hey everybody hope you're doing well now that we're through the intro part of hurricanes and how they work and the different characteristics I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the Galvis hurricane of 1900 because it had such an important impact on not only the Texas coast but how we understood and planned for hurricanes going forward across many areas of the US and like it says here some lessons we learned and in other areas there's a lot of work to do which I'll concentrate on more the future work uh in subsequent lectures so I don't know how many people have heard of the Galviston hurricane in 1900 or any details but I want to give everybody the same background so that we're all on the same page with answering questions and going through this lecture set but at the time leading up to 1900 Galvis was one of the leading cities in Texas and in general in the Gulf Coast region and was actually competing with Houston to become one of the leading cities along the gulf well today we can look at that and kind of laugh and say well uh obviously galvon is not even close to the size of Houston but it's important to understand that the 1900 hurricane had a big impact on why that is and why the landscape looks the way it does so in terms of the history of where we were with meteorology and climatology and Science in general there was a beginning of a rapid increase in terms of scientific knowledge in the 1800s that's only accelerated in through the 1900s and into the 21st century and so there are things that happened around the same time like the Titanic okay that led to this kind of false control that human beings could control everything and in some ways that's what got us into trouble with what happened with the 1900 hurricane so our story overview is going to begin with Isaac Klein who was posted to the National Weather Service Office in Galveston and Isaac was highly educated for the time but the problem was he also said things like a hurricane would be an absurd delusion in regards to it hitting Galveston so if you want to know more about this there's a good book about all this history and how Isaac Klein was involved it's actually called Isaac storm but I'm just going to give you an overview of everything today so Isaac had said that a hurricane would be an absurd delusion essentially if that happened meanwhile in Indianola about 120 miles away from Galvis in 1875 there was a hurricane that hit the coast okay and it was bad three quarters of the buildings were destroyed and there were 176 deaths luckily not more but it wasn't a huge town at the time 11 years later town is totally wiped out okay so remember this is less than 2 hours as we think about a driving by car today this is less than two hours roughly okay as the crow flies to galvaston from Indianola so not very far away really they build a seaw wall well no unfortunately places along the Gulf Coast did not despite the warnings of other areas okay and of course Isaac and what he was saying being the one posted the National Weather Service Office would have provided them with a lot of relief this is also from what Isaac Klein said it would be impossible for any Cyclone to create a storm wave which would materially injure the city and he referred to it as a crazy idea again that a hurricane could hit the area and meanwhile here's the historical marker Indianola for where those two hurricanes hit not too far away again from where Galvis is and if you look closely at the bottom of this sign you can see that it references Indianola being destroyed and then completely destroyed by the hurricanes in 1875 and 1886 so we know if we've heard about the Galviston hurricane of 1900 what the devastation looked like on the right hand side okay was the result of a category 4 hurricane estimated to be a strong category 4 and there were a lot of missteps not just by Isaac Klein but in general how the whole weather bureau acted leading up to the storm and so you can see the path here that the storm P took right at the peak of hurricane season like we said so this is this over here is August 27th okay and this over here as it gets into the Gulf of Mexico is getting into the first week of September okay and so you we can see here that it went over Cuba and meanwhile this Orange area indicates where the National Weather Service or the weather bureau actually warned about the storm on September 6th so the storm's already entering the gulf down here you can already see it on the sixth and they incorrectly warned the bureau or warn the area over here despite the fact the Cubans had warned them that it had just passed over their Island so ignoring the Cuban experience proved to be catastrophic from Isaac kle and his fellow Associates at the US weather bureau and we know now looking at this of course if it passed over Cuba it had a good chance of hitting the United States either Florida or getting into the Gulf because remember our pressure systems right our pressure systems and how they set up mainly our high pressure systems helped to steer the hurricanes and so when this moves in a little bit this way right when the high pressure moves toward the us and we get that clockwise circulation around high pressure it pushes our low pressure waves into these areas in here okay and so that's what was happening and they ignored the Cubans warning them about it and here's a zoomed in picture of what I showed you before so the Cubans warned them that it was going into the Gulf and then they still proceeded to warn the east coast of the US and ignore the fact it was going through the gulf so once the storms get over the gulf they can really intensify like