.jpg)
Talking Texas History
Talking Texas History
Hurricanes and Texas History
How have hurricanes shaped the history, culture, and political landscape of Texas? Join us on this episode of Talking Texas History as we unravel the profound effects these powerful storms had on the history of the Lone Star State. This a must-listen episode for anyone interested in starting to understanding the multifaceted impact of weather on Texas.
This podcast is not sponsored by and does not reflect the views of the institutions that employ us. It is solely our thoughts and ideas, based upon our professional training and study of the past.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Talking Texas History, the podcast that explores Texas history before and beyond the Alamo. Not only will we talk Texas history, we'll visit with folks who teach it, write it, support it, and with some who've made it and, of course, all of us who live it and love it. This is Talking Texas History. Welcome to another edition of Talking Texas History. I'm Gene Preuss.
Speaker 1:I'm Scott Sosby. Gene, you're sitting in Houston right now. It's just had the devastation of Hurricane Beryl that came through Everybody out of power and everybody angry at Centerpoint Energy. So we should talk about hurricanes, shouldn't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know B, you know barrel. I think that was an apt name because it barreled through the town uh texas yeah, east texas. So, um, you know, scott, if we we as historians, as as academic historians, when we're teaching our classes, how often do we bring up weather?
Speaker 1:The only time I can think of is, of course, the hurricane of 1900 is a weather-related thing, and I guess we can call probably the dust storm the dustbowl era. Other than that, we probably don't talk about weather that much.
Speaker 2:Right, we don't talk about weather, and right, we, we don't talk about weather. Uh, and, and clearly it had an effect and and um, I don't know many of our colleagues even who look at weather in history, but I think that there's a rich body of information and you and I were talking about this earlier. It does affect us. It affects us, as you were saying, everybody's mad at center point right now. The governor is saying that he's going to look deep into it and do some investigations. I mean, it's a political issue, it becomes, it's in politics, gets involved, it affects people's lives. So there's that social and culture. Certainly. I mean, look our friends just to the east of us, in Louisiana, there is a culture built around hurricanes. So we I think this is something, an aspect that we, as historians, often overlook, and so let's take a look at tropical storms or hurricanes or cyclones, whatever you want to call them In Texas.
Speaker 1:That's right and it's a topic that maybe somebody should tackle this as a research project. Now I was amazed when I started looking into this, getting ready to do this. According to David Roth, who's a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, he said since records have started to be really kept in the 1850s, texas has been the location of a tropical cyclone on 120 different occasions. 120 tropical cyclones since the 1850s, that fit texas, 64 of them hurricanes. Only florida has more than that. Of course, like we've talked about earlier, that's because both florida and texas are big and stick out, so that's why they get a lot of hurricanes like you put yourself out there, you're gonna get hit, right you're gonna get hit.
Speaker 1:That's right, but of course hurricanes have been hitting texas in that area for a long time. The Spanish took note of a few hurricanes that came through and a lot of them had an effect on history. Hurricanes have an effect on history. Think about the hurricane that the Spanish noted off the Texas coast in 1527 that hit the Panfilo Narvaez expedition 200 people scuttled their shirts, and that's why Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca came to Texas and made his famous track across Texas.
Speaker 2:Right, well, you know, and and actually the, the Navarro's expedition and Cabeza de Vaca, I mean there were several hurricanes right and apparently it was a big hurricane season.
Speaker 1:Either that or the same.
Speaker 2:Either that or the same hurricane hit him twice just hung out there waiting and I didn't get him the first time, so he came back. Uh, and we've seen hurricanes do that right. That one over florida last year was it that went back and forth over the they'll come over and then cross back and come back. Yeah, well and and we've had some in Texas that have bounced along the Gulf Coast.
Speaker 1:Well, there's been some that go right up the whole coast. One of the famous hurricanes, carla. Carla basically did a loop in the Gulf, came near Texas shore, looped back out and then came back in Harvey. You know, that's the big 2017 storm that was so terrible for houston and caused the devastation. That was one of its problems, if we'll remember that. It kind of came inland and came back out. After it came down around rockport and then built up some more energy and that's when it came on again and dumped all that rain in houston. But we talk about influences in the history. Think about harvey, think about how much influence that we don't know yet, but how much that will probably have later on this barrel coming through so many things.
Speaker 2:So that is an important and important uh aspect we probably should take into consideration so you, you were saying that we've, whenever you were looking at this, so we've had hurricanes that have gone back into the 50. I'm certain that there must have been hurricanes long before that right, and that we don't even know about.
