Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [35]
Their joy was premature. The wind again began shoveling water, this time back toward Matagorda Bay, and created an “ebb surge,” a mesoscale version of what happens on any beach when water brought ashore by a wave rushes back out to sea, undermining anything in its way. “The tide now swept out toward the bay with terrific force, the wind having but slightly abated, and it was at this time that the greatest destruction to life and property occurred. The buildings remaining had been so loosened and racked by northeast wind and tide that the moment the tremendous force was changed in a cross-direction dozens of them toppled in ruins and were swept into the bay.”
The initial storm surge had poured into Matagorda Bay over the course of eighteen hours. It exited in six.
The devastation was stunning. “Fully three-fourths of all the buildings had entirely disappeared from the scene, and of those remaining, a large part were in utter ruins,” Smith wrote. “Many of those remaining had been swept from their original foundation—some but a few yards, others several blocks.”
The storm killed 176 people. Compared with the death tolls of the great Bay of Bengal typhoons, this raw total did not seem like much. But Gen. Adolphus Greely, who visited Indianola six months after the storm, estimated the death toll amounted to one-fifth the city’s population. The storm left a schooner high and dry five miles inland and killed fifteen thousand sheep and cattle. All this, Greely observed, despite the fact that Indianola occupied a sheltered niche on the Texas coast fourteen miles from the Gulf and behind a broken plume of barrier lands that might have been expected to blunt the force of any oncoming storm. Even six months afterward, the damage was obvious and vivid. The hurricane had destroyed not only the superficial structures made by men, Greely found, but also God’s own topography. “The striking physical changes were the formation of a large lake in the rear of the town and the plowing of numerous bayous inland, five connecting across the solid land of an elevation ranging between 10 and 20 feet above the level of Matagorda Bay, on which the town was built. One of these bayous was nearly 20 feet deep at the time of my visit.”
Indianola was proud of its port and believed it could be restored to its former prosperity. Its residents chose to rebuild.
THE SECOND HURRICANE arrived on August 20, 1886. “The water in the bay commenced to rise rapidly,” according to the Signal Corps account of the storm. The wind destroyed the service’s weather station, where falling timbers killed the resident observer, I. A. Reed, as he tried to escape. “A lamp in the office set fire to the building and, although rain was falling heavily, it was burned, and also more than a block of buildings on both sides of the street.”
The wind raised storm and ebb surges even more destructive than those of 1875. “The appearance of the town after the storm was one of universal wreck. Not a house remained uninjured, and most of those that were left standing were in unsafe condition. Many were washed away completely and scattered over the plains back of the town; others were lifted from their foundations and moved bodily over considerable distances.”
The storm caused such thorough destruction, and killed so many residents, the survivors abandoned the town forever.
AT FIRST, GALVESTON’S leading men seemed to grasp the significance of the Indianola storms. Anyone who looked at a map could see that Galveston was even more vulnerable to destruction than Indianola. It had no picket of barrier islands to shelter it, no buffer of mainland prairie. The city faced the Gulf head-on.