Dr. Patricia Bixel

So this is the first thing that happens, is that you develop this new governmental structure, and then the rest of the recovery of the island sort of flows out of that.

Well, the city commission hired some engineers, General H.M.

Robert, who's also interesting because he is the author of Robert's Rules of Order, which is a small book that governs the way meetings are run all over the world.

And Alfred Noble and H.C.

Ripley, who had all been either Corps of Engineers engineers or had worked in Galveston on engineering projects, they were very familiar with the island, they were very familiar with...

the topography and the wave action and all of the natural dynamics of the space, the commission hired them to think about what you could do to protect the island and report back.

So they submitted a report to the city in 1902, and it's got three parts.

First one is the seawall.

What this initial report suggests is a three-mile-long seawall of solid concrete, 17 feet high or 17 feet above mean low water,

That would have put it 1.3 feet higher than the storm surge that had come with the storm.

At the bottom, the wall would be 16 feet wide.

At the top, 5 feet.

The city commission did issue bonds to do that.

And I would note that they were absolutely religious about paying these bonds.

So the bonds were issued and they were paid off on time and exactly the way they were supposed to have been.

In addition to the seawall, they also specified that the grade of the island should be raised.

If you had gone to Galveston before the storm, you could pretty much, if you know Galveston, you could stand at 25th and Broadway and you could see the beach on one side and the port on the other.

And the mean height of the island at the time was about nine feet.

So one of the things they say is if you're going to build the seawall, you need to fill in and raise the land behind it.

So part of the report also recommends a grade raising, the raising of the island, and to fill in then between the wall and the land so that the storm surge will be deflected and you would not have the kind of damage that they had had with the 1900 storm.