Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 22

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“The shore at Texas City contains enough wreckage to rebuild a city. Eight persons who were swept across the bay during the storm were picked up there alive. Five corpses were also picked up. There were three fatalities in Texas City. In addition to the living and the dead which the storm cast up at Texas City, caskets and coffins from one of the cemeteries at Galveston were being fished out of the water there yesterday. In the business portion of the city two large brick buildings, one occupied by Knapp Brothers and the other by the Cotton Exchange saloon, collapsed. In the Cotton Exchange saloon there were about fifteen persons. Most of them escaped.

“The cotton mills, the bagging factory, the gas works, the electric light works and nearly all the industrial establishments of the city are either wrecked or crippled. The flood left a slime about one inch deep over the whole city, and unless fast progress is made in burying corpses and carcasses of animals there is danger of pestilence. Some of the stories of the escapes are miraculous. William Nisbett, a cotton man, was buried in the ruins of the Cotton Exchange saloon, and when dug out in the morning had no further injury than a few bruised fingers.

“Dr. S. O. Young, Secretary of the Cotton Exchange, was knocked senseless when his house collapsed, but was revived by the water, and was carried ten blocks by the hurricane. A woman who had just given birth to a child was carried from her home to a house a block distant, the men who were carrying her having to hold her high above heads, as the water was five feet deep when she was moved.

“Many stories were current of houses falling and inmates escaping. Clarence N. Ousley, editor of the Evening Tribune, had his family and the families of two neighbors in his house when the lower half crumbled and the upper part slipped down into the water. No one in the house was hurt.

“The Mistrot House, in the West End, was turned into a hospital. All of the regular hospitals of the city were unavailable. Of the new Southern Pacific Works little remains but the piling. Half a million feet of lumber was carried away, and Engineer Boschke says, as far as the company is concerned, it might as well start over again.