xt day the people of Galveston began rebuilding. Galveston constructed a seawall along the beach to protect the city from future storm surges. By 1905, the wall was 6 miles ling, 17 feet high and 16 feet thick, and the town’s elevation was increased 10 to 17 feet by dredging the ship channel.This is a wonderful book; it is not only well written but also very interesting. Erik Larson did a very good job of describing this tragedy in a very effective, lifelike way. He provides information to back up the fact that before this time no one believed that a storm could be strong enough to destroy a town like Galveston, and it had to take a disaster like this to force the National Weather Service to provide citizens with proper notification of storms heading towards them. After reading this I felt very informed; it was very thorough. The only thing I could not understand was the ignorance of the National Weather Service. I learned a lot about this time period, mostly about how information that should have been released to people was not. There were a lot of shocking facts, in my opinion, revealed. The most shocking to me was the story of the nuns and children at Roberts 4St. Mary’s Orphanage. The nuns tied the children together in groups in order to try to keep them together during the height of the storm. Their building gets washed away and later while rummaging for survivors a child is discovered buried in the sand with a clothesline tied around him. They followed the line and found a group of dead children tied together. All 3 nuns working at the orphanage along with 90 to 93 children died. I have been to Galveston many times and I guess this is why I was so interested in this book. I knew very little about the storm of 1900, but I feel very educated on the subject now. Roberts 5Work CitedLarson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History. New York: Crown Publishing, 1999. 1...
