Funeral workers or volunteers took notes on each body, some descriptive, detailing missing fingers, hair ripped away by the storm and the condition of molars and filings. Other cards are terse and simple, as though the writer did not want to invade the dead's slumber or because the naked corpses were too decayed to offer any description. White, about 5 or 6, brown hair, blue waist, white cuffs and collar, short khaki pant, underbody. Buried in Rose Hill. Another describes Mrs. W.E. Nichols, who died in her blue and white checkered house apron, with a small footnote on the fate of her family.
Survivors work to haul the collapsed buildings away and clear the streets.
Many had found refuge in the Nueces County Courthouse. Some of the dead wore swimsuits and perhaps had been bathing on the shores, like the surfers who recently challenged the understated violence of Hurricane Bret's waves. Indeed, many victims in 1919 seem to have discounted the raw power that had struck Florida a few days before, perhaps because a hurricane three years earlier, in 1916, had proved so impotent, Mobley said. But three years later, a sea of debris and bodies of those who had not heeded the warnings of policemen cluttered the water in an oily mess. A farmer found her grandfather, the former Union solider uniformed in the black saltwater.