Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 41

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The city is filled with destitute, bereft and homeless people, while in the improvised morgues are the rigid forms of hundreds. Whole families are side by side.

The city beach in the southwestern part of the city was under ten feet of water, and the barracks there are destroyed, the soldiers having a marvelous escape from drowning. Many substantial residences in the western and southwestern part of the city were destroyed, and the death list from there will be large.

A heavy mortality list is expected among the residents down the island and adjacent to the coast on the mainland, as both were deeply flooded, and the houses were to a great extent insecure. The heaviest losers by the storm will be the Galveston Wharf Company, the Southern Pacific Railway Company, and the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway Company, and the Texas Lone Star Flouring Company.

Additional details by tug from Galveston show that west of Thirty-third street the storm swept the ground perfectly clear of the residences that once stood upon it and piled them up in a conglomerated mass five blocks back on the beach, strewing the piling with the debris and the bodies of its many victims. Many of these were lying out in the afternoon sun and were frightful to look upon. The fearful work of the storm was not confined to the district along the beach, but took in all the district in the city and the Denver resurvey, but it was near to the beach that most destruction to human life occurred.

The waves washed away the Home for the Homeless, and it is thought that the inmates, consisting of thirteen orphans and three matrons, were drowned. Out in the Denver resurvey the destruction was terrible, and victims of the storm were many. The government works were greatly damaged, the buildings on the beach were washed out into the Gulf and their occupants are thought to have perished.