On September 8, 1900, a hurricane crossed the barrier island of Galveston, Texas, and pushed a storm surge across the whole of it. The city was built on sand at an elevation of a few feet. Between 8,000 and 12,000 people died. No natural disaster in United States history has killed more.
The island had been warned and had not believed it. The Weather Bureau in Washington had issued warnings based on observations and barometer readings from ships, and on the day of the storm the local office's director, Isaac Cline, rode along the beach telling people to move inland. The sea was already over the lower streets by late afternoon. Winds were around 145 miles per hour. The tide gauge went out of range. By the evening the storm had wrecked the bridges to the mainland and cut the telegraph, so the outside world did not know for days.
Most of the dead drowned. Others were crushed when houses came apart. The water did the killing. The wind did not. Galveston had no defence against either. The wooden houses of the poorer districts and the brick buildings downtown both went. Around 3,600 buildings were destroyed. Cline's wife died, as did hundreds of people who had gathered in a building he had told them was safe.
The city's response was one of the largest engineering projects of its era, and it explains why the death toll was never repeated there. Between 1902 and 1904 Galveston built a seawall about five metres high and more than 15 kilometres long, and then, in a job that went on for years, pumped sand from the ship channel underneath the whole city and raised the streets and buildings by up to five metres. Roughly 2,000 buildings were lifted on jacks. New building rules came with it.
The port never fully recovered. Shipping business shifted to Houston, up the ship channel, and Galveston became a resort and a smaller port. Hurricanes in the United States did not get official names until the 1950s; this one is known by the year and the place.