“Sunday, September 9, 1900, revealed one of the most horrible sights that ever a civilized people looked upon. About three thousand homes, nearly half the residence portion of Galveston, had been completely swept out of existence,” wrote Galveston weather bureau meteorologist Isaac Cline, whose wife, pregnant with their fourth child, was swept away during the storm. “The correct number of those who perished will probably never be known, for many entire families are missing. Where 20,000 people lived on the 8th not a house remained on the 9th, and who occupied the houses may, in many instances, never be known.”
The horrors of the storm were visceral. Among the dead were 90 of the 93 orphans at St. Mary’s Orphanage and the 10 nuns in charge. Officials tried to dump some of the corpses 18 miles into the Gulf of Mexico, but when the bodies washed ashore, the city’s relief committee ordered they be burned. So-called “dead gangs” set them aflame. As Erik Larson described the scene in his history of the disaster, Isaac’s Storm, “The fires began almost at once, with the assistance of the city’s fire department. Soon the nights were rimmed with the orange light of countless pyres. The air stank of death for weeks. Human ash sifted from the sky.”
Prior to the storm, the wealthy city of Galveston had been one of the nation’s busiest ports. After the storm, it was saddled with about $20 million in damages, which would amount to more than $700 million in today’s dollars. Donations poured in from New York’s millionaires in the wake of the storm, as well as from concerned citizens as far as Germany and South Africa. Clara Barton, the 78-year-old founder of the Red Cross, arrived two weeks later to restart the orphanage and coordinate the distribution of donated goods, especially loans to rebuild homes. (Some efforts to restore public order were more haphazard; TIME reported in 1938 that one of the biggest leaders in preserving public order during the recovery was a rabbi who patrolled the area “with a shotgun over his shoulder and a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.”)
In additions to efforts to lift spirits and bodies from the rubble, this city on a sandbar also had to be literally lifted to protect the downtown area from future storms. Engineers built a roughly 17-foot-tall, three-mile-long concave seawall designed to send waves back where they came from (that’s now about 10 miles long). About 500 buildings were raised by as much as 18 inches in an effort to match the height of the seawall, according to TODAY’s Al Roker, who also wrote a history of the hurricane, Storm of the Century.