CATASTROPHE: Texas Hurricane

The wind that had smashed Cuba (TIME, Sept. 11) reached the south Texas coast one day last week, beginning with fitful, stabbing gusts and a rain that spread out fanwise across the 200-mi. shorefront from Corpus Christi to Brownsville. The gloomy curtain rolled inland over orchards and cotton fields before the lappings and lashings of the wind. Long muddy-foamed sea waves licked angrily at the shore, tumbled into the lowlands. At Corpus Christi a giant steam whistle blew its shrill warning blast at ten-second intervals. Streets were deserted, houses and storefronts had been hurriedly boarded up. The townspeople were huddled in strong structures on the sand bluffs back of Corpus Christi, waiting. Suddenly the black clouds parted, the moon shone through, the rain ceased. There was an ominous silence. Moonlight lay yellow on the rain-soaked trees, rippled and rolled over the cotton fields like a saffron wave as the wind veered and puffed unsteadily. Then the hurricane struck. A shrieking wall of air came out of the Gulf, driving the sea before it. With savage fury it seized the town of Brownsville, shook it to pieces, dumped dozens of wrecked houses into the rising sea-tide. It lifted the roofs off buildings in inland towns, tore out bridges and highways, rolled abandoned automobiles over & over like dice. The hurricane roared up the Rio Grande Valley snuffing out power stations, snapping electric wires, twisting houses, fences, highways and towns into jumbles of ruin. Then it raced across the Rio Grande, dissipated itself in the wastelands of Mexico. In its wake were 22 dead, 1,500 injured.