During a rare daytime storm when I was three or four, my mom and I watched the roof being torn from the school across the street from us. Most of the storms, however, seemed to hit at night so you never knew what might be flying around outside.
In all the time we lived there, however, I only remember one death in the area directly related to a hurricane. A farmer went out during the eye of the storm to check on his livestock. The eye passed more quickly than he expected and when the wind hit again from the opposite direction it collapsed the barn on top of him.
That rare loss of life was not the case in Galveston, Texas, in September 1900. The book Hurricane: A Novel of the 1900 Galveston, Hurricane by Janice Thompson takes you to September 8, 1900, as, without warning, the citizens of Galveston Island are in the fight of their lives. In a single night of horror, more than 6,000 (some experts say maybe as many as 12,000) islanders and vacationers lost their lives. Those who do survive are surrounded by devastation and death and are cut off from outside help.
If this is a topic that interests you, try these additional books from the TA library:
Fiction
- City of the Dead (Horrors of History series) by T. Neill Anderson
- Dark Water Rising by Marian Hale
- The Great Storm: The Hurricane Diary of J.T. King by Lisa Waller Rogers
Nonfiction
- Through a Night of Horrors: Voices of the 1900 Galveston Storm by Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelly (based on eye witness accounts) (976.4/Gre)
- A Weekend in September by John Edward Weems (976.4/Wee)
- The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900 by Al Roker (976.4/Rok)