Speaker 1:Well, absolutely, I mean the word hurricane that we get it. I mean, depending on which version that you believe, that comes from the word, it comes to English through Spanish. There's one version that said the Spanish got it from the Taino indigenous people in the Caribbean. There were Hurrican, which the Spanish spelled H-U-R-I-C-A-N, supposedly meant their god of evil, the Caribbean god of evil, really Wow. But then the Maya. The Maya had a word. They probably got from the Taino, or vice versa, also that they came their word Huracan, h-u-r-i-c-a-n. No, h-u-r-a-c-a-n, I'm sorry, that was their god of storm, rain and storm water and fire. So that's where the word comes from, spanish, and Spanish it's still, you know, huracan. That's what it still is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it it had. Certainly if the Mayan and the Taino and those older cultures, it certainly was impressed them enough that they gave it a personality, they gave it a name, they made it a character right in their, in their cosmology. That so, yeah, I mean what?
Speaker 1:the structures they built right, the philopola that comes from us all are all built to withstand windstorms. Only really ignorant 20th century Americans were dumb enough to say let's build big cities right on the coast where storms come. And that's one reason why we have so much devastation from 20th and 21st century storms. It's because we chose to build these big, huge, industrial, modern structure cities right on the coastline where hurricanes come. It's not really very smart.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we do this a lot. I mean, I think I grew up in New Braunfels, you know, and we've had. We sit on two rivers, and so one of my earliest memories when I was a kid was the Great Flood of 1972. And, interestingly enough, when people rebuilt after that flood, where did they build some of the nicest homes?
Speaker 1:in that floodplain.
Speaker 2:We do this. You know, when I came through here in Houston, there were people living just underneath the aquifer, a reservoir, and it's almost like we think that we can control the environment, we can control the weather, the environment, we can control the weather. And, um, you're talking about droughts and, and one of the things hurricanes do cure droughts. Uh, they, they, they come along and and uh, throughout texas history there have been several droughts and what ended those were hurricanes coming across either south texas or even up in west texas. The other thing we don't think about hurricanes is they don't end when they hit the land no, no, no, it's just.
Speaker 1:It's like the amazing. There's a uh in 1978, uh hurricane, uh, seal, uh forget the name of it. Was in 1978 anyway. It actually went ashore and as far west as albany, west Texas 32 inches of rain as a result of that storm. And that's just amazing that that would be the case. Del Rio a couple of times by storms in the 20th century we know it was flooded. Del Rio is a long ways inland to get storm-plugged this.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, uh, del rio is a long ways inland. Uh, to get storm plug this. Oh yeah, well, if we look at we'll talk about this later on with the galveston hurricane, you know kind of the big the big daddy of the hurricanes as far as texas history is concerned. Um, that thing continued on up almost to new york yes, and was terrible.
Speaker 1:Dropped rain, allpped rain all over in the Appalachian area. Drowned people all over the place. It was a devastating tropical storm.
Speaker 2:So I think that there's a lot of material and we can only scratch the surface here and, as you say, we need to maybe come up with some ideas and maybe encourage other students and scholars who might be interested in looking at the weather to look at this. So tell us a little bit, since you've done some work on hurricanes and you were talking about some of the history of them Is it a hurricane or is it a cyclone?
Speaker 1:Well, a tropical cyclone is the meteorological function of these things as they form, as they twirl like a cyclone, the term, of course, from that a hurricane gets it termed a tropical cyclone becomes a hurricane when it reaches over 80 miles per hour of sustained winds. If it reaches over 35 miles an hour it's a tropical storm. And this is in the Atlantic Basin. They have different names for them in the Pacific Basin of course, but we're dealing in Texas with these tropical cyclones that become tropical storms and hurricanes and I looked it up and said 120 of those since the 1850s had come ashore in Texas. The highest wind ever recorded by a hurricane in Texas was 1970, celia at Aransas Pass, over 180 miles per hour. There may have been other storms that had higher winds but the anometers broke before they could record them, but they got that one recorded at 180 miles an hour.
Speaker 1:Amelia I saw that 1978 storm Amelia that hit the little town of Bluff in the middle part of the coast. Forty six inches of rain with Amelia, and Amelia went on as far as Albany right just around Abilene in west Texas had 32 inches of rain from Amelia as it went in. So a lot of devastating effects are going on of these storms. Like you said, that keep going, but we've had a lot of very, very famous storms right in Texas that affected a lot of things other than that. Of course we can't, but you can't talk about hurricanes right unless you talk about Indianola and the great devastation of Indianola.
