The Deadliest US Natural Disaster

Uncategorized 2 Minutes

From HISTORY.COM

The deadliest natural disaster in American history remains the 1900 hurricane in the island city of Galveston, Texas. On September 8, a category four hurricane descended on the town, destroying more than 3,600 buildings with winds surpassing 135 miles per hour.

Estimates of the death toll range from 6,000 to 12,000, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Tragically, the magnitude of the disaster could have been lessened if the U.S. Weather Bureau hadn’t implemented poor communication policies.

When the storm picked up in early September of 1900, “any modestly educated weather forecaster would’ve known that” it was passing west, says Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over in Cuba, where scientists had become very good at tracking storms in the hurricane-prone Caribbean, they “knew that a hurricane had passed to the north of Cuba and was headed to the Gulf of Mexico.”

The Weather Bureau in Washington, however, predicted that the storm would pass over Florida and up to New England—which was very, very wrong.

“I mean they were just way off target,” he says.

The Weather Bureau—predecessor to the National Weather Service—was only 10 years old, and hurricane science in the U.S. wasn’t very advanced. “Galveston occurred at a very interesting time in the science of hurricanes,” Emanuel notes.

The bureau’s director, Willis Moore, “was so jealous of the Cubans that he shut off the flow of data from Cuba to the U.S.,” he says. At the same time, Moore told regional U.S. forecasters that “that they could not on their own issue a hurricane warning, they had to go through Washington”—not a very quick or easy task, in those days.

The combination of blocking information from Cuba, while also making it difficult for local forecasters to report hurricanes, turned out to be deadly.

In the couple days before the storm hit, the Weather Bureau’s chief observer in Galveston, Isaac Cline, began to suspect that Washington’s forecast had been off. He tried to warn the city, but it was too late. Cline’s wife was killed, the port city was devastated, and Galveston was never able to fully recover.

The 1900 hurricane was a wake-up call that the Weather Bureau needed to have better communication channels if it wanted to keep people safe.

“The Galveston hurricane made people realize you can’t play politics with a weather bureau,” Emanuel says. “If you make it political, people will die.”

U.S. hurricane science wouldn’t really take off until the 1940s. But after Galveston, the bureau began to open up communication channels both internationally and within the country. Although the U.S. had begun to send wireless messages out to sea before the hurricane, the practice became more widespread after Galveston.

Today, the United States has advanced systems in place to accurately forecast hurricanes and communicate storm paths to affected areas. “We have come light-years from where we were in 1900,” says Jay Barnes, a hurricane historian who has written about storms in North Carolina and Florida.

The bigger problem, which Galveston would still have faced if it had been properly warned in 1900, is the logistical challenge of evacuating large metropolitan areas in short amounts of time, Emanuel says.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in part because of government negligence (levee failures and inadequate aid after the storm), not an inability to accurately predict and communicate the storm’s path. Hurricane Harvey, which wreaked havoc in Houston as well as modern-day Galveston in August 2017, was also well-forecasted. But without effective emergency plans for mass evacuations, cities still end up suffering from natural disasters—even if they can see them coming.

SOURCE: HISTORY.COM; BECKY LITTLE

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Published by pat frederick

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104 thoughts on “The Deadliest US Natural Disaster”

  1. Morning All!
    chilly 40* here with some clouds, a little bit a sun starting to peek thru too.
    to may surprise, we still have a few hummers out there. i went out with a towel to dry off the feeders and 2 came flying at me to scold me …lol

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Morning, Pat! Not quite as chilly and clear here this morning – 50 instead of the high 40’s – whoopee! LOL – but it’s supposed to warm up for a few days. Those must be the straggler Hummers! No sign of Wheezer yet this morning – hmmmm, it’s almost like he’s saying “the hell with you” since I didn’t refill his dry food last evening. Oh, well – his canned food is there, when he decides to make an appearance.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Morning Filly!
        I often wonder what initiates their drive to migrate? they leave at different times–they arrive at different times.
        I always miss them in fall/winter and can’t wait till they start coming back!

        Liked by 1 person

  6. Charlotte99

    September 8, 2024 5:59 am

    The Truth About Kamala
    Her background is WEALTH

    Is there anything real about Kamala?

    The truth was that Kamala was the “privileged child of foreign grad students” (Los Angeles Times) who attended “Montreal’s tony Westmount” and then began her career socializing with the elites of Nob Hill. Before Kamala started claiming to be from a “middle class household”, her mother was telling a very different story to Modern Luxury magazine, bragging, “When Kamala was in first grade one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, ‘Oh, I’ve been there.’ So I told her, ‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.”
    “We weren’t rich in financial terms, but the values we internalized provided a different kind of wealth,” Kamala claimed in her memoir The Truths We Hold.
    In reality, she came from wealthy parents, was raised in a wealthy family and among elites. The Los Angeles Times described P.V. Gopalan, Kamala’s grandfather, as “part of a privileged elite”.
    Modern Luxury quoted “one of Harris’s Nob Hill friends” as saying that “her Brahmin background accounts for her ease around wealthy, powerful people.”

