The Irish standard., 1900-09-15

| city was going to be visited with disaster
| Hundreds of residences along the beach
front were hurriedly abandoned, the fam.
lilies fleeing to dwellings in higher portions
of the city. Every home was opened to
the refugees, black or white The winds
were rising constantly and it rained in tor
rents. The wind was fierce that the
rain cut like a knife.
The City Submerged.
by five o'clock the waters of the gulf
and bay met, and by dark the entire city
was submerged The flooding of the cleo
trio light plant and the gas plants left the
city in darkness. TO so upon the streets
was to court death. The wind was then
at cyclonic velocity, roofs. cisterns, por-
tions of buildings, telegraph poles and
, walls were falling and the noise of the
winds and the crashing of the buildings
were terrifying in the extreme The wind
and waters rose steadily from dark until
i:4o o'clock Sunday morning. During all
| this time the people of Galveston were
ike rats in traps. The highest portion
| OF the city was four to five feet under wa
ter, while in the great majority Of cases
| the streets were submerged to a depth
OF ten feet To leave a house was to
drown. To remain was to court death In
| the wreckage.
Night of Agony.
Such night CT agony has seldom been
eGualed. Without apparent reason the wa
ters suddenly began. to suhside at 1:45 a.
| m. Within 20 minutes they had gone down
two feet and before daylight the streets
were practically freed of the flood waters.
In the meantime the wind had veered to
the southeast. Very few If any buildings
escaped injury. There is hardly a habita-
Bile dry house in the city. When the peo-
pie who had escaped death went out at
daylight to view the work of the tempest
and the fOuIS thew ha horrible "a
sights imaginable. In the three blocks
from Avenue N to Avenue p in fremont
street. I saw eight bodies. Four corpses
were in one yard.
'"rhe whole of the business front for
three blocks in from the gulf was stripped
of every vestige of habitation, the dwell
ings. the great bathing establishments the
Olympia and every structure having been
either carried out to sea or its ruins piled
in pyramid far into the town. accord
ing TO the vagaries of the tempest.
Great Buildings Wrecked.
1.-The first hurried glance over the city
| showed that the largest structures, sup
posed to be the most substantially built,
suffered the greatest. The orphans home.
Twenty-iirst street and Avenue NJ, fell like
a house of cards. How many dead chill
dren and refugees are in the ruins could
not be ascertained. OF the sick in st. Mary s
infirmary. together with the attendants,
only eight are understood to have been
saved The old woman's home, on Roscn-
berg avenue, collapsed. the Rosenberg
school house is mass of wreckage The
Ball high school is but an empty shell,
crushed and broken. Every church in the
city, with possibly one or two exceptions,
is in ruins.
"At the forts nearly all the soldiers are
reported dead, they having been in tenn
porary quarters, which gave them no pro-
lection against the tempest or the flood.
Shipping Damaged.
Eight ocean steamers We're torn from
their moorings and stranded in the bay.
The Kendall Castle was carried over the
flats from the Thirty-third street wharf to
Texas City, and lies in the wreckage of
the 1nman pier. The Norwegian steamer
Gyller is stranded between Texas City and
Virginia Point. An ocean liner was swirled
around through the West bay. crashed
| through the bay bridges and is now lying
in eight feet of water near the wreckage
of the railroad bridges. The steamship
Taunton was carried across Pelican Point
and is stranded about ten miles up East
| bay. The Mallory steamer Alamo was torn
from her wharf and dashed upon Pelican
flats. Down the channel to the jetties two
other ocean steamships lie grounded. Some
schooners, barges and smaller craft are
strewn bottom side up a long the slips of the
piers. The tug Louise, of the Houston Di-
rect Navigation company. is also a wreck.