On Sept. 8, 1900, virtually the entire island of Galveston 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 as shown in map above. The hurricane hit Galveston in the late afternoon on Saturday, September 8th, and did not vanish until midnight! Winds reached up to 130 miles per hour, and a storm wave said to be "nearly five feet high" demolished nearly the entire city.

The reason for the approximate 6000 deaths in Galveston, and the approximate 2000 deaths elsewhere is that there was no evacuation, because this category-4 storm caught people by surprise. There was not an outside warning, and the populace did not recognize early, local indicators. Ironically, as the storm approached, many people gathered at the beach to watch the high waves.

It left 1,000 survivors naked and 5,000 more bruised and battered. In a 1,500-acre area of total destruction, 2,636 houses-nearly half the homes in the city-were swept out of existence. Elsewhere, at least 1,000 more were reduced to wreckage. Not a single building escaped damage. To sum it up On Sunday, September 9th, Galveston was "a city of wrecked homes and streets choked with debris and six thousand corpses. It was a city whose very cemeteries had been emptied of their dead as if to receive new tenants."