![]() Its streets, its buildings, and much of its medieval infrastructure were replaced with materials that conformed to twenty-first-century standards. ![]() Meanwhile, FEMA and HUD poured money into the island’s recovery. The coffeehouse’s patrons rallied and rebuilt the furniture, in some cases using reclaimed wood from the city’s shattered houses. Ike had roared through downtown like a 110-mile-per-hour threshing machine, submerging MOD and its neighbors in eight feet of floodwater, ravaging its interior and whisking away every item that had not been bolted to the floor. Taylor recounted this as we sat on the patio of MOD Coffeehouse, a languid institution situated in a 157-year-old brick building in the historic downtown Strand District whose habitués-academics, firemen, wealthy retirees in shambling beach attire, and artists with fluorescent hair-reflect the island’s hierarchical nonchalance. Ike gave us this tremendous opportunity to rebuild the city, with all this federal money.” That’s when I realized how everything underneath this beautiful old city had long been neglected and was now decaying. Someone had put it there in the 1800’s, and it had survived all this time. That line was literally a wooden log that was connected with wooden pegs. They’d been working on the East End with a backhoe, and they’d accidentally cut into a water line. “One of the first stories I did when I got here, in 1991,” Taylor recalled, “happened one night when a city crew called me. One of these was Heber Taylor, a man not given to hyperbole, a result of having spent the previous 23 years at the Galveston County Daily News, the state’s oldest operating newspaper, before retiring last December as its editor. Instead, in this season of elemental havoc, I encountered an island of absolute calm-as well as inhabitants who argued, quite seriously, that Ike had done Galveston a favor. ![]() I had fully expected to see Galveston still in disarray seven years later. Of course, there has been a vicious succession of storms since that first one, and in its own way, 2008’s Hurricane Ike was especially brutal, in that it all but destroyed the city a second time. Before that calamitous hurricane laid waste to the dazzling port city and killed at least six thousand residents, to date the deadliest natural disaster in American history, it was commonly held that violent weather preyed only on large territory and would forever spare the unsinkable island. Damage was reported as far east as the Mississippi River delta.Arriving in Galveston the morning after Memorial Day from flood-stricken Houston-part of a weather tirade that had left more than twenty dead and thousands displaced-I found the island in a state of sunny, even smug, tranquillity, as if history had reversed itself and we had returned to the halcyon days before the Great Storm of 1900, when the island ruled the Gulf Coast. Outside the protection of the Galveston Seawall, structures on the island were severely damaged by storm surge. One F4 tornado ripped through downtown Galveston, killing several (sources differ on the exact number, varying from 6 to 12). Much of the damage was done well away from the landfall site, as Carla caused one of the largest hurricane-related tornado outbreaks on record at the time, when 26 tornadoes touched down within its circulation. This marked the first live television broadcast of a hurricane. Then little-known newsman Dan Rather reported live from the Galveston Seawall during the storm, an act that would be imitated by later reporters. Pressure at landfall was measured at 931 mb ( hPa), making it the eighth most intense hurricane to strike the United States in the 20th century. Wind gusts as high as 170 mph were recorded at Port Lavaca. Winds were reported to be 115 mph in Matagorda, 110 mph in Victoria and 88 mph in Galveston. Because of its large size, the whole Texas shore was hit, and damage was seen as far away as Dallas. Storm surge was measured at 22 feet (6.6 m) near the heads of bays, in some places reaching 10 miles inland. Along the whole Texas shore, hurricane warnings were given, and people were moved out of their homes in low-lying areas. ![]() At the time, Carla became the largest hurricane on record in the Atlantic basin. Just before landfall, it weakened, but Carla was still a very strong and unusually large Category 4 hurricane when it touched the shore between Port O'Connor and Port Lavaca, Texas, on the 11th. ![]() As it moved slowly across the Gulf of Mexico, Carla got stronger to its peak of 175 mph (280 km/h) winds (Category 5 intensity) on September 11. ![]()
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