Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 86

Table of Contents

“Great piles of human bodies, dead animals, rotting vegetation, household furniture and fragments of the houses themselves are piled in confused heaps right in the main streets of the city. Along the Gulf front human bodies are floating around like cordwood. Intermingled with them are to be found the carcasses of horses, chickens, dogs and rotting vegetable matter.

“Along the Strand, adjacent to the Gulf front, where are located all the big wholesale warehouses and stores, the situation almost defies description. Great stores of fresh vegetation have been invaded by the incoming waters and are now turned into garbage piles of most defouling odors. The Gulf waters, while on the land, played at will with everything, smashing in doors of stores, depositing bodies of human beings and animals where they pleased and then receded, leaving the wreckage to tell its own tale of how the work had been done. As a result the great houses are tombs wherein are to be found the bodies of human beings and carcasses almost defying the efforts of relief parties.

“In the piles of debris along the street, in the water and scattered throughout the residence portion of the city, are masses of wreckage, and in these great piles are to be found more human bodies and household furniture of every description.

“The waters of the Gulf and the winds spared no one who was exposed. Whirling houses around in its grasp the wind piled their shattered frames high in confusing masses and dumped their contents on top. Men and women were thrown around like so many logs of wood.