Weatherman Al Roker has a new book out this week which explores a historic hurricane that took place in Galveston, Texas more than 100 years ago.
In The The Storm of the Century: Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America’s Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900 (HarperCollins), the NBC co-anchor and Weather Channel co-host explores how the city of Galveston was destroyed by a single storm in 1900. Check it out:
On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and fifteen-foot waves slammed into Galveston, the prosperous and growing port city on Texas’s Gulf Coast. By dawn the next day, when the storm had passed, the city that existed just hours before was gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage. Rushing water had lifted buildings from their foundations, smashing them into pieces, while intensive winds had upended girders and trestles, driving them through house walls and into sidewalks. In less than twenty-four hours, one storm destroyed a major American metropolis—and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature.
“I think human nature is that we can handle whatever comes our way,” Roker told Weather.com. “But I think, as our environment is changing, I think we have to rethink that, and that certain ways of life and certain places we live may not be feasibly habitable for much longer and hard choices are going to have to be made.”