    And Kamala’s life of “public service” allows her to live in a $5 million home with a “spa-like” master bedroom, and a kidney-shaped pool and gifted her and her husband an estimated net worth of $8M . A good deal of that money came through her husband whose career as a partner at major law firms seemed to parallel her upward rise through the political ranks.

    As Kamala got into politics, she began reinventing her past, falsely claiming that she had been in “the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools” when schools began to be integrated the year she was born and plagiarized an MLK story about demanding “Fweedom” as a child in the spirit of the civil rights movement.
    Berkeley had not been segregated, but her family home is in Brentwood which is 84% white and 1.2% black in Los Angeles, a city that is nearly 10% black, more closely fits the bill.
    

    https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-truth-about-kamala/

    Liked by 1 person

    1. He’s FOS, just like everything else! Having said that, it isn’t widely accepted in the small towns like where I live. I told the story once long ago about when I was working at Speedy Mart here and a young black guy came in all dressed to the nines as a woman – gorgeous hair & make-up, but slutty clothes.

      His fellow students at the HS accepted him for the most part but a lot of the adults were somewhat shocked. I wasn’t shocked altho I was surprised to see that he appeared to be widely accepted. But that was not universal by any means.

      Poor guy had a bad family history; when his parents found out he was gay, they moved out, left town, and abandoned him; a family in town took him in and he was able to finish out HS here. When he graduated, he moved to CO.

      I felt bad because my surprise was clear on my face the first time I saw him and I wanted him to know it was not disapproval on my part, and to show him that it is quite possible to live a good life as a gay man. I had the pics from the drag show we went to in DC, when my Mom made some dresses for Freddie (very tall black guy) to wear for the show. He had already left town but I gave the pics to the woman he had lived with before he went to CO. She said she would get them to him.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. EXCERPT: “Did you watch HBO’s riveting series “Succession?” It was an exceptional drama about wealth, power, and family struggles, and it was somewhat based on the Murdoch family, whose billionaire patriarch Rupert founded one of the most influential media companies in the world. Through entities such as News Corp and the Fox Corporation, the family controls The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Fox News, and multiple international outlets—almost all of them with a conservative bent.

    But just like in “Succession,” a high-stakes battle over who will control the conglomerate after the boss dies has broken out behind the scenes, and a court drama commences in Nevada Tuesday that will decide if the power will be shared by his children, or if—as the 93-year-old Rupert now desires—eldest son Lachlan will take the reins.

    Things could get ugly:

    Mr Murdoch’s attempt to overhaul the family trust, dubbed “Project Harmony”, will have significant implications for the future of the media empire, which includes the Sun and Times newspapers as well as Fox News in the US.

    Lachlan has taken pole position to take over the reins in recent years after adopting the roles of chief executive and chairman of TV group Fox Corporation in 2019 and chairman of News Corp last year.

    The 52-year-old is viewed as the most conservative of Mr Murdoch’s children and as such is most closely aligned with his father’s views.

    Son James, however, would likely steer coverage in an entirely different direction if he’s able to wrest a measure of control.

    https://twitter.com/JeffClarkUS/status/1832460315289698584

    https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2024/09/08/fox-in-court-blockbuster-trial-begins-this-week-that-could-determine-future-of-murdoch-empire-n2179046

    Liked by 1 person

            1. half the time i don’t even bother trying to get the tweet to actually show–i copy the info…that’s the important part anyway
              Jeff Clark
              @JeffClarkUS
              Pray that the eldest son of Rupert Murdoch (Lachlan) wins his battle against his siblings to keep control of Fox News.

              James is a liberal. If he takes over, Fox will become a CNN clone.

              We are outnumbered as conservatives too much already in MSM.

              Liked by 1 person

            1. Yep – same thing that happens to me sometimes – it will show until you hit “comment” to post it, then it reverts to the link. Sometimes (like now) I also can’t see the entire bottom of the page….sigh….

              Liked by 1 person

          2. Yes, since that’s the only way to post Tweets. Sometimes I can hit “try again” a couple of times and it will work; whereas sometimes it won’t. 🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

            Liked by 1 person

  11. According to this report, President Biden spent almost as much time on R&R as he did running the country. The 81-year-old commander-in-chief has racked up 532 vacation days in less than four years — about 40% of the 1, 326 days he’s been in office.

    It would take the average American — who gets 11 days a year of vacation — approximately 48 years to accumulate that number of days off, according to shocking data compiled by the Republican National Committee.”

    Liked by 1 person

  12. “They obviously did ‘Like Ike’. Campaign workers for Eisenhower’s 1956 campaign sported some seriously fancy outfits. These Ike Girls first made an appearance in 1952 as part of “Draft Ike,” the first successful grassroots effort in the 20th century to bring a private citizen, WWII hero General Dwight D. Eisenhower, to the White House. The ones shown here were drumming up the vote for Ike’s second term.”