Speaker 1:Indianola was the second largest port in Texas. It's where Stephen F Austin brought in most of the people that settled in his colony. Where Stephen F Austin brought in most of the people that settled in his colony, indianola would have probably grown to be a great Texas coastal town, but two hurricanes hit it one in September 1875, which destroyed three-quarters of the city. But they didn't get the message Again. Hey, let's build a town right on the Gulf to be a port. They built the town back on this and then in 1886, a huge other storm came around and completely devastated the town and it wasn't rebuilt. So there's one that really affected a great bit of Texas history by any other storm.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, you think about that and I bring this up in my classes sometimes when I think about it. But those Think of how Texas history would be different, think about how current conditions will be different if Indianola had remained the big town. It would have been the Galveston, it would have been the Houston of its. Of. Maybe today, right, that that was the big port, that's where everybody was coming in of. Maybe today, right, that was the big port, that's where everybody was coming in. And, as a result of the destruction of Vendianola, galveston and some of the other up coastal places become the ports. Or in Corpus, right.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:They benefited from. Well, I hate to say this, they benefited from the destruction of Indianola.
Speaker 2:And you know, I thought about that because when I was growing up as a kid, my dad loved to go fishing. We would go down to the coast once a year and we would go to Indianola, or you know, indianola, and it was nothing. It was nothing there, um, and so I always, you know, when I learned that that was the big port at one time, it just, uh, it struck me that. Um, you know that when I was growing up in the seventies, we would go down. It was ruins.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it still is. You go down there, you know. You look, you go down to their uh in Calhoun County I believe it was where Indianola is. When you, when you look out in there, if it's low tide, you can catch the foundations of the buildings still out there. Now they're fairly well off. You know, talk about how the coastlines change. Those foundations are now pretty well off the what would be the coast today. They're set out in the water, you know. But you're talking about wait, storms and things affect history and people that take advantage. Of course, in texas the big notable storm is the great storm of 1900 that hit galveston over 8 000 people dead. The great, fantastic book If you haven't read it you should read it on Isaac's Storm by Eric Larson. Eric.
Speaker 1:Larson yeah, it was so fantastic and all, but the storm surge of that thing might have approached 20 feet on this and killed so many. But think about the history of devastation. It is that storm that spurred the building of the Houston Ship Channel and Houston becoming a huge port, and they actually took advantage of it to take these things away from Galveston, and also it built the Galveston Seawall and we have that situation. So think about how Galveston was. You know, wall Street of the South and all this, and Galveston still, to some extent, has still never recovered from the storm of 1900s.
Speaker 2:You know I was at a couple of stories about the Galveston hurricane. Of course there's many right, there's a whole museum, there's movies, there's the Galveston. The historical society has done a great job of trying to recover a lot of the history. But here in downtown Houston there's a church, I mean right in downtown Houston, a Catholic church. It collapsed the church and picked up the bell tower, the belfry and the roof and moved it. And you know, I was talking to somebody who's a historian of that church and he had pictures and was just, and I, you know, again, a lot of times when we talk about history we just look at the immediate effect or the event and we don't look at what happened elsewhere.
Speaker 2:You know, scott, talking about one thing you brought up and I want to circle back to this. We spent time in Lubbock and one of the meteorologists in Lubbock, you knowock, designed a tornado force scale. There's also a hurricane force scale and you were talking about that one wind speed being up to 200 miles per hour. So let me just tell everybody here hurricane wind scale Okay, category one, 74 to 95 miles per hour, and I think that's not a lot. I mean, we were in Lubbock.
Speaker 1:That's a spring day in Lubbock sometimes. I know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we had 70,. You know, one of the last years I was there, in 99, I think they had a week of 70 mile per hour winds, it seemed like, or at least two or three days During the dust storm, they had 74 mile an hour winds. It's hurricane force winds, category 2, 96 to 110. That's pretty stout. Category 3, 111 to 129. Now when we had the DeRay show a couple of weeks ago, they came through Houston in our backyard we had winds going up to about 130.
Speaker 2:So that's Category 3, Category 4.
Speaker 1:Don't take out your fence, Phone it Gene.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really amazing because it snapped that fence back and forth like a pancake. Um 130 to 156 is a category four, and 157 or better is a category five, but that 200 mile an hour winds, um, I mean god, that should have a category of its own you know it should.
Speaker 1:Of course, hurricanes. The big thing about hurricanes is the water that comes, and hurricanes are the rain, the rain, and they're massive storms.
