Getty Image / William Lovelace/Express/Hulton Archive
63 years ago today, on September 13, 1961, Hurricane Carla made landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane and it went on to become the most powerful hurricane to hit the Lonestar State in the entirety of the 20th century, it also dumped thousands of venomous water moccasins and rattlesnakes into tiny towns leading to numerous bites.
Each year on the anniversary of Hurricane Carla, news stations throughout Texas produce snippets on the historical category 4 hurricane and there are so many fascinating aspects to the storm that over time run the risk of being lost to history. For instance, it was how legendary news anchor Dan Rather got his big break.
At the time, Dan Rather was a young reporter at Houston TV station KHOU Channel 11. When Hurricane Carla hit Texas, Rather brought viewers nonstop weather updates from the Galveston Weather Service which marked the first time in TV history a reporter had brought live weather updates like this. He quite literally changed TV news as we know it during this massive storm that is said to have been so big it inhabited nearly the entire Gulf of Mexico.
Remember Hurricane Carla, Texas, and Deadly Snakes
iStockphoto / johnaudrey
Another incredible detail from this story is how the flooding brought by Hurricane Carla caused thousands and thousands of venomous snakes, rattlesnakes and water moccasins, that were pushed from floodwaters to higher ground into towns where they terrorized locals.
An old-timey video from TexasArchive.org has footage of the snakes being captured by locals, that footage was featured in a segment from Austin’s KVUE News yesterday in remembrance of Hurricane Carla. You can see the massive rattlesnakes strung up around the 1:22 mark in the video:
When Hurricane Carla hit Texas, the storm completely destroyed a total of 1,915 homes, 568 farm buildings, and 415 other buildings. Those are the ones that were completely demolished. Another 50,723 homes, 5,620 farm buildings, and 10,487 other buildings suffered damage from the hurricane.
With all of that in mind, and the fact that there were thousands of venomous snakes flooding small towns as they fled flood waters, it’s a miracle that only 43 people lost their lives as a direct result of this hurricane.
As a born and raised Floridian, I’m a de-facto weather nerd. It’s in our blood and something we’re forced to pay attention to and come to be deeply fascinated by over time. That said, I feel like I have a major blindspot in my storm knowledge over hurricanes prior to the 1980s. I’d never heard of Hurricane Carla until that KVUE clip above which has sent me down a rabbit hole learning about this storm.
The weather today in Dallas is a balmy high of 95 and low of 73. I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around how people made it through storm recovery without air conditioning which only became common in the United States in the 1960s.
The massive rebuilding projects that were launched due to Hurricane Carla had people working in brutal Texas heat combined with the menacing explosion of mosquitoes that comes after flooding in the South. Add in the thousands of venomous snakes and this really sounded like a nightmare of biblical proportions.