Cremation of the dead is being pushed, but it will be many days before the working parties get out the last of the bodies. The whole twenty-two miles of the island was submerged. The horrors of the western portion beyond the city limits are just being learned. At San Luis 181 bodies were burned to-day. Between twenty and thirty bodies were counted among the piles of the railroad bridge between the island and Virginia Point. In Kinkead’s addition about 100 were lost, eighteen in one house. There were also losses at Nottingham, one of the Galveston island villages, where nothing but wreckage remains.
One hundred bodies were buried in Galveston on Sunday. The further the men work in the Denver reservoir section the more numerous do they find the dead. Fires are burning every 300 feet on the beach and along many of the streets. Mayor Walter C. Jones to-day, in response to a request, made a statement of conditions and needs of Galveston people, basing his conclusions on the most current information which has come to him. Mayor Jones’ statement is as follows:
“WE ARE BROKE.”
“It is almost impossible to speak definitely as yet of the needs of our people. We are broke, the majority of us. Galveston must have suffered, in my estimation, based upon all of the reports I have to the extent of $20,000,000. We now need money more than anything. From the advices I have received I believe that the shipments of disinfectant and food supplies now on the way will be sufficient to meet the immediate wants. By the time these are used we shall have regained our tranquility.”
This is the ninth day after the storm and still the grewsome works goes on of recovering the dead from the gigantic mass of debris that lines the southside of what remains of the city. Among the scores of bodies recovered and cremated yesterday was a mother with a suckling babe tightly clasped to her breast.
The body of Major W. T. Levy United States Immigrant Inspector of this district, was among the number. He had made a struggle to save his wife and three children but all were lost. The bodies of the wife and children have not been recovered, or if so they are still among the uninterred dead.
The task of recovering the bodies that are beneath or jammed into this immense rick of debris, extending from the eastern to the western limits of the city, a distance of over three miles, is a herculean one, and the most expeditious way of removing the whole from a sanitary point of view, is by fire. This, however, in the crippled condition of the fire department and water works, would endanger the remaining portion of the city. As it now stands this immense mass of debris, strewn with dead bodies, the carcasses of decaying animals, etc., is a sore menace to the health of the city and is the most difficult problem the Board of Health has to deal with.
OPENING UP THE STREETS.
The work of opening up the streets and disinfecting them is being vigorously prosecuted. The debris and garbage is being removed, 250 vessels of every description carrying it out to a safe place, where it is burned. In a few days all streets will be opened for the passage of vehicles. It was decided at a meeting of the Central Executive Committee that all the laborers employed in burying the dead, cleaning the buildings and moving the debris from the streets and sidewalks shall receive $1.50 per day and rations. Heretofore they have been working for nothing, and if they refused were impressed by the military.
The work of relief of the sick and injured is well in hand and under the direction of skilled physicians and nurses it is improved daily. Eleven hundred tents were received by the Board of Health. All except 300, retained for hospital purposes, will be distributed by the chairmen of various ward sub-committees to shelter the homeless in their respective wards.