Speaker 1:They're huge and they, you know, we think of them, they we. Sometimes we think, well, the eye came on the eye, small, but you know, hurricane force, wind, winds can, can spread 50, 60 miles out from the center and it swirls around. And that's the thing about a hurricane and it's so devastating. Most of the destruction comes from the water, from storm surge and the rain. Of course, the Bula barrel that just came through when it hit the coast it was wind damage that was so bad because Bula had some pretty strong winds as much. It didn't kick the storm surge up as much. Uh about things.
Speaker 1:But again, uh, we were talking about history, 1961, september of 61, hurricane carla that comes ashore in texas. Uh, it's one of the largest ever hit tex, texas in modern history and it came in with a massive storm that came ashore, spawned tornadoes in Galveston, killed livestock and people, hundreds of people and thousands of head of livestock as it came aboard. It's the first real hurricane that hits in the gulf. That hits after we built modern structures and modern infrastructure and modern industrial and we had all those refineries and various other petrochemical factories right down there on the coast which was not very smart to build them there and it just it flattened them when it came aboard.
Speaker 1:And the thing about carla is that this you know before that states had to. You know recovery was left up to the states. The federal government generally did not get involved and if they did, it had to be a long political process of passing bills in congress. The state of texas could not afford to rebuild after carla. They couldn't afford to do this because it's really a modern storm that came ashore and that's one of the big things about now is the billions and billions of dollars of destruction.
Speaker 1:Carla is one of the impetus. Although it takes it 15 more years. Carla is one of the first impetus that we get FEMA and why FEMA is developed as a federal program because of Texas couldn't afford to rebuild after Carla and if Lyndon Johnson had not been vice president and so influential, who knows whether they would have got the funding from the federal government to actually rebuild from that? Carla also spawned the career of Dan Rather, of course very famous, as he was a young reporter from Wharton working for a Houston television station, and he went down to report on Carla and that gave him notoriety in. Cbs, hired him and the rest is history.
Speaker 2:That is incredible, Carla. You're talking about 43 deaths as a result of Carla. You had, they say, $325 million in damages, but that was 1971 money.
Speaker 1:That was some serious. That was when, like old people like say, that's when it was real money, right, I say, I say old people like we're not old people.
Speaker 2:Well, we weren't then, yeah, I mean, but it's just amazing and I was looking at the map of of where the rainfall had you were saying you know 100 mile. That was rainfall from Carla stretched all the way from the tip of texas in the united in the united states. Right, because it it came through other areas. Right, it came through other countries, from the tip of the united states to canada up past lake superior. It was a massive storm. Student working on a project on these hurricanes. There is a lot of material outside of texas. Although you know it's.
Speaker 1:It's maybe not as important to texas historians but it certainly is impactful to, uh, to history yeah, here at talking texas history, we're provincial son of a guns, we don't really care about what happens. Well, again, all these things that Houston right now has very stringent codes about skyscrapers it didn't protect it a whole lot from the derecho, of course, but there's very stringent codes about building these things A lot of that comes about because of various storms that come through. A lot of that comes about because of various storms that come through, but, most importantly, ones we could probably remember August of 1983, alicia came through, hurricane Alicia and blew out so many of the big glass things in the Houston downtown area when it came through and dumped a massive amount of rain and did damage on that. You know Houston sits in a plane. It's one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States to hurricane damage because of not just where it sits real close to the coast, but it also sits in a depression.
Speaker 1:Water pools and floods Houston well, you know, you live there it rains an inch and a half and the whole city is flooded and comes to a stop. Because of that, but also because Houston doesn't have building codes and stringent building codes enough to withstand some of these damages that could come. For example, you don't build anything in Miami that's not hurricane-proof because they know they come through. That same thing doesn't apply in Houston. Our codes are a little lax on that. And now, maybe barrel will change things when you have this thing uh, a barrel. And then, of course, harvey, which is so devastating. Harvey was a freak of nature, though the way it happened. I mean, there's no way to actually prepare for something like harvey, where a tropical cyclone becomes basically stationary over a huge population area and dumps 17 to 18 inches of rain in two days, and it's just oh. But of course, again, you're talking about the reservoir. People built housing developments in the middle of a reservoir that was built in the 1940s to keep downtown Houston from flooding.
