Dr. Patricia Bixel

The other thing about Galveston and its location is you not only have the Gulf on one side, but you've got Galveston Bay on the other side.

So you had water that sort of met in the middle of the island that was coming both from the Gulf side, from the Gulf of Mexico and from Galveston Bay.

But like I say, we know that this probably happened in mid to late evening that night.

And then the waters began to recede.

You see swept landscapes.

We were very fortunate in that when we did the book, we've got access to photographic sources that hadn't been used before.

So there's materials from the National Archives and from the University of Texas and some other holdings around the country that people hadn't seen before.

But the ones that strike me are the ones that just show all of this lumber and all of these materials stacked up, and then you just see sky.

You see all of this wreckage, sometimes with bodies, sometimes with items and articles that you can recognize.

But mostly it's just lumber and, you know, a destroyed town that's just lying there on the beach.

The photo that both Liz and I liked the most is the cover photo of the book, which we found in the National Archives.

And it's a woman who's standing there at the end of this wreckage.

tunnel of debris.

There is immense amounts of debris on either side of her and there are a group of children at the end of this walkway.

And she's carrying what looks like laundry or a bundle of something and she's walking down this tunnel of debris toward these children.

And there are a couple of structures in the background so you can tell there is some level of built environment around.

But to us, this was like the perfect storm photo.

This basically conveyed what we wanted to about this book and what the book was going to talk about.

This is probably one of the most awful and horrific aspects of the cleanup because there were tremendous number of deaths.

The death toll that has been settled on over the years is about 6,000.