Lethal weapon: Waves and winds crushed most of the city.
Date: Sept. 8-9, 1900
Death toll: About one of every six Galveston residents killed.
Galveston Island is 28 miles long, several miles wide and at no point more than 9 feet above high tide. On Sept. 8, 1900, virtually the entire island was underwater.
The killer storm had moved west from Cuba, past the tip of Florida and strengthened as it churned through the Gulf of Mexico.
The hurricane hit Galveston in the late afternoon Saturday and didn't subside until after midnight. Winds of up 130 miles per hour and a storm wave said to be "nearly five feet high" demolished two-thirds of the homes in the city and half the businesses.
Pieces of the wrecked home, tossed by waves and hurled by winds, became lethal weapons. "The roofs of houses and timbers were flying through the streets as though they were paper," wrote Dr. I.M. Cline, who was in charge of the Weather Bureau office in Galveston.
After his home washed away, killing his wife and about 30 others seeking shelter there, he and other survivors drifted about the wreckage, holding planks before them for protection.
"Many persons were killed on top of the drifting debris by flying timbers after they had escaped from their wrecked home," he wrote.
By Sunday morning, the city was littered with corpses. Fearing an outbreak of plague, martial law was declared and the bodies were taken out to sea for a mass burial.Copyright © 2015, Sun Sentinel