Raising Galveston
The worst natural disaster in American history struck Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, when a hurricane covered the whole seaside city with surging water, leveled a third of its area, and took an estimated 6,000 lives. The city had been ravaged by hurricanes before and would certainly be devastated again, but never had Galveston been so helpless and desperate.
Nevertheless, within a few months the city fathers responded with a grandly, confidently technological form of salvation. They would build a wall against the Gulf of Mexico and raise the entire city above harm by reshaping the island on which it sat. They would move 16.3 million cubic yards of sand and defeat the sea.
Galveston Island is a barrier island 2 miles off the coast of Texas, about 28 miles long and 3 miles wide at its widest. Along its south side a wide beach faces the Gulf of Mexico; on the north, toward the coast of Texas, lies a natural harbor. Galveston early became Texas’s principal port, and in 1889 the United States chose it for a deepwater harbor on the Gulf.
By 1900 the city, at the eastern end of the island, was a thriving seaport with 37,789 inhabitants. The metropolis had an esplanade-lined boulevard, fine houses, churches, and public buildings; its beach along the Gulf was lined with hotels, bathhouses, and restaurants. Galveston also had a major problem: hurricanes. The highest spot on the island was only 9 feet above mean low tide, and by 1900 eight hurricanes had flooded the island. Storm surge would raise the level of water in Galveston Bay, on the north, as much as 10 feet and inundate the island, while waves poured over the Gulf beach on the other side. In 1886 a commission considered building a sea wall but rejected the idea.
So Galveston was vulnerable in the first week of September 1900, when a hurricane roared through the Caribbean, hit Florida, and headed west, gathering strength. Joseph Cline, the climatologist in Galveston, received two telegrams telling him a hurricane was heading his way.
Friday the barometer changed little, but by midnight Cline noticed long swells on the beach and a higher tide than usual. By dawn the tide was flooding lower parts of the island, heavy rain was falling, and the barometer was dropping. The city had been through storms before. How bad could this one be? Men went to work that morning; mothers and children went to the beach to watch the pounding waves.
Nonchalance was a mistake. By noon the water was two feet deep in some streets. At 3:00 P.M. , when Cline sent his last report to the Weather Bureau, the barometric pressure was 29.22 inches, and the wind was blowing at 42 miles an hour. At 5:15, when the gauge blew away, the wind had reached 84 miles an hour; later it was estimated at more than 100 miles an hour. But flooding was the worst problem. About 7:30 P.M. Cline was standing in 8-inch-deep water in his house. Suddenly it was 4 feet deep—”above my waist before I could change my position.” Eventually the entire island was under water 10 to 15.7 feet deep.
At least Galveston was built for floods. Because of frequent flooding, many houses stood on stilts, out of the water. This night was different, though. Besides 20-foot waves battering houses along the beach, the storm tore loose streetcar tracks and sent 50-foot lengths of railroad line, lashed together with ties and crosspieces, hurtling into the city. They battered down the first row of houses and swept them into the next row, which joined the wreckage moving into the city. By the time the storm was over, 3,600 houses had been destroyed.
The 1900 hurricane put the entire island underwater, killing at least six thousand.
Debris kept moving until it was about six streets inland, and there it piled up in a wall more or less parallel to the beach and strong enough to resist the waves. Some water seeped through to flood the area between there and the bay, but the wall protected the rest of the city from battering. “Except in rare instances,” a report after the storm recorded, “the line of debris marks the limit of total destruction.” At 1:45 A.M. the water began to subside.
When the sun rose on Sunday morning, the sky was cloudless, as if nature had spent all its energy. But the death and damage were enormous. At St. Mary’s Orphanage each nun had tied eight infants to her body. The women were found Sunday with the dead infants still strung to them. Similar scenes were found all over Galveston. By various estimates between 6,000 and 8,000 people had died during the night. At first bodies were buried, some at sea. As the toll mounted, they began to be burned, and observers on the mainland could see the fires at night until November.
