Notable Historic Hurricanes and Typhoons

The Galveston Hurricane of September 1900 remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history, striking the low-lying barrier island of Galveston, Texas, as a storm now estimated at Category 4 strength and killing an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 people, most commonly cited at around 8,000, largely because the city sat barely 2.7 meters above sea level with no seawall and had no advance hurricane warning system beyond delayed telegraph reports from Cuba. The catastrophe prompted the city to build a 5-kilometer seawall, completed in stages after 1902 and eventually raised to over 5 meters, and to physically raise the grade of the entire city using dredged sand, a civil-engineering response still studied as an early model of large-scale coastal disaster mitigation.