They Were Told It Was Safe. 8,000 Died in One Night.

On September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane drove a fifteen-foot storm surge over Galveston, Texas — a barrier-island city standing less than nine feet above the sea — killing as many as 12,000 people in a single night and remaining, more than a century later, the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. The city had been assured it was safe: the government forecaster stationed there had written in the local paper that the idea of a hurricane destroying Galveston was “an absurd delusion,” and the seawall the city had debated was never built. This film reconstructs how a correct forecast from Cuba was banned from the telegraph wires before the storm arrived, how the sea erased a wealthy boomtown in a matter of hours, and how the survivors answered by building a seawall and lifting their entire drowned city up out of the water. SOURCES Encyclopædia Britannica — Galveston hurricane of 1900: https://www.britannica.com/event/Galveston... NOAA / National Weather Service — The Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900: https://www.weather.gov/hgx/hurricanes_1900 NOAA Hurricane Research Division — Deadliest U.S. hurricanes: https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/deadl... Cline, Isaac M. — Special Report on the Galveston Hurricane, September 8, 1900 (U.S. Weather Bureau): https://www.weather.gov/hgx/history_1900isaac Larson, Erik (1999). Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (Crown): https://eriklarsonbooks.com/book/isaacs-st... Galveston Historical Foundation — The 1900 Storm: https://www.galvestonhistory.org/news/the-... HISTORY — 1900 Galveston Hurricane: https://www.history.com/articles/1900-galv... Rosenberg Library, Galveston — 1900 Storm digital collections: https://www.rosenberg-library.org/