Hurricane Carla—A Pretty Name for a Bad Storm (September 16, 2025)
by Scott Sosebee
As we draw toward the historical peak of hurricane season in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, it reminds me that Texas has taken the brunt of a number of brutal storms. No one will ever forget the devastation of Harvey as it dumped massive amounts of water on Houston and the Gulf Coast region. Before that, in 2008, Ike came ashore on Port Bolivar and wreaked havoc on a track through East Texas, and Rita, in 2005, did near the same. Others, such as Alicia, Celia, and Beulah, all battered the Texas coast and caused massive amounts of damage. Of course, no list of Texas hurricanes is complete without mentioning the greatest of them all, the Great Storm of 1900 that leveled Galveston and cost over 6,000 lives. One storm, at least in part of its path and development as well as intensity, echoed that Great Storm— was Hurricane Carla, which impacted most of the Texas Gulf Coast in 1961.
Carla developed in the Caribbean Sea basin in September 1961, first observed over two hundred miles southeast of Nicaragua. It was a slow-moving storm, one that gained ferocity as it moved first northeast over the Yucatan, which caused it to make a shift to the northwest. Aerial maps (also something relatively new at the time) showed it to be an unusually large storm, one that covered almost the entire Gulf of Mexico.
The huge cyclone essentially stopped and spun in the Gulf on the morning of September 11 and the sea’s warm waters added to its destructive force. When it began to move again, the center took a more drastic northwestward path—directly toward Matagorda Bay. It crossed the coastline at Port Cavallo in the mid-afternoon of September 11, but the huge storm’s impact was felt over a wide region, from Grand Island, Louisiana all the way to the Rio Grande. From the Sabine River raged,rpus Christi hurricane force winds raged and storm surge caused tremendous damage. It also spawned a number of tornadoes, one which struck directly in the center of Galveston, adding to the destruction. Winds well over one hundred and seventy miles and hour slammed into Port O’Connor and Port Lavaca, where the storm surge reached over twenty-two feet. Texas City was almost completely flooded, while Kemah and Seabrook were almost totally flattened. Buildings disappeared, large numbers of livestock had been killed, and crops ruined.
The devastation was undoutedly massive, but that may not be the most historic aspect of “Carla.” Hurricanes are a constant on the Gulf Coast—they hit in the past and will strike again in the future. But “Carla” was the first large hurricane to crash into a modern, industrial Texas coast. Unlike the past, the area contained large populations, huge modern industrial facilities, and a complex economic structure. Evacuation and recovery from such conditions were not a simple matter of a small population leaving the path and cleaning up debris. Now it had to replace the infrastructure—buildings and industrial plants that cost millions of dollars.
The good news was that the evacuation of people ably proceeded. Utilizing the same procedures in place for a possible nuclear attack, civil defense authorities evacuated more than 300,000 people before the storm struck land. Recovery from the hurricane was another story. The monetary expenditures it would take for a modern economy to recover from such a natural disaster was something that private concerns could not afford to do. Insurance companies, also, did not have such vast resources in their reserves, businesses’ liquid assets were not enough to completely rebuild, and most private individuals did not have the ready cash to resurrect their homes. Governmental relief at that time rested primarily upon the state, and Texas’ treasury and structure precluded it from making the necessary expenditures. Recovery and rebuilding from the storm was slow, painstaking, and generally inadequate. Eventually, only federal intervention was able to help rebuild the devastated Texas Gulf region, but even that was not without difficulty. The United States government, at that time, had no dedicated structure or agency to help with natural disasters. If a region needed relief, that meant a detailed bill had to move through Congress, have debate, and then possible passage. That took time and effort, and it also meant that emergency services from the federal government could not move and help until legislation had been passed. Texas, in 1961, was lucky that the Vice-President of the United States at that time was a Texan. Lyndon B. Johnson helped to get some emergency help to Texas through his influence.
Carla can also take indirect credit for launching the remarkable career of a Texas journalistic icon. When Carla was near landfall, KHOU reporter Dan Rather, a Wharton native who understood such storms, likely became the first television reporter to take the risk of making televised reports of a hurricane as it made landfall. Rather, clad in a raincoat and at times grasping the base of a streetlight to keep from blowing down the road, managed to give Texans—and the nation—its first real “live” glimpse of the force of a hurricane. CBS News would soon summon Rather to its network headquarters and he would go on to a distinguished career.
It would take more Gulf storms (“Camille” and “Celia” particularly) to fully make the impression upon Congress and the American people that a more adequate system had to evolve to protect the economy and the coast from these horrific tropical storms and other natural disasters. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Congress took stop-gap and temporary measures to deal with such situations, but it was not until 1979 that the federal government officially created the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). FEMA certainly has its issues, but it has proven to be a much more effective way to deal with disasters than the haphazard efforts of state and local governments in the past. Hurricane Carla and the devastation it brought was a primary impetus toward creating such an entity.
The East Texas Historical Association provides this column as a public service. Scott Sosebee is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University and the Executive Director of the Association. He can be contacted at sosebeem@sfasu.edu or via www.easttexashistorical.org.