You can’t understand what happened when you’re staring in the wrong direction

All right now.  For most of a week I’ve read this comparison and that comparison of hurricane Katrina against this or that disaster, and particularly against other hurricanes:  Camille, Andrew, Ivan.  I believe all of them are wildly off-base.  Even comparisons to the 1935 Florida Keys storm are off.  I think the true parallel to Katrina in destruction and loss of life will turn out to be a much older storm—the Galveston Hurricane of September 8, 1900.

The Galveston storm was, by modern estimates, comparable to Katrina in strength.  Modern meteorologists put it at a high Cat 4, with top wind gusts somewhere around 150 mph and a sixteen-foot storm surge.  The NWS’s lowest official barometric measurement was 28.48 inches (968 millibars), although another unofficial source measured 27.50 inches (931 millibars).  NOAA scientists later made it 27.49 inches (930 mbars)1.  Most hurricanes (i.e., Cat 3 or less) never go below 950 millibars.

However, meteorology isn’t where the comparisons are closest.  It’s in the damage and destruction the Galveston storm caused.  The Galveston storm killed somewhere between six and eight thousand people from a population of 38,000 in Galveston proper.  That’s something between sixteen and eighteen percent of the population.  Include all of Galveston Island, and total casualty figures rise to between 10,000 and 12,0002.  For a similarly catastrophic casualty list, the New Orleans MSA would have to lose somewhere around 215,000 dead from a population of 1,340,000, and the Biloxi-Gulfport MSA 60,000 dead from a population of 374,0003.  The next deadliest natural disaster of modern times after Galveston, and a distant second at that, was the Lake Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 which killed an estimated 2,500.

Two-thirds of Galveston was either flattened or washed into the bay in front of and the lagoon behind the island.  Economic damage added up to $30 million in 1900 dollars; value conversion between then and now is almost impossible, but somewhere near a billion 2005 dollars is a good guess.  The hurricane made sure that Galveston, which up to that time had led Houston as the most prosperous city in Texas, would forever after be a second- or even third-tier town.

You want to know what Gulfport and Biloxi may well be like in fifty years?  Go look at what Galveston is today.  It’s certainly a pleasant enough place, but it’s a backwater, totally overshadowed by Houston, because of a hurricane that nearly wiped it off the map.  It’s not impossible that New Orleans could suffer the same fate, although the river barge and ship traffic make that less likely.

But don’t go on at me about Camille and Andrew comparing to Katrina.  They ain’t even in the same ball game.  Go read Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm and John Edward Weems’s A Weekend in September.  Then you’ll begin to understand what the stakes really are.

Pictures of damage after the Galveston storm; scroll to the bottom of the page

The 1900 Storm Photo Gallery.  A collection of historic photographs of the storm’s aftermath.  This fine site also has contemporary movie clips, articles, and reminiscences of hurricane survivors.  The photos show damage very much like the footage coming out of coastal Mississippi, which isn’t surprising; both regions were hit by the stronger east side of the storm.

1 Larson, Erik.  Isaac’s Storm (2000), pp. 194-195.

2 The Handbook of Texas, Online edition.  Galveston Hurricane of 1900.

3 US Bureau of the Census data, 2004.