MORTALITY

How many lives were lost in the 1900 Storm will never been known.  The census taken in June showed that Galveston had a population of 38,000.  Outside the city limits, down the island, there were 1,600 persons living.  The dead in the city exceeded 5000, and the dead living outside of the city limits mounted to 1200.  This frightful mortality - 75% - outside the city is explained by the fact that most of the people there lived in frail structures and had no places of comparative safety to take refuge in.  On the mainland district, across the bay, at least 100 person perished.  It is safe, therefore, to state that at least 7,000 lives were lost.

In some cases, entire families were blotted out.  In others, the strong perished and the weak survived.  Of the various branches of one family, 42 were killed.  In another household, 13 of fifteen family members were killed.
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Bringing the injured to the hospital for treatment
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Of the sick in St. Mary's Infirmary, together with the attendants, only eight were understood to have been saved.  At the forts nearly all the soldiers were reported dead, having been in temporary quarters which gave them no protection against the tempest or flood.  The life-saving station at Fort Point was carried away, the crew being swept across the bay fourteen miles to Texas City.
 
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PROPERTY DESTRUCTION

No estimate can be considered accurately.  The estimates ranged from $25,000,000 to $50,000,000.

The water had extended across the island, and had been six feet deep in the rotunda of the Tremont Hotel, and six feet deep in Market Street.  Sheds along the wharves were either wrecked or had lost their sides and were of no protection to the contents.  The east end portion of the city, which was the residence district, was practically wiped out of existence.  On the west end, which faces the Gulf on another portion of the island, much havoc was done.  The beach was swept clean of structures, the bath-houses destroyed, and many of the residences were in total wrecks.
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Ruins of Public School at Twenty-Fifth Street and Avenue P
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Very few if any buildings escaped injury.  There was hardly a habital dry house in the city.
The Orphans' Home fell like a house of cards.  The old Rosenburg School-house was a mass of wreckage, the tower having falling in and killed about eleven people during the height of the storm. The Ball High School was but an empty shell, crushed and broken.  Every church in the city, with possibly one or two exceptions, was in ruins.

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