In , a major hurricane struck the city, resulting in significant property damage and loss of life, destroying much of the city. Following this disaster, a seawall was constructed to minimize damage caused by future hurricanes. A seawall is a large reinforced concrete structure designed to absorb the impact of waves as they strike the shore. Expansions have increased the length of the seawall from its initial length of 3.
The Galveston Seawall has repeatedly proved its worth in the century since it has been built. The city has experienced many severe hurricanes in that time and the presence of the seawall has reduced devastation significantly.
The following paper examines the events leading to the construction of the seawall, subsequent hurricanes in which the seawall effectively protected Galveston, and improvements and extensions to the seawall.
Full Text: PDF. Despite the unimaginable devastation and what must have been a hard realization that it could happen again, the city immediately began pulling itself out of the mud. By 10 a. Jones had called emergency city council meetings and by the end of the day had appointed a Central Relief Committee.
Ignoring advice from its sister paper, The Dallas Morning News, that it move temporarily to Houston, The Galveston Daily News continued publishing from the island and never missed an issue. One side listed the dead. The other reported the devastation of the storm. In the first week after the storm, according to McComb's book, telegraph and water service were restored.
Lines for a new telephone system were being laid by the second. Residents of Galveston quickly decided that they would rebuild, that the city would survive, and almost as soon, leaders began deciding how it would do so. The two civil engineering projects leaders decided to pursue - building a seawall and raising the island's elevation - stand today and are almost as great in their scope and effect as the storm itself.
Raising the grade. It's impossible to stand anywhere in the historical parts of Galveston and get exactly the same perspective a viewer would have gotten years ago. Everything is higher than it was back then, and some spots are much higher. The feat of raising an entire city began with three engineers hired by the city in to design a means of keeping the gulf in its place. Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1, feet to the bay.
The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island, according to McComb.
The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston's ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes.
Their theory was that as the water drained away the sand would remain. Before the pumping could begin, all the structures in the area had to be raised with jackscrews. Meanwhile, all the sewer, water and gas lines had to be raised.
McComb wrote that some people even raised gravestones and some tried to save trees, but most of the trees died. In the old city cemeteries along Broadway, some of the graves are three deep because of the grade raising. The city paid to move the utilities and for the actual grade raising, but each homeowner had to pay to have the house raised. By , McComb wrote, city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet. The Seawall. The most apparent of Galveston's efforts to prevent a repeat of 's devastation is the seawall, which today runs from just past Boddeker Drive on the east end to just past Cove View Boulevard on the west.
The current span of just more than 10 miles was built in six sections in a period of almost 60 years, said County Engineer Mike Fitzgerald. The oldest part of the seawall still visible runs from Sixth street to 39th street and was built between and , he said. The next section, which runs from 39th Street to 53rd Street, was built by the U.
Army Corps of Engineers to protect its property at Fort Crockett and was completed in In the early s, the county and U. Army extended the original wall eastward to protect Fort San Jacinto. That project took a sharp northward curve that originally ran from Sixth Street to Eighth Street out of the seawall.
The eastward run of the wall was extended again in the late s and by ran all the way to the bay just past Boddeker Drive. In , a section of wall running from 53rd Street to 61st was completed, and the final run of the wall, from 61st to its current end, was built between and , Fitzgerald said.
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