During the brief calm of the storm, as the eye passed overhead, staff rounded up guests and herded them to a neighbouring hotel, where they slept in corridors, and on sunloungers and sofas, with their babies, young children, dogs, and cats in baskets.
Among them was Mona Garza, 57, and her family, who left Galveston at 11am Friday when water began rushing into the streets. A mandatory evacuation order had been issued by the mayor of Galveston the day earlier.
"We had planned on staying. We were born and raised on the island - we were there for Hurricane Carla in 1961, that was a lot bigger than this, and we thought we'd be OK. But then we realised the water was coming over the seawall Friday morning and it hadn't even started raining yet.
"I worry for people down there now. It's not easy to take a decision to leave everything you own and I guess that's the bad decision a lot of people made. But a lot of people were also reluctant to go because of what happened in the last evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005.
"We were on the road, stuck in traffic, for 38 hours trying to get to Fort Worth. There were cars everywhere, nothing was moving, everyone was running out of gas - that's why people didn't want to move again this time. But God bless them now," she said.
Nia Singleton, 32, left her house in Galveston Friday afternoon and holed up in the Hampton Inn at Texas City, where the roof crashed to the ground in the early hours of Saturday.
"It was terrifying. The wind was just howling, howling, and the building was shaking. I don't have much with me but what I have right here is all I care about," she said, gesturing at her four-year-old son Dominic.
"I didn't leave Galveston sooner because we were just thinking about that evacuation in 2005, none of us wanted to get on the road for a four-hour evacuation trip then find it turning into 15, 20 hours of hell."
