warnings kept off the American wires on purpose, the storm flag that nobody noticed, the train from Houston stranded at Bolivar, the orphanage of St. Mary's, the night in Cline's house on Avenue Q, and the terrible days after, from the dead burned on the beach to the grade raising and the seawall that finally rose. Then we ask how a storm that killed between six and twelve thousand people slid out of the nation's memory. Tell us in the comments where you're watching from, and whether you know how high the water could come where you sleep. Was keeping the Cuban warnings off the wires sound policy, or pride? If you'd been on that train, would you have stayed in the cars or walked for the light? And if your family lived through the Galveston storm, or any storm like it, tell their story and name the town. Subscribe for more disasters history keeps forgetting, told from the warning to the last minute. The seawall still runs about ten miles along the Gulf front of Galveston, but in 2008 Hurricane Ike flooded the island from the bay behind it, just as the sea did in 1900. A gate across the mouth of Galveston Bay has been designed, at an estimated fifty-seven billion dollars, with only a small part of the money found and at least twenty years of work ahead. In 1891 Galveston was told it could never happen there. Today the warning is on paper once more, waiting to be paid for. #GalvestonHurricane #Galveston1900 #DeadliestDisaster #HurricaneHistory #DisasterDocumentary