[118], The city of Galveston was effectively obliterated. After the storm devastated New Orleans in 2005, the federal government spent $120.5 billion to help the city and other affected areas recover (roughly $150 billion in 2017 dollars). The churches, the great business houses, the elegant residences of the cultured and opulent, the modest little homes of laborers of a city of nearly forty thousand people; the center of foreign shipping and railroad traffic lay in splinters and debris piled twenty feet above the surface, and the crushed bodies, dead and dying, of nearly ten thousand of its citizens lay under them. On September 8 the storm reached Galveston, which at the time had a population of approximately 40,000 and benefited economically and culturally from its status as the largest port city in Texas. Deadly Hurricanes Are Nothing New to Texas. Weather Bureau, wrote in an article for the Galveston Daily News that “the coast of Texas is, according to the general laws of the motion of the atmosphere, exempt from West India hurricanes and the two which have reached it followed an abnormal path which can only be attributed to cause known in meteorology as accidental.”. [19] With this prosperity came a sense of complacency,[20] as residents believed any future storms would be no worse than previous events. Credit: Library of Congress. Winds downed telegraph lines in the southeastern Louisiana in the vicinity of Port Eads. [12] The hurricane continued to strengthen significantly while heading west-northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico. Most of ...read more, For as long as people have been tracking and reporting hurricanes, also known as tropical cyclones, they’ve been struggling to find ways to identify them. In Puerto Rico, the storm produced winds up to 43 mph (69 km/h) at San Juan. [56] Farther east, roads were flooded by storm surge in the communities of Gretna and Harvey near New Orleans, leaving the streets impassable via horses. The engine slowed and the steamers later reached safety in Canada with no loss of lives. Everyone said it couldn’t happen.

[102] Along the coast, the storm produced abnormally high tides, with tides reaching their highest heights in six years at Westbrook. One person died in Niagara Falls, when a man attempted to remove debris from a pump station, but he was swept away into the river instead. [35] Further, no other survivors corroborated these accounts. After landfall, the cyclone turned northward through the Great Plains.

At the time, the highest point in the city was only 8.7 feet above sea level. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! By the time the storm reached the Texas coast south of Galveston late on September 8, it was a Category 4 hurricane. Orchards in the city suffered near complete loss and many shade trees were also damaged. [113], In New Hampshire, the storm left extensive in the city of Nashua. Burial on the spot where found, or incineration, generally the latter, were the only practicable methods – and they were pursued for more than six weeks. Heavy crop losses occurred over western New York, with fallen apples and peaches completely covering the ground at thousands of acres of orchards. [72] The Tremont Hotel, where hundreds of people sought refuge during the storm,[73] was severely damaged. Some small crafts in Narragansett Bay received damage, while apple orchards experienced slight losses. Many places of worship in the city also received severe damage or were completely demolished.