Hurricane in the Gulf

It was near midnight, sultry and sullen, when the Weather Bureau discovered a hurricane blowing up in the Gulf of Mexico. Somewhere near the coast of Yucatan, 540 miles south-southeast of New Orleans, it hovered above the tropical water like some unearthly monster about to heave itself into the sea. Its center, three miles across, moved at 17 m.p.h., while around its periphery in a vast, pumping circle the winds raced counterclockwise at 100 m.p.h. or more. Reaching out 150 miles on either side of its "eye," it moved for three days over the Gulf as if feinting for an opening.

Along the low coasts of Texas and Louisiana the tides were abnormally high. Rivers began to run backwards; water from Lake Pontchartrain poured back into the Mississippi. Up & down the coast, from the bayous of Terrebonne Parish to the islands off Texas, the people began to move to high ground.

Out of the strange, half-submerged wilderness of southern Louisiana, people who live along the bayous came into the little towns: French-speaking Cajuns with their families, alligator hunters, Chinese shrimp fishermen, muskrat trappers, oil drillers, smugglers. Almost every community bore the scars of some earlier storm. Children around Port Lavaca, Tex. had played in the ruins of Indianola (once considered a rival of New Orleans), which was blown off the map in 1886. In 1893, while dwellers on the shore of Barataria Bay south of New Orleans were dancing to celebrate the end of a storm, mountainous waves suddenly swept over, wiped out town and townspeople in 15 minutes. At Galveston, where in 1900 a hurricane and tidal wave killed 6,000, sandbags were piled before doorways, windows boarded up. Long before the Weather Bureau released its dry warning that the storm was at hand, launches chugged inland over the bayous, dugouts paddled swiftly toward settlements, country storekeepers moved their stock to high shelves.

Before it reached the coast, the storm raced crazily over almost a thousand miles of sea. It caught a seaman from the tanker Myriam, washed him overboard. Storm warnings flew from the tip of Florida to southern Texas. Four hundred Army planes in the Louisiana maneuvers were ordered into Texas, out of harm's way.

Off the coast of Texas the sea began to boil. The water level in the Houston Ship Channel rose more than seven feet. The roads leading from the exposed coastal towns were jammed with refugees. At Port Arthur 500 home guards patrolled the highways and the levees. At Houston defense guards patrolled the city by automobile; 2,700 more citizens volunteered. Torrential rains fell; closed windows in the editorial office of the Houston Post could not keep out the rain; there was half an inch of water on the floor. Rice farmers along the Texas coast watched the tender stalks--the biggest crop in years, ready to harvest--smashed into flat ruin in an instant. East Texas became a country of blinding rain, flooded roads, broken communications, broken windows, stalled cars, banging signs.' Lights went out, but great gas flares burning in the oil fields stretched out like pennants in the wind.

At Matagorda (pop. 1,250) on Matagorda Bay, the wind hit 100 miles an hour and before long every house was under water. Just as the station agent reported:

"The flood looks bad . . ." the wires went down. When the wind hit Houston's Main Street, it took 15 trucks to haul away the broken plate glass. The ferris wheel at Speer Park folded in the middle. Seven airplanes were smashed at the airfield. In the nearby Goose Creek oil field, eight steel derricks went down. Near midnight, when the trees were down, houses unroofed, power off, a dead calm settled over Houston; it was at the exact center of the hurricane. Then the blast returned.

Next morning Texas added up the six dead; property damage, $25,000,000. The rice crop was ruined, and half the corn and cotton. The storm went roaring up the Mississippi Valley, to end at last in a flurry of disorder in the Great Lakes region.

Even before the hurricane struck, brief storms and unseasonable weather scarred the U.S. In New Mexico, after a cloudburst, a 22-ft. wall of water swept down the mountains in a flash flood, left one dead, eleven missing. New York had the driest September in its history. In New England the drought was so severe that girls at Mount Holyoke College were told to use water sparingly (Harvard undergraduates gallantly offered the girls their showers) and Mount Holyoke students washed their clothes in a campus lake (see cut).

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