Galveston, Texas, is under mandatory evacuation today as massive Hurricane Ike barrels toward it. According to the Associated Press, “the National Weather Service warned residents of smaller structures on Galveston they could ‘face certain death’ if they ignored an order to evacuate.”

This has all happened before, on September 8, 1900, as detailed by newspaper journalist Nathan C. Green in his book Story of the Galveston Flood: Complete, Graphic, Authentic, available from Cosimo Books. In Chapter 1 he writes:

One of the most awful tragedies of modern times has visited Galveston. The city is in ruins, and the dead will number possibly 6,000. The wreck of Galveston was brought about by a tempest so terrible that no words can adequately describe its intensity, and by a flood which turned the city into a raging sea.

This compilation of news coverage and survivor stories was published almost immediately after the disaster, the turn-of-the-20th-century equivalent of current-events documentary. With a dispassionate eye but with a flair for finding the dramatic in the eyewitness accounts he relays, journalist Green gathers startling accounts of the death and ruin of the city, the national relief efforts that sprung up in the aftermath, and scientific assessment of the storm, and more. In the wake of the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and now the current threat to Galveston, this is a historical story with a fresh new relevance.

Story of the Galveston Flood: Complete, Graphic, Authentic is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.