It's interesting that Ron Paul should choose 1900 as the year to emulate. On September 8, 1900, Galveston sustained a direct hit from a category 4 hurricane. The Weather Bureau office in Galveston had received warnings from the Washington DC office on September 4th that a tropical storm had moved northward over Cuba, but because of limited observational capability in 1900, they had no way of knowing where it currently was or in which direction it was heading.
Large swells from the southeast on the Gulf and clouds at all altitudes moving in from the northeast prompted the Galveston Weather Bureau office to raise the hurricane warning flags on the afternoon of the 7th, but the city had weathered numerous previous storms, and for the most part the population was unconcerned; the weather on the 7th seemed unremarkable, and few people chose to evacuate. They had no idea they were facing would would be, and remains, the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history.
The destruction of property was great, but the greatest tragedy was the enormous death toll, estimated at between 6,000 and 12,000 (and most often reported as about 8,000). Many who survived the actual hurricane died trapped under debris before they could be rescued. 30,000 were left homeless.
Because the bridges to the mainland were destroyed and the telegraph lines were downed, no word of the city's plight got out the the wider world until six survivors on the ship Pherabe, one of the few at the Galveston wharfs to survive the storm, straggled into a telegraph office in Houston at 3 a.m. on September 10th to send a message to the governor of Texas and President McKinley that the city of Galveston had been destroyed. And even then, they had no idea of the full extent of the damage, estimating the dead at five hundred.
This is really what Ron Paul wants to go back to?
