Wiped Out in a Single Night: The Galveston Hurricane That America Was Warned About

One of the richest cities in America was wiped out in a single night. In September 1900, a hurricane hit the island city of Galveston, Texas, and killed as many as twelve thousand people. Forecasters in Cuba had seen it coming, but America's Weather Bureau had banned their warnings. This is the story of the deadliest natural disaster in American history: the booming cotton port on an island nine feet above the sea, the weatherman who called the danger "an absurd delusion", the Cuban forecast Washington ignored, the night the sea came in, St Mary's Orphanage, Isaac Cline's house, and then the city that refused to die: a seventeen-foot seawall, and a whole city raised on jacks while church services carried on. Then Houston, Hurricane Ike, and the Ike Dike. So who was to blame? Tell me in the comments. Chapters 0:00 Wiped out in a single night 0:24 An island nine feet high 0:41 Galveston was booming 1:09 The warnings 1:27 "An absurd delusion" 1:45 The storm reaches Cuba 2:08 The ban on Cuban warnings 2:32 The wrong forecast 2:47 Saturday morning 3:09 Cut off 3:40 The sea comes in 4:13 St Mary's Orphanage 4:28 Isaac Cline's house 4:57 The morning after 5:10 The toll 5:33 The aftermath 6:09 The seawall 6:43 Raising the city 7:29 The 1915 test 7:51 Houston takes over 8:10 Ike and the Ike Dike 8:38 Who was to blame? Sound effects: CC0 recordings from the Kenney, CC0-Public-Domain-Sounds and rse/soundfx collections, the ESC-50 dataset (CC0-sourced clips only), and AltSFX by ALEX11BR (CC-BY 3.0). Maps: Natural Earth (public domain). Anything drawn by hand is labelled on screen. Sources HurricaneScience.org, Galveston 1900: https://www.hurricanescience.org/hist... Invention & Technology, Raising Galveston: https://inventionandtech.com/node/85437 HistoryNet, Blown Away (the Cuban warnings and the Weather Bureau): https://historynet.com/blown-away/ NPR, The Tempest at Galveston: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/30/566950... The Eyewall, 125 years after the Great Galveston Hurricane: https://theeyewall.com/125-years-afte... #history #historyfacts #StickmanTimeMachine #americanhistory #naturaldisaster