The Great Galveston Disaster / Containing a Full and Thrilling Account of the Most Appalling Calamity of Modern Times Including Vivid Descriptions of the Hurricane and Terrible Rush of Waters; Immense Destruction of Dwellings, Business Houses, Churches, and Loss of Thousands of Human Lives; Thrilling Tales of Heroic Deeds; Panic-Stricken Multitudes and Heart-Rending Scenes of Agony; Frantic Efforts to Escape a Horrible Fate; Separation of Loved Ones, etc., etc.; Narrow Escapes from the Jaws of Death; Terrible Sufferings of the Survivors; Vandals Plundering Bodies of the Dead; Wonderful Exhibitions of Popular Sympathy; Millions of Dollars Sent for the Relief of the Stricken Sufferers

by Paul Lester

PREDICTIONS OF DISASTER.

“For years and years people have said that when the right kind of storm came the island would sink under it or be washed away like a house of cards in a flood. It was supposed that the great currents which would rush across the island would dig bayous as deep as the bay. These would grow in width, and finally the great island would be cut into small ones, if it did not disappear beneath the waves. But the result of this greatest storm on record? Why, there is not, as far as I could hear, and I made inquiries, a single excavation made from the Gulf to the bay or the bay to the Gulf. The island stands there in all things, except in the matter of the erosion mentioned, as stable and firm as it has ever been since man knew it. That is enough. The foundation is there. Man can do most any thing with a proper foundation.

“The only need now is stable and the right kind of houses. The old houses seem to have stood the shock better than the new ones. The reason of this is apparent. The old ones were built with an eye to storms. The new ones were built in book times. One young fellow told me that his house, the one in which he was born, had stood the storm of 1875 and every storm since that time without a quiver.

“‘And it would have stood this one had it not been for one thing,’ he said. ‘That thing was the outward flow of the tide when the storm was over. The water rushed back to the sea like a torrent. It fell over a foot and a half in fifteen minutes, and as it went out it swept many a house from its foundations.’ This flow, running like a torrent, swept across the island, and yet there was not left a single evidence in the way of excavations of it going.