A few Galvestonians moved away, including one man who had lost twelve of his fourteen relatives; but no one talked openly of abandoning the island, and most resolutely decided to rebuild. It was to technology that they turned. On November 22, 1901, the city appointed a board of engineers to make recommendations on three objectives: protecting the city generally against overflows from the sea; raising the city above overflows; and building a breakwater or sea wall along the Gulf. The members of the board were outstanding engineers, Brig. Gen. H. M. Robert is best known today for having written Robert’s Rules of Order ; he was the head of the Army Corps of Engineers and had experience in harbor works. Alfred Noble was from Chicago and had helped design that city’s breakwater and raising. H. C. Ripley had lived in Galveston and was familiar with its sand and soil, tides, winds, currents, storms, structural materials, contractors, and carriers.
The board started its work by gathering information about the storm. But how do you measure a hurricane? In a downtown hotel the board established a public forum that asked citizens for information on six topics: the direction and force of currents that had washed over the island; the effect of the breakwater formed by the debris; whether the water began to fall before or after the wind changed; sudden rises in water when the wind veered to the east and southeast; the relative effects of the wind, waves, and wreckage in destroying property; and whether a current from the bay toward the Gulf had been observed. Citizens brought in anecdotes, snippets of information, and data. On January 25, 1902, the engineers delivered their report.
It begins by making Galveston’s vulnerability clear. The highest point was on Broadway, which runs lengthwise along the island. Its elevation was 9 feet above mean low tide. The average elevation of most of the city was only 5.8 feet above mean low tide. Eight storms had flooded the city since 1834. In 1837 a vessel drawing perhaps 10 feet of water had been blown inland to a spot where the elevation was 5.5 feet, and in later storms water had risen to 9.3 feet deep in the city. But the 1900 storm had been the worst, with water from 10 feet deep in Avenue A, along the bay, to 15.7 feet deep at one point along the Gulf. Water first came in over the east end and south side of the island—by the Gulf—but before that water could get across the island, water from the bay met it, and the currents merged and ran northwest. Although wind damaged houses all over the island, currents and waves did the most damage, some carrying streetcar and railroad tracks and mounting debris. Such waves appeared suddenly.
The board concluded that it would be possible to protect Galveston from storms like those before 1900 and to prevent serious damage from a storm as severe as the 1900 one. That could be accomplished, the board members said, by raising the city’s grade so that it sloped upward from the bay to the Gulf. Avenue A would be raised to 8 feet, and the slope from there would be at 1 foot in 1,500 feet. To protect the new shape of the island, a concrete wall should be built, 3 miles long and 17 feet above mean low tide, or 1.3 feet above the highest water in the 1900 storm. One end would be on the bay side of the island; it would swing around the east end of the city to the beach, then turn west and run for twenty-three blocks to the Fort Crockett reservation. It would be 16 feet wide at the bottom and 5 feet wide at the top, its face concave at the bottom, rising to a vertical line, so it would throw the storm waves upward rather than let them wash across the island. It would sit on timber piles driven into the sand, and an apron of riprap 27 feet wide would protect it in front.
On top of the filling behind the wall would sit an embankment, level with the top of the wall and sloping up an additional foot 200 feet behind the wall and then descending to the surface of the city. This embankment was considered part of the sea wall and essential to it. A boulevard and sidewalk along the sea wall and grass elsewhere would help protect the embankment. The embankment was needed not only structurally but also because without it the wall, 4 feet higher than the new grade, “would very much obstruct the view of the Gulf.” A levee would protect the western end of the city.
