re: Can you imagine how it was in the old days when you didn’t know a hurricane was coming

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Can you imagine how it was in the old days when you didn’t know a hurricane was coming

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Read "the last days of last island" I think it's set in 1853 where last island was equivilant to grand isle and a massive hurricane hit while 400 or so people where there.

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The city of Galveston was demolished when the hurricane struck on Sept. 8, 1900. The highest points in the city when the hurricane hit ranged between seven and nine feet above sea level. The storm surge crested at 15 feet. The hurricane rolled over the island destroying everything in its path.

Homes were knocked off their foundations and either carried away or reduced to kindling and rubble. Thirty thousand people, almost the entire population of the city, were left homeless. The rest were dead. The loss of life in Galveston was horrendous. The death toll is estimated between 6,000 and 12,000. The generally accepted total is 8,000 deaths but no one knows for sure. To gain some context, 1,836 people died as a result of Katrina in 2005. Eight thousand dead is more than the number of American deaths in the Iraq and Afghan wars combined. The Galveston Hurricane is the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States.

There were too many bodies to bury so the corpses were weighted, shipped out into the Gulf of Mexico on barges, and dumped overboard. Shortly thereafter the bodies began to wash back onshore. The survivors and rescue personnel turned to constructing funeral pyres to burn the corpses. The fires burned day and night for weeks.

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Winifred Black sat on the steamer as it approached Galveston. In the distance, she saw a great column of “blood-red” fire. “Some of the buildings must be burning,” she commented to no one in particular. A man turned toward her and laughed. His face looked like the dead. “Buildings?” he muttered. “Do you know what is burning over there? It is my wife and children.”

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The train’s engineer, a Galveston resident, had spent the day after the storm digging through refuse in search of his family. He found his wife and three children on the beach, dug a shallow grave, and buried their bodies. Another man had fallen asleep on a floating piece of roof with his wife and mother, as they waited for rescue; when he woke, he was alone. Later, Black held a small boy who told her that he watched his mother die.

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Can you imagine Baton Rouge or New Orleans during rush hour during the school year? That would be a disaster

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