Lindsey Graham

You wonder if they've survived or if their bodies are laid out somewhere here too.

You suddenly realize that you can't stay a moment longer.

So you run out of the warehouse and into the blinding morning sun and gasp for air.

But the scent outside is almost as sour.

You know that you and your daughters won't find peace until you find Cora, but you're not sure you have enough strength for the search.

In the days after the hurricane, Galveston's burial committee organized gangs of men to round up hundreds of bodies, sending them out in 30-minute shifts and fortifying them with whiskey to steady their nerves.

They then laid the corpses out in makeshift morgues to await identification.

Meteorologist Isaac Klein was one of the thousands of survivors desperate to find a lost loved one.

He searched for his wife Cora among the dead, but she was nowhere to be found.

But there was the opposite problem, too.

Volunteers discovered that many of the dead victims had no surviving family members left to claim their bodies.

The death toll was simply overwhelming, and it soon became clear that the ground was too soaked for burials.

But with the bodies rapidly decaying, there was no time to waste.

Fearing the spread of disease, the committee decided that burial at sea was their only option.

So on Monday, September 10th, workmen loaded roughly 700 bodies onto three waiting barges while deputized white citizens rounded up 50 black men at gunpoint and forced them to board the barges and handle the task of disposal.

That night, the crews traveled 18 miles offshore, only to find that the darkness made it impossible to do the work, leaving the men to spend the night at sea, surrounded by the dead.

Finally, at dawn on September 11th, the workmen began attaching weights to the bodies to help them sink.

They worked quickly, anxious to complete this grim task.

But to everyone's horror, later that afternoon, scores of bodies washed ashore, some with the weights still attached.

By then, decomposition had made the bodies hard to handle.