The rationale for the project was simple. “The raising of the city grade is necessary to get the streets and lots sufficiently high for safety to life and property in severe storms,” the engineers wrote. “The sea wall is necessary to protect this filling from the force of the waves.” Had the city had the new grade in 1900, the bay water would have been only 2 feet deep at Avenue A. South of Broadway the land would have sloped above the elevation of water from the bay. The new elevation also would have decreased the danger from the Gulf. Even without a sea wall, the deepest water from the Gulf would have been 3.5 feet. “Still, even in such shallow water there would have been some damage from tfie waves of the Gulf had there been no sea wall to break their force.” The curve on the face of the sea wall would “give the wave an upward direction and prevent to a great extent its running up and over the embankment behind the wall.” The embankment would prevent water from undermining the sea wall from behind. “Doubtless some of the Gulf water would slop over the sea wall and embankment from wave action and run down the slope in a thin sheet,” but only when the water was at its highest point.
The project would cost $3,500,000: $1,300,000 for the sea wall and $2,200,000 for the filling—an amount that was not large considering the results obtained. But the city had defaulted on interest payments on bonds, and its credit was bad, so a financial plan almost as complex as the project itself was devised. The county, which had good credit, took on the sea wall project and embankment and sold $1,500,000 worth of bonds at 5 percent interest. The state legislature had promulgated a new charter for the city, establishing the Galveston Commission as its government; the city would be allowed to keep various taxes and sell its own $2,000,000 in bonds to pay for the grade raising.
The city would be elevated above storm level: the wall would protect the fill.
On March 20, 1902, the voters approved the county’s sea wall bonds overwhelmingly—3,119 in favor to 22 against. In a banner headline the Galveston Daily News exulted GRAND JOLLIFICATION LAST NIGHT . The firm of J. W. O’Rourke and Company of Denver got the contract with a bid of $1,198,318.80 and agreed to take $350,000 in sea wall bonds.
As usual with large projects, there were delays, and they started at the very beginning. The pilings were to be longleaf yellow pine from the forests of East Texas. Piling was expected in Galveston about the last of September 1902, but for some reason the shipment didn’t leave Beaumont until October 4 or 5. The first two carloads arrived on October 27, apparently without warning. They were promptly hauled to the work site, and at 2:00 P.M. that day the first pile was in the ground. In about twenty minutes it was driven to the clay stratum. Only about twenty people were present, but they “cheered the christening of the first construction work on the sea wall,” as the News reported the next day. Eight piles were driven that day.
Pile driving never became a routine matter; weather and tides kept interfering. The piles were to stand 4 feet apart between centers in four parallel lines 3.5 feet apart. A trench 16 feet wide and 3 to 4 feet deep was excavated, and two pile drivers on railroad tracks forced the timber down to the clay, so that the tops were at 2.5 feet above mean low tide. The top 6 inches were then sawed off. Next three thicknesses of plank, 3 inches thick and 1 foot wide, were driven down just behind the row of piles nearest the Gulf, to protect the piles from undermining. The work started on December 10, but only because there weren’t enough round piles to keep the men busy. Forty men worked on the pilings.
When enough piles were driven, a little mixer on rails poured concrete into the trench for the foundation, and men beat it down along the heads of the piling. Before the upper part of the wall was poured, the riprap was laid in an apron 27 feet wide in front of the foundation. The specifications had called for granite, limestone, or sandstone riprap. They all cost the same per ton- $2.10—but sandstone was much lighter, only 86,700 tons, as opposed to 110,000 tons of granite, so the county chose sandstone. By the time the work started, though, O’Rourke found that good sandstone was scarce, and “we will not be able to get it fast enough.” So he made the county a deal: If he could use granite and the extra tonnage added more than $6,000 to the cost, “we will complete the rip rap at our cost.”
One reason why he wanted granite was that it was in copious supply nearby. A little more than 200 miles away in central Texas lies the Llano Uplift, a dome of Precambrian rock that covers hundreds of square miles. O’Rourke took a group of the county commissioners to Granite Mountain there and to a nearby sandstone quarry, and as one of them observed, “The Sandstone quarries looked like gopher holes in comparison with the granite mountain.” The county bought O’Rourke’s suggestion, and the riprap became granite. To prevent delays, the railroad assigned two hundred cars to the sea wall project and labeled them so that as soon as they were emptied, they could return to the mountain. At Galveston a steam crane sitting on the foundation lifted the rocks out of the railroad cars. The specifications required that at least half of the stones weigh more than 200 pounds each and one-fifth weigh 1,000 pounds or more.
