Hurricanes past

[mellicious]

I said I'd talk about Hurricane Carla, and if I don't do it while I'm thinking about it I never will. The thing is, my mother was pregnant with my sister, who had been due the end of August (1961). I was a toddler, so I don't remember this, myself, and I don't have my dad handy to ask him more, but I asked him again the other day, and apparently what happened was the hurricane started in (it was at Matagorda, southwest of us) and stalled. And what Daddy told me the other day - and he didn't even have to stop and think about it, he remembered - he said they had hurricane-force winds that lasted from Saturday night until sometime Tuesday. It was just about this time of year. I believe the sequence of things was that they had taken to my mom to the hospital and then they had sent her home again because she wasn't actually in labor, and then in the middle of the storm she started having labor pains again, and they drove her back to Texas City - at least 15 miles or so - to the hospital, and she stayed the rest of the storm in the hospital. And my sister wasn't born until it was all over, on the 15th. So Monday is her 47th birthday.

We started talking about Carla earlier this week when it looked like Ike was going to come in down at Matagorda, just like Carla did. Carla was a stronger storm - it had been a category 5 when it was out in the Gulf, and was still a 4 when it came in - but apparently not much bigger, and Ike for some reason had this really bad tide/storm surge effect. (Although they have said today that the worst of the storm surge was east of us, back toward High Island and Beaumont.) I'm not sure when was the last time a storm came directly over Galveston like this one did. Alicia in 1983 came over the West End, which is still much more lightly populated than the other end, even nowadays. Since the 1900 storm, I know there were another couple of bad ones, one in 1915 and I think one in the '40s, and then Carla and Alicia. But I don't know exactly about the tracks of those other ones.

Comments

[ursulahitler.livejournal.com]

Jesus, hon... You could write a novel about how these damn storms have plagued you through the years.

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

But see, I haven't really been through that many, myself - at least, not that I remember. I was too little to remember Carla, and supposedly there was some other storm when I was little where I slept in a dresser-drawer - I have no idea which storm that would've been, but I had to have been pretty little, if that's true. I missed Alicia because I was in Austin. I have lots of stories of near-misses, but no real personal ones until now. This is just the way it is when you live in hurricane country, really. Lots of scares, but the real thing is pretty rare.