    TBH, I don’t blame them!!!

    Liked by 1 person

  13. Wow! Talk about ornate!!! I love copper ceilings!

    “I’m heading back to Ireland next week and looking forward to seeing my buddy Michael, the head kegsman at the Crown. This really is in my top five favorite bars (three of which are in Ireland). Take a look at their website and google it for it’s history. Helluva tale here…”

    https://www.nicholsonspubs.co.uk/restaurants/scotlandandnorthernireland/thecrownliquorsaloonbelfast#/

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Ummmm…..IDK but I wouldn’t think so. Can’t find anything specific about copper but one of the reasons they say to stay away from windows is that older windows have metal frames, which can conduct lightning…..

        Liked by 1 person

  16. “A friend of mine has a 2/2 condo in Vero Beach that he’s owned for about ten years now. He’s a retired postal worker on a small pension, and his condo association fees went up in June from $660.00 a month to $ 1,350.00 a month. Because he’s in a first floor unit and there’s a lagoon behind his place, his homeowners/flood insurance has risen to over $ 400.00 a month. This appears to be happening all over Florida, especially in the coastal communities, and it’s not just a problem here in Florida. Gonna be interesting to watch how this plays out. There’s a story explaining some of the problems here.“

    Liked by 1 person

  17. “According to this report, a new study found that cannabis use in the US has been increasing … but not among teenagers. The research, which looked at data on more than 500,000 people’s cannabis habits during different time periods from 2013 to 2022 and was published in this month’s edition of Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports, also revealed that cannabis use had increased among Americans in households earning more than $75,000 a year, as well as those with a college degree.”

    “We used data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, and we really just estimated the prevalence of use,” said Delvon Mattingly, a behavioral science professor at the University of Kentucky and lead author of the study.”

    Liked by 1 person

  22. “When Royal Air Force pilots discovered chocolate-coated marshmallow teacakes expanded at high altitudes, they became “the subject of some rather unscientific in-flight experiments” in the 1950s.

    Air crews removed their silver foil packaging and perched them around the cabin for observation: The marshmallows swelled as pressure changed. Eventually, they became too big to eat in one bite. ⁠⁠Many noted that, despite the extreme physical effects, the expansion didn’t compromise the taste. ⁠⁠

    But the expanding teacakes’ fame was short-lived. After a period of marshmallow fever aboard the V-Bombers departing from Gaydon air base, an explosion put a stop to the fun. ⁠During the summer of 1965, a captain and student pilot forgot they had placed unwrapped teacakes above their instrument panels. When the captain pulled an emergency depressurizing switch during a training mission, the treats erupted. ⁠

    Shards of chocolate and marshmallow hit the windshield, flight controls, and the mens’ uniforms. Shortly thereafter, the RAF put marshmallows on their no-fly list.” — Via Dull Men’s Community

    Liked by 1 person

  37. “Georgia School Shooter’s Mother Tried to Warn Officials Minutes Before Shooting Began”

    Red State, By Jeff Charles | 12:55 PM on September 08, 2024

    AP Photo/Jeff Amy

    EXCERPT: “The mother of 14-year-old Colt Gray, who has been charged with fatally shooting four people at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, attempted to warn school officials just minutes before the alleged gunman carried out his rampage. The case has sparked national discussions about gun control, bullying, and the responsibilities of parents.

    Marcee Gray, Colt’s mother, called the school just before the attack, alerting them to an “extreme emergency” involving her son, according to Annie Brown, Colt’s aunt, in an interview with The Washington Post.

    “I was the one that notified the school counselor at the high school. I told them it was an extreme emergency and for them to go immediately and find [my son] to check on him,” Brown said.

    She provided screenshots of the text messages exchanged between herself and her sister and gave evidence of the call, which happened about 30 minutes before the shooting.

    The Associated Press confirmed the reports after speaking with Brown. Phone records from the family’s shared phone plan showed a call to the school made at 9:50 a.m. School personnel attempted to locate Colt before the shooting but were too late….”

    https://redstate.com/jeffc/2024/09/08/georgia-school-shooters-mother-tried-to-warn-officials-minutes-before-shooting-began-n2179056

    Liked by 1 person

  41. “Fireflies in the forest”

    “Three hyena, a jackal, and two elephants endure a sandstorm on a hot humid late afternoon, while the wind picks up before the heavens open.”

    “Bee-eaters gather before flying away to spend the night in their underground nests. I waited for the moment when the birds on the branch were motionless while the faded wings of the bird flying in the background refract the light like a prism.”

    Waynoka, OK

    “With the mating season under way, two common toads get intimately acquainted. Their reproductive embrace is called axillary amplexus. The smaller male clasps the female beneath her forelegs.”

    Liked by 1 person

  43. I am adding a short daily prayer to the board. I would invite each of you, if you wish, to also add one or maybe two of your own liking. I do not want to stifle anyone but please limit yourself to one or two religious postings. here’s one I found that I liked.

    Like

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