Galveston

On the morning of September 8, 1900, children were out playing in the rising water that had begun coming ashore in Galveston, Texas sometime around dawn. As early as 5 am, Isaac Cline, chief meteorologist of the local US Weather Service office in Galveston noted the rising water and the falling barometer. Throughout the day, until the lines finally went down, Cline telegraphed warnings to the Weather Service's central office in Washington, DC. Eventually, Cline issued a hurricane warning without approval from the central office. It was too little, too late, however. The city of Galveston was no more than 9 feet above sea level at any point. The storm surge reached at least 15 feet that night.

"In reality, there was no island, just the ocean with houses standing out of the waves which rolled between them," Cline wrote in his memoirs "Storms, Flood and Sunshine," (1945, Pelican Publishing).

Cline's own pregnant wife died in the storm, as did at least 6,000 in Galveston proper and possibly as many as 12,000 in the immediate region. A bitter irony was that Cline had argued in 1891 that there was no need for a sea wall to be built to protect Galveston. The Galveston County Daily News maintains a website about "The Storm" (In Galveston, no other name is necessary).

The population of Galveston in 1900 was about 37,000. Almost one person in six died in the storm. There has never been a more lethal meteorological disaster to hit the United States.