While struggling to wade back to his worksite in the early evening to pay his workers, the severity of the storm finally dawns on August. He hires a driver and buggy to go to his house, pick up Louisa and their children, and bring them to his mother's house which is further inland than theirs. The driver succeeds in picking up Louisa and her two children but finds that the way to August's mother's house is impassable. Instead, Louisa tells him to drive to August's sister Julia's house. When they arrive, Louisa sends a message to August with the driver, informing him of their change of plans. The message never reaches August. Meanwhile inside Julia's house, the windows shatter and the piano rolls back and forth across the room.

Confident that this telegram reached his wife and children, Dr. Young hunkers down to wait out the storm in his house, one of the strongest in the neighborhood along with Isaac's. He later recalls, "Being entirely alone, with no responsibility on me, I felt satisfied and very complacent, for I was fool enough not to be the least afraid of wind and water" (181). Larson concludes that "gusts of two hundred miles an hour may have raked Galveston.