Early in 1903 rain and wind caused more delays. In February it rained nineteen out of twenty-eight days, and a strong southeast breeze blew for fifteen days, so work was suspended several times. One time the weather cleared and a long section was excavated, but that night the wind raised an extra high tide that filled the excavation with sand. The high tide prevented work the next day. The third day the trench was dug again, and another high tide filled it. Wet weather also interfered with work at Granite Mountain, so riprap arrived more slowly than planned.
Finally enough riprap was in place for the wall itself to begin to rise above the Galveston beach. On March 16, 1903, concrete for the first monolith was poured into a wooden box 16 feet wide, 16 feet high, and 25 feet long. Inside, the tamping crew packed it down. Steel reinforcing rods, 10 feet long and 4 feet apart, were held in position by light ropes. Neighboring monoliths followed.
Railroads along the wall were useful here too. On parallel lines railroad cars carried crushed granite, sand, and cement, and on the line beside the foundation, a big mixer turned out 300 cubic yards of concrete a day. A steam crane picked up materials from the cars and dumped them into the mixer. At the mixer’s discharge funnel, another crane received the mixed concrete and poured it into the box. As the work progressed, several different sizes of monoliths were built.
It took one day to pour a monolith and seven days for it to dry. The crew built alternating sections, and by the time the seventh was poured at the end of a week, the first would be dry, so the workers could then go back and fill in all the intervening gaps.
By July 29, 1904, less than two years after starting, the colossal wall stood 17,593 feet long and weighed 40,000 pounds per foot. Eighteen thousand railroad cars had passed the site, carrying round pilings, sheet pilings, riprap, crushed granite for the concrete, sand, cement, and steel rods. While the work on the county’s wall progressed, the federal government decided to build 4,935 additional feet of sea wall to protect Fort Crockett west of town.
Building the wall was almost easy compared with raising the island’s surface to the wall’s height. Sand would have to be piled from a few inches to 17 feet high. The Board of Engineers estimated that the job would require 11,244,000 cubic yards of sand, and one writer said seven hundred steamships the size of the Baltic , the world’s largest at the time, would be needed to carry that much sand.
By itself such a task would be a fairly simple matter of hauling in sand and pouring it on the ground; that had been done before. But never had it been done in such a densely populated area. Almost 3,000 buildings stood on the ground to be raised, including churches, schools, 1,226 cottages, 413 one-story houses, and 162 stables. There were also water and sewer lines, streetcar lines, electric lines, streets, sidewalks, fences, shrubs, trees, gardens, and outhouses. Working around those problems challenged everyone, exciting debate over where to get the sand (from the bay, the Gulf, or land) and how to deliver it (through pipes over the sea wall or by cars). Each solution presented problems.
A temporary railroad hauled eighteen thousand cars of material for the wall.
On October 27, 1903, three men came to Galveston to inspect the situation. One, Lindon W. Bates, had invented a system he thought might work. With him were his partner, P. C. Goedhart, and their engineer, D. Brand, and they toured the city with the secretary of the Grade Raising Board, E. R. Cheesborough. They headed to the bay front and then, after getting on the sea wall, which was under construction, walked along it for a way. Near Eighth Street the three stopped and told Cheesborough they wanted to bid on the job. Only two bids were submitted, and theirs was $74,000 lower than the other, so they got the contract.
Their method was little short of audacious. Bates had invented a self-propelled dredge, and the partners eventually brought four to Galveston. They dredged a slurry of sand and water from the bay, then steamed into the city via a canal, which had to be excavated. There the slurry was pumped into pipes that led to whatever section was being raised at the moment. As the sand settled, the water ran off through drainage ditches to the bay.
