Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 21

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“Very few if any buildings escaped injury. There is hardly a habitable dry house in the city. When the people who had escaped death went out at daylight to view the work of the tempest and floods they saw the most horrible sights imaginable. In the three blocks from Avenue N to Avenue P, in Tremont street, I saw eight bodies. Four corpses were in one yard.

“The whole of the business front for three blocks in from the Gulf was stripped of every vestige of habitation, the dwellings, the great bathing establishments, the Olympia and every structure having been either carried out to sea or its ruins piled in a pyramid far into the town, according to the vagaries of the tempest. The first hurried glance over the city showed that the largest structures, supposed to be the most substantially built, suffered the greatest.

“The Orphans’ Home, Twenty-first street and Avenue M, fell like a house of cards. How many dead children 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 Roosenburg avenue, collapsed, and the Roosenburg School-house is a 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 temporary quarters, which gave them no protection against the tempest or flood. No report has been received from the Catholic Orphan Asylum down the island, but it seems impossible that it could have withstood the hurricane. If it fell, all the inmates were, no doubt, lost, for there was no aid within a mile.

“The bay front from end to end is in ruins. Nothing but piling and the wreck of great warehouses remain. The elevators lost all their super-works, and their stocks are damaged by water. The life-saving station at Fort Point was carried away, the crew being swept across the bay fourteen miles to Texas City. I saw Captain Haynes, and he told me that his wife and one of his crew were drowned.