Remembering Carla
Reader Doug Bennett sent us his memories of Hurricane Carla, which struck the Central Texas coast on September 11, 1961. First a few notes…
Carla is the eighth strongest US landfalling hurricane with a central pressure of 931 millibars. Top winds at landfall were 150 mph (category four.) Carla was a category five over the Gulf before landfall.
I love the blog and all the information we have, but there was something very real about teletype reports…here is one from the Weather Bureau Office in Corpus Christi at the height of the storm…
It made landfall near Port Lavaca, where wind gusts to 170 mph were reported. Storm surge was 22 feet. Forty three people died, thrity one of them in Texas.
The 1961 season is the eighth most active from a standpoint of Accumulated Cyclone Energy. There were eight hurricanes that year, but seven of them were mahor hurricanes, the second most on record. There were two category five hurricanes (Carla and Hattie.) There were a total of eleven named storms.
Doug’s memories…
Living that close to the gulf (about 15 miles), most people were told to move to shelters about 2 days before it hit. I remember listening to the radio at the church with about 100 other people and hearing that Carla was moving very slow and gaining strength.
Just to give you a better idea about the distance between Corpus Christi and Port Lavaca (Carla’s landfall), they are about 80 miles across water. When it hit Port O’Connor, in Corpus, our church lost the steeple and there was a very large mesquite tree (about 3 1/2 feet) across that was split in half from the winds. We had put everything in the house on cinder blocks in the house, we had about 6 inches of water in there. Electrical service was out for about 4 days, trees were down, and of course the water. Across the ship channel was North Beach (just another part of the town right on the bay), it was flooded, buildings were gone. The National Weather Service was at the airport and their wind vane broke at a gust of 140 mph we were told. The wind and rain lasted for 12 hours, we still had some rain, just not strong wind after that.
I lived in Victoria, Texas, later on and they have a section of the local paper about Carla hitting that area each year. Victoria is about 40 miles from the coast, they had 100 mile per hour winds with gusts to 140, the newspaper tried to get to Port Lavaca or Port O’Connor, but could not due to the damage on the highways.
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Bill Murray is the President of The Weather Factory. He is the site's official weather historian and a weekend forecaster. He also anchors the site's severe weather coverage. Bill Murray is the proud holder of National Weather Association Digital Seal #0001 @wxhistorianSubscribe
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