Читать книгу The Great Galveston Disaster - Paul Lester - Страница 92

Table of Contents

The authorities at Galveston on the 13th prohibited the entry into the city of any one but men willing to work. Six hundred women and children fled from Galveston and came to Houston. The smell of the dead attained to the stifling point. Five hundred more bodies recovered from the debris were cremated in one pile. Several of the women who arrived at Houston from Galveston were fever patients. They were removed to ambulances from the train in stretchers. It was evident that the city was on the verge of an epidemic, if, indeed, it was not already in its throes. There were serious indications that the authorities were suppressing the facts.

The eagerness of the Board of Health that two miles of wreck be burned, whether it threatened to consume the other portion of the city or not, and the frantic haste of the police to get every woman and child out of the city, coupled with an order issued that no one be admitted to the island except for work, not even relatives of victims or anxious ones searching for relatives, and the seizure of the railroad running to Texas City to prevent people going to Galveston, all contributed to stamp the situation as beyond the control of the handful of inexperienced men in authority. The consensus of opinion of prominent Houston people who returned from the city was that the Federal Government owed it to the country to intervene at once. Otherwise, the danger of contagion to neighboring cities and States must continue to multiply each day.