we talked about previously now we don't have a nice satellite photo of the 1900 hurricane obviously because the technology didn't exist but here's a picture of Katrina exploding in terms of its intensity when it got over the gulf in 2005 so essentially the same thing happened with the 1900 hurricane it gets into the same part of the gulf and it gets up to wind speeds that they estimated about 50 m hour and so nobody that had been around the gulf at that point had seen those types of strong category 4 Winds and just showing you the path with how it evolved in terms of its intensity right so we see once it gets into this portion here it's a hurricane and once it reaches the dark red which is a category three or higher once it gets to a category three or higher it's classified as is a major hurricane so categories three four five are considered major hurricanes and so you see it intensifies just in time out over the middle of the gulf and get steered right into the upper Texas coast so what initially happened is they were experiencing offshore winds because the circulation around the hurricane having that counterclockwise flow so initially like this Black Arrow shows on this picture they thought the winds were blowing off Shore but what didn't make sense to them was the tide and the surf coming in kept Rising so they're in the part of the storm initially right where the storm's off the coast a bit the storms are blowing offshore but remember the whole storm itself is gradually pushing that water up the coast which is causing the water levels to go up so even though the winds are blowing the opposite direction that whole storm wave is pushing into the Texas coast causing the water level to increase so now we have the storm surge impact in the city but people initially go out to play in the surf and play in the in the flooded streets which of course if we think about that today is something you would be highly advised against doing so what happens is what we would expect to happen looking at the data now right the offshore winds eventually reverse and then the onshore winds begin to push that water even more intensely onto the landscape okay when the wind start to increase in speed and you get close to the eyewall the amount of debris the size of the debris starts to increase buildings start collapsing and the worst part about our severe weather sometimes is if these events happen at night and you can't really see what's happening in terms of how to get to an area that might be safer or higher elevation or something like that now remember here it's a category 4 storm so even getting onto the roof would not be all that helpful to escape the storm surge because you could get impaled by debris or things like that with 150 M hour winds so the big issue in galison was how low the island sat so Galviston is naturally the Barrier Island and so its elevations aren't very high and really the average elevation sat just below 9 ft before engineering and design changes after the 19 00 hurricane so essentially what would happen for every one foot rise in sea level you lose about a th000 ft of Beach and remember at this time there's no seaw wall protecting the rest of the island so the storm continues to get worse okay and we don't have pictures for what it looked like in terms of the same type of modern high-res photographs that we can get right after storms here we have some things that I showed you in terms of the historical damage but but we can see what Ike did for example to balar okay and what it did to some of the unprotected areas away from the seaw wall along Galvis Island and the Texas coast and Ike actually when it made landfall was only a strong two was only a strong category two the 1900 hurricane remember was a strong four okay so one of the last messages that reaches the mainland from them in Galviston actually came from Isaac Klein's brother which said Gulf Rising water cover streets of about half the City well when we look at the orientation of the 1900 hurricane if you look back at that map I showed you previously the eye of the storm passed just west of galvon Island which put Galvis right in the heart of the Northeast quadrant and the eyewall so it was the worst possible orientation in terms of impacting Galviston from both wind speeds and storm surge okay so the stormm surge was about 15 ft deep and remember with no seaw wall it looks more like other parts of the Texas coast that were unprotected okay so by 8:00 p.m. they estimate some of the wind gust could have reached 200 miles per hour so I told you escaping the storm surge just by trying to climb to higher elevations wasn't going to save people because there were flying flying pieces of debris around that wind up killing horses and people uh just really not good stuff in terms of impacting people's bodies and and just killing them through the debris itself if it can cut holes in houses and structures of course people that were exposed to this were in bad shape okay there's an orphid with 90 children that was unfortunately impacted so it was just a catastrophic event in terms of the damage to the island and the number of people and lives that were impacted there are also numerous snake bites so when you get the water that's moving across the landscape from the swamps and the bayos they wind up in people's yards and things like that so there's some people that tried to escape things in their house or try to climb trees or things like that and there's documented evidence of some of them being killed by snake bites so when we look at some of the pictures from the aftermath okay some of the historical photos the destruction was just