Excavating the canal was a major undertaking in itself. It ran from the bay around the city’s east end and south side, following the curve of the sea wall. On maps it looks like an arm partway around the city with a turning basin for a fist. It was 3 miles long, 18 feet deep, and wide enough for two dredges to pass each other. Buildings, trolley car tracks, utility lines, and other improvements were removed from its way, and bridges were built so wagons, pedestrians, and the trolley could cross the canal. After the grade raising was completed, the canal was filled in and all the improvements were returned.
After the dredges arrived, they worked night and day pulling up the sea bottom with centrifugal pumps and suction pipes with cutters on the ends. They did this 6 miles out at sea, taking forty minutes to load and fifteen to thirty minutes to unload back in town. The largest dredge, the Leviathan , made five trips a day, and the others made six trips a day. The Galveston , a typical one, had a hopper that held 1,500 cubic yards, and it could move 6,000 cubic yards of sand a day.
Photographs show the 42-inch slurry pipes in street intersections spewing sand and seawater 10 feet into the air. On the ground lies a muddy film, but that passed in a few minutes, leaving the sand hard and firm. In nearly every picture a man stands atop the pipe looking down in fascination.
Certainly the work was fascinating. Even today Galvestonians tell their grandparents’ stories of the grade raising with a kind of affectionate awe. Most stories deal with the buildings that had to be raised. When it was time to fill a section, a dike was erected around it to hold the sand. Then the engineer in charge, H. T. Wilson, stenciled white marks on telephone poles and fire alarms at intersections to show where the new grade in that section should be, and owners hired contractors with jacks to raise their houses 2 feet above the level. In some sections houses were raised 8 to 12 feet.
Just before the filling began, the Daily News published a list of house movers and said that although raising homes would not be expensive, owners should band together to hire contractors. Raising some houses was enormously expensive. It cost $6,000 to raise W. L. Moody’s brick mansion 3 feet—and took two weeks just to place the three hundred jacks in position. St. Patrick’s Church weighed 3,000 tons, and it had to be raised 5 feet. That took seven hundred jacks, but services were never interrupted.
Building the wall was almost easy compared with raising the island.
Some owners did not raise their houses. Where houses stood on stilts, the sand might fill only the space under them. Other owners just didn’t want to bother. The owners of Ashton Villa, now one of the attractions on a tour of Galveston, decided not to raise, and that’s why the top of the wroughtiron fence in front stands only a foot or so above ground. Of the grand stair to the front porch, only three or four steps are left above the ground. To get to some doors, visitors step down.
There were also houses that appeared “perilously high,” according to the Daily News . The ends of porch steps hung in the air, and extensions had to be built to reach the ground until the ground could reach the house. Along the canal many properties were cut into, just as properties are cut into today when an expressway is built, so owners kept their cows tied to the back railings of their houses or found themselves, as the News put it, “keeping the pig in the parlor.”
Getting around while the houses were on stilts was a project in itself. Along the streets being raised temporary boardwalks were built. Some were just planks attached to fences. The News said they didn’t give much assurance to the corpulent or to those “with the downtown club habit.” Connecting to them were planks leading to the houses and to the sheds and outhouses in the backyards. Photographs show a rickety maze of foot trestles such as Dr. Seuss might have drawn. Getting from place to place was tricky because the maze sometimes led three or four blocks out of the way. And routes changed as new sections were raised.
Fences had to be removed and stored so they could be reinstalled on the new ground, but the corner posts were left so the lot corners could be found without a new survey. After the filling, fence posts could be seen sticking up 1 to 5 inches. Where the filling covered the corner posts, planks were nailed to them to reach above the new level.
