I Still Hear Your Sea Winds Blowing

Ralph Kinney Bennett has a decent piece up at Tech Central Station about the hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900 and the reconstruction effort that followed. One part of the story he doesn't explore is how the city was rebuilt: The old local government was abandoned, and a business committee took control of the reconstruction effort. In the wake of that success, the businessmen devised a new government modeled on the corporation, with five commissioners running the town.

The new plan quickly spread across the country, paving the way for the commission-manager model that then supplanted it in the hearts of Progressive Era reformers. However New Orleans comes to be rebuilt, I'm sure it will leave a substantial political imprint as well.

Here's another link for people interested in donating to the Katrina relief effort: Charity Navigator, sort of a Consumer Reports for philanthropy. For tips on avoiding charity scams, go here.

Comments

[Ammonium]

Galveston could get back to rebuilding very quickly since the water could run off. New Orleans will take a lot longer because they need to pump out the water and then clean up all the junk.

The article acknowledges that even with the rebuilding efforts, Galveston became unimportant as everybody started moving to Houston -- as far inland as possible while still having sea access. New Orleans can probably look forward to a similar fate: not much happening other than some shipping (Houston and other gulf ports will grow busier) and tourism.

Another thing to consider is that Galveston still isn't very safe. The sea wall only protects about 1/3 of the gulf side of the island. In a bad hurricane water will be pushed in back of the island and onto land. In a really bad hurricane, the wall won't matter much. Similarly, New Orleans will probably never become safe against the big storms and will have an even more difficult time than Galveston because of the sinking ground and the disappearing land.

[joshua corning]

hey is there a fund that pays to first save people and then uses funds to pay people not to live in hurrican ally...below sea level...under a lake.

[Cuban Pete]

"But when the worst natural disaster in American history occurred, September 8th, 1900, the people of Galveston, the prosperous island city on the coast of Texas, had virtually no warning." Nope. Not what happened.

in fact, there's a case to be made here, too, for gov agency inertia making things worse.

As Ammonium says, Galveston didn't rebuild, exactly. No more than the average small town rebuilds when everyone moves into a strip mall by the walmart on the highway and lets the old city square convert to antique stores and soda shops.

[Jesse Walker]

They raised the grade of the town by as much as 17 feet, Pete. That's rebuilding.

It didn't become a major metropolis again. Frankly, it was probably already on the way downhill before the storm. But rebuild it certainly did. (The Strand -- that's where the soda shops are -- is something separate; it wasn't revived until the 1980s. For much of the twentieth century, Galveston went the sin city route: sort of a mini-Vegas on the Gulf.)