incredible unlike what people had seen in areas along the Gulf Coast because again this was one of the big upand cominging cities along the Gulf and it gets hit just right with one of the worst possible hurricanes you could experience only a few miles per hour short of what would likely have been a category 5 and so only some of the most well-built buildings toward the interior of the island largely survived and you can still see some of those if you do tours of galvaston and go around the island today so it's still one of the deadliest storms around the world in terms of hurricanes and in the us it is the deadliest natural disaster okay only Hurricane Katrina has come close and it was still a few thousand people less in terms of the deaths from the event so one reason I'm talking about this isn't just because it's Texas this set a precedent for how many people could be killed in a storm without better planning and so with that many bodies and stuff they had to have makeshift morgs and they actually started trying to get rid of some of the bodies by putting them on barges and sending them out to sea only to have them come back in with the tide and later having to burn some of the bodies and piles to try to reduce any potential disease and things that might happen if they had left the bodies Isaac's family well his wife didn't fa so well okay and he wound up Surviving okay uh and one of his children I believe okay but he wound up having a successful career after this but it's important to remember that a lot of what he told the community at the time wound up in potentially leading to way more deaths than if he had confronted the reality of hurricanes being able to hit not just Indianola but also galvaston and other areas okay it just so happened that Indianola was the place that got hit a couple times in a row but if you knew anything about storms getting into the Gulf you would know that potentially anywhere along Ong the Gulf Coast could be impacted so following the 1900 hurricane the city voted to build the seaw wall and things take some time after the fact so it took a couple years for them to vote to build it and they actually had to raise private funds because they didn't have enough public funds to build this all by themselves so private wealthy land owners helped to raise money through bonds and things like that and then by 1904 they had the original 3.3 Mile Stretch of the wall all done well it was extended a couple times in the 1920s and then into the early 1960s and so today the seaw wall that you see is about 10 1 12 miles long okay and it was built up about 17 ft in fact the seaw wall isn't the only thing that was built up the whole Island was built up they raised the elevation of the whole island by bringing in dredge materials they brought in dredge materials or these uh materials on the bottom of the bay okay in Galveston Bay and they brought them in on barges and they actually put that fill material down to raise the elevation of where homes would be okay so they put the seaw wall in that's about 17 ft high and then they put in fill material and raise the elevations behind the seaw wall some of them to about 15 ft and then the elevation of the island declines by about a foot every ,500 ft or so as you move away from the seaw wall which is one worry that Engineers have looking at today the seaw wall has done a pretty good job of protecting Galveston from major storms but if it were to get hit and the seaw wall were over topped if you're down by the seaw wall next time try to remember when you look at it you'll realize that the ground elevation actually slopes down as you get interior to the island and so if the seaw wall were to over top again if you were to have a big enough storm to do that then that water would likely continue to flow down and impact number of buildings and a lot of the ones behind the seaw wall are not raised and could be impacted because their elevations are located at the ground elevation okay so it take a pretty large hurricane event to potentially do that but it's not out of the question as we'll talk about in future lectures okay so galvaston island has continued to be inhabited a number of people still live there the population has definitely increased over 8,000 okay so there's a number of people that could still be impacted by a catastrophic event if they were not able to evacuate but hopefully with our advanced warning systems now and things like that the damage wouldn't be the same and the fatalities would be much much lower as a result okay remember the material they used to raise it came from the bay itself okay so by the time it was done and and when you look at what happened of the island all the fill and dredge material raising the island that was done within about 10 years after the storm hit okay but remember the seaw wall and what you see today getting all the way down to the furthest Southwest side of the seaw wall on the island that wasn't finished until the 1960s okay so why did we talk about this well this was the most deadly hurricane in the United States it continues to remain as the most deadly hurricane in the United States and so it taught us that areas that have high population maybe we need to engineer them a little bit better there may maybe some areas we have to put hard infrastructure in like a seaw wall to make sure that that Devastation doesn't occur again and then also it has told us that we need to make sure we give advanced warning and try to evacuate people when we can from these lowest lying coastal areas and we'll talk about if that's been entirely successful or not when we talk about hurricanes in the next couple sets