A widespread worry was that the filling would ruin lawns. It was 45 percent sand and 55 percent salt water, and it added to the damage the hurricane had done. Some homeowners dug up their topsoil, put it in bins or on platforms, and replaced it after the filling. Some took soil from their backyards, put it on their front yards, and put all the sea sand on the backyards. But they needed to build 1-foot dikes around the front yards to hold out the salt water. In one area that needed only about 6 inches of filling, the homeowners decided to do it themselves so they could save their trees. The filling was pumped nearby, and the homeowners brought it to their lots themselves. In many cases there was no way to protect the ubiquitous oleanders and the trees. Besides the salt, in some sections the filling was deep enough to smother roots. The Women’s Health Protective Association led an effort to plant trees and oleanders, and one family with a 14-acre farm offered free cuttings of oleanders.
But Galveston took its problems with a sense of humor. One day, while the engineer H. T. Wilson was inspecting the work, a woman asked if he had any hooks with him, saying, “That is such a beautiful hole to go fishing in. I thought you fellows were raising the grade, but it looks to me as if you were raising duck ponds.” Someone else asked, after the sand dried, when the camels would arrive.
The project took almost seven years. On August 8, 1910, the last cubic yard of sand was in place, and Galveston had risen above the sea. The first test came even before the project was finished. In July 1909, as the grade raising progressed, a hurricane bore down on the island. Five people died. Six years later, after the grade raising had been finished, the island was hit by a hurricane some think was as severe as the 1900 storm. Only eight died. That storm beat the schooner Allison Doura to pieces against the sea wall, and evidence of the encounter can still be seen in two large chunks broken off the top of the wall.
Over the years the wall has been extended several times. The federal government built a section 10,300 feet long in the 1920s to protect Fort San Jacinto, east of the city. This section continues along the beach, starting at the place where the original sea wall curves to the north. The land behind the extension became available for filling and building, and today it is as high as the rest of the island. This filling has buried the old wall, but at several points what looks like a sidewalk is the top of the sea wall, identifiable because of the red granite in the concrete. In 1927 and from 1950 to 1963, extensions were built that carried the wall far to the west. It now covers 10.04 miles, 9.74 of them along the Gulf, and Galveston advertises the longest sidewalk in the world. Building the wall has cost a total of $15,465,000.
The sections have noticeable differences. The first mile of the federal wall, built right after the county’s 3 miles, is made with sandstone concrete, and instead of red granite, it shows gray spots of sandstone. The faces of both sections are deeply pitted after standing up to eighty-six years of storms, but the federal section seems more so. The first sections of the wall stand on untreated piles that would be vulnerable to teredo, a marine organism that could destroy the pilings and let the wall sink into the mud. But a beach keeps the worms away, and groins help hold the beach in place. Later sections are built on treated pilings and on concrete pilings that are not vulnerable to teredo; in those sections there are no groins and no beach. Longtime residents of GaIveston can show visitors places where the beach used to stretch hundreds of yards in front of the sea wall but where today the waves of the Gulf crash over the riprap and lap at the foot of the wall itself. There are places that used concrete riprap, large flat blocks that were supposed to fit together like pieces of a puzzle; while they were being placed, a storm undermined the beach, and the riprap is buckled like a waterlogged driveway. In some lengths the riprap is beginning to subside into the Gulf; in others the wall itself has sunk a foot or so.
It has been said that Galveston could not exist without the wall. You can see it’s true.
It has often been said that without the sea wall Galveston could not exist. If you stand on the west end of the sea wall, you can see that the unprotected beach beyond the end has eroded about 50 yards back. That erosion is itself a testimony to the importance of the wall.
Today the sea wall is an arena of life. Joggers buck the wind; bicycles and pedal-powered surreys with fringed tops weave among the strollers; surfers and fishermen unload gear. At Fort Crockett’s old gun emplacements, now a park, people sit watching the surf or, at night, the lights of shrimp boats out in the Gulf. Always there’s a wind.
In 1961 Hurricane Carla struck Galveston three days after the anniversary of the storm of 1900. Tides from the bay flooded part of the city, and tornadoes spawned by Carla damaged buildings. But in the protected area no one died and no homes were destroyed by the storm surge. The sea wall had proved itself once more.
