Galveston built a seawall to protect the residents from other vicious hurricanes : the oldest part of the seawall still visible runs from Sixth street to 39th street and was built between 1902 and 1904. Along with building a seawall, Alfred Noble, Henry M. Robert and H.C. Ripley recommended the city be raised 17 feet at the seawall and sloped downward at a pitch of one foot for every 1,500 feet to the bay.

The first task required to translate their vision into a working system was a means of getting more than 16 million cubic yards of sand - enough to fill more than a million dump trucks - to the island. The solution was to dredge the sand from Galveston's ship channel and pump it as liquid slurry through pipes into quarter-square-mile sections of the city that were walled off with dikes. By 1911, McComb wrote, 500 city blocks had been raised, some by just a few inches and others by as much as 11 feet.

Residents endured years (1906-1911) of pumps, sludge, canals, stench and miles of catwalks during the project. Human technology made it possible - for the city of Galveston to remain on such unstable land. The city did not flourish. Houston - left the island city far behind. Galveston simply survived.