Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire 45 yrs ago today

hurricane Celia hit us here in corpus.

I was in Jr. Hi in Austin! We hit port Aransas like two weeks later and cleaned up on Specks! Lot o' fish!!! Remember Aransas looked like Hell! There was a big tank at Dow Chemical washed into its partner! Big azz dent! Remember airplanes and boats washed up on the beach!

I was stationed at NAS Kingsville VT-22 when that happened.
Hard to believe that was 45 years ago. Man that makes me old.

i was a 7 yr old kid living in kingsville.

I was living on the Welder Wildlife Refuge a little north of Sinton on the Aransas River. Most of the other grad students there were not from