“The first hurried glance over the city showed that the largest structures, supposed to be the most substantially built, suffered the greatest. The Orphans’ Home, Twenty-first street and Avenue M, fell like a house of cards. How many dead children and refugees are in the ruins could not be ascertained.
“Of the sick in St. Mary’s Infirmary, together with the attendants, only eight are understood to have been saved.
“The Old Woman’s Home, on Rosenberg avenue, collapsed, and the Rosenberg Schoolhouse is a mass of wreckage. The Ball High School is but an empty shell, crushed and broken. Every church in the city, with possibly one or two exceptions, is in ruins.
“At the forts nearly all the soldiers are reported dead, they having been in temporary quarters, which gave them no protection against the tempest or the flood.
“The bay front from end to end is in ruins. Nothing but piling and the wreck of great warehouses remains. The elevators lost all their superworks and their stocks are damaged by water.
“The life-saving station at Fort Point was carried away, the crew being swept across the bay fourteen miles to Texas City. I saw Captain Haines yesterday and he told me that his wife and one of his crew were drowned.
“The shore at Texas City contains enough wreckage to rebuild a city. Eight persons who were swept across the bay during the storm were picked up there alive. Five corpses were also picked up. In addition to the living and the dead which the storm cast up at Texas City, caskets and coffins from one of the cemeteries at Galveston were fished out of the water there.
“The cotton mills, the bagging factory, the gas works, the electric light works and nearly all the industrial establishments of the city are either wrecked or crippled. The flood left a slime about one inch deep over the whole city, and unless fast progress is made in burying corpses and carcasses of animals there is danger of pestilence.
“Some of the stories of the escapes are miraculous. William Nisbett, a cotton man, was buried in the ruins of the Cotton Exchange saloon, and when dug out in the morning had no further injury than a few bruised fingers.
“Dr. S. O. Young, secretary of the Cotton Exchange, was knocked senseless when his house collapsed, but was revived by the water and carried ten blocks by the hurricane.