Then and now
My grandmother survived the great Galveston hurricane of 1900. She was only a toddler at the time and told me that all she remembered of it was water pouring into the house. She said her mother told her when she was older that the roof had been ripped off and the rain had poured in. They were not on the island itself but on the mainland, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.
The people of Galveston had no idea what was bearing down on them. The hurricane had been observed as it barreled across the Gulf, but communications were so poor that they weren’t warned in anything like enough time. Even if they had been warned, their means of transportation were so primitive that they likely could not have gotten out of the way (though the island surely could and should have been evacuated).
Today, I am sitting in my apartment a thousand miles away and watching Gustav (and Hanna, and Ike) in real time. I watched Gustav stomp across Cuba, observed every jog as it worked its way across the Gulf, and went to bed feeling confident that it wouldn’t hit New Orleans or Galveston but would hit in between, and that nearly everyone had been evacuated out of its path.
What a difference 108 years make.