Lindsey Graham

For years, many residents had complained that the mayor and city council were plagued by inefficiency and infighting.

To address this issue, the Deepwater Committee drew up a new city charter, proposing replacing the sitting mayor and city council with a five-member city commission, with each member overseeing a key department, including police and fire, finance and revenue, streets and public improvements, and water and sewers.

The goal was to make the city government more businesslike and nonpartisan.

In an address to residents justifying the change, the committee declared, We believe that municipal government, as it has been administered in this community for the past 20 years, is a failure.

It did not require the storm to bring a realization of this fact, but it brought it home with greater force upon us.

It is a question with us of civic life or death.

In July 1901, over the protests of sitting city council members, the Texas state legislature approved the new city charter.

And two months later, a mix of elected and governor-appointed commissioners took their seats.

In the years that followed, hundreds of other cities across the country adopted what became known as the Galveston Plan, from Houston, Texas to Oakland, California, as the reforms undertaken in Galveston did make the government more efficient and businesslike, helping to reassure potential investors.

Still, it was clear to many that if Galveston was going to truly recover, the city commission would need to take drastic steps to prevent future disasters, so they finally began making plans to build a protective seawall around the island.

In November 1901, the commissioners selected a board of engineers to design and build the seawall.

The following year, construction began on a concrete barrier beginning on the eastern end of the island and extending more than three miles along the beach.

It stood 17 feet high and curved toward the gulf, designed to toss waves back on themselves.

The entire project cost $1.5 million, and when the seawall was finally completed in 1904, McClure's magazine called it one of the greatest engineering works of modern times.

The wall would later be extended, reaching its final 10-mile length in the 1960s.

But city engineers knew that all the expense and effort of the seawall would be wasted if nothing was done to raise the elevation of Galveston itself.

So in 1903, a monumental effort began to raise the ground by as much as 17 feet.

In the mid-19th century, parts of Chicago had been raised to improve drainage, but there was no precedent for a project of this scale.

Workers used manual screwjacks to raise some 2,000 buildings, including a cathedral, and then filled the space underneath with millions of pounds of sand dredged from the Gulf.

They raised streets, water mains, trolley tracks, and gas lines, the entire city infrastructure.