Speaker 2:Who the hell let that happen? Yeah it, you know, harvey. When it came through I had friends who got on the highways and sat there for an entire day and not moving, and it's one of the reasons why, now you know, everybody you know says oh well, Houston, you've got 10 lanes of interstate 10 and now the expansion of Interstate 45 and widening those is to accommodate people evacuating. You know you're talking about FEMA and helping people recover and institutions like the American Red Cross, who also service people during the natural disasters occur. But also think about highway construction and think about things like widening the roads. There was a hurricane that I don't know if it was a hurricane or a tropical storm early in the 1990s.
Speaker 1:Hurricane or a tropical storm, um early in the 1990s and and um it, it took out. All of it may have been, it may have been allison.
Speaker 2:it was also was 89, wasn't she? Uh, 2001. It took out banking across the United States because, as it turned out, a lot of banks were routing their ATMs and electronic banking through underground tunnels under Houston and when those flooded and it wiped them out, the electronics out, it affected banks all across the US.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is a story right there.
Speaker 1:It is. I think, yeah, and that's the things that hurricanes in the modern time, you know, we've talked about. Yeah, they used to hit, quite often hit the Caribbean, but you didn't build right there, you didn't put all this infrastructure. But we do. Now we have. I mean, what is it? I don't know the exact number, but I remember reading one time in the United States over 60% of the population in the United States lives within 50 miles of the coastline of the nation. Think about that. That is amazing. Now, of course, a lot of that's in California and on the Pacific Northwest. They don't have to worry about hurricanes, they have to worry about tsunamis and earthquakes destroying everything. But how sustainable is that for us? Particularly? We talked about, uh, climate change, uh, bringing on these more powerful hurricanes. I mean, barrel grew into a category five hurricane at one point in june. That doesn't happen. That just doesn't happen. Uh, it hasn't happened before. On this, what's going to happen in september?
Speaker 2:yeah, I don't. Yeah, that's when a lot of the hurricanes hit, you know. And one thing that we off that I've just come to notice because living here in houston I had never known um, that saharan dust blows in and it modify or mollifies a lot of the hurricane activity, because this is where a lot of tropical storms start, is in Africa, off the coast of.
Speaker 1:Africa. Yeah, there's those tropical waves that come off the coast of West Africa and we get that dust, that comes in and it calms it down a little bit.
Speaker 2:And it calms it down a little bit.
Speaker 1:And you know how long has this Saharan dust been blowing over to the United States and over places like Texas, enough to create a little Africa, I suppose in Texas, and that's probably why we have oil.
Speaker 1:Yeah, could be there's. You know lots of things. Well, oil is another thing, where we discovered oil, where so much of our oil infrastructure is and the refineries are right on the coast. What's going to happen when, finally, that big, huge Category 5 comes slamming into the upper Texas Gulf Coast and takes out? I mean, what is it? Three of the four largest refineries in the world are on the Texas upper Gulf coast.
Speaker 2:Well, what was the last time the United States built a refinery?
Speaker 1:I don't know A long time ago. I don't have that exact number, but it's been quite a long time.
Speaker 1:It's like 40 years ago, I think Something like that, yeah, and they take all those out and what's? You know, that's what's going to happen to our world energy supply when that happens. Has anybody thought about that? Or is that just something that's going by the wayside? Weather does make a big difference and we should look more into it. So that's what this is, gene a clarion call for scholars to say listen, we need to look at the effects of weather on history and how it's changed things. So some young person out there looking for a project that's listening to Talking Texas History? You're probably not, but if you are, grab this as a topic and get hold of it. It'd be a great topic for somebody to research.
Speaker 2:In fact, scott, I think what we ought to do next and we talked about some hurricanes in general upcoming episode let's do a follow-up where we pick each of us our five most significant hurricanes so we're going to rate them okay or we'll do that, we'll.
Speaker 1:We'll go and do our due diligence and we'll come back and do that.
Speaker 2:That's a deal yeah, there's a lot to think about, and I mean, we just, like I said, we just scratched the surface on things that are of historical significance, and I would like to see some more people do some deep dives on this.
Speaker 1:I would too. All right, gene, that sounds fantastic. You know we don't have guests, people just have to listen to us talking. That may you know we might only have people. That only made through five minutes of this right.
Speaker 2:Right. So if you were to ask us what do we know? Is that we know we should also have some guests on.
Speaker 1:We should also have some guests. What do we know? We know we don't know a whole lot. That's what we know. That's why we're asking people what they know because we don't know a whole lot and Because we don't know all of them, and so we can start plagiarizing and cribbing off of them right. Expand our knowledge.
Speaker 2:All right, scott. Well, have a good one and I'm glad you guys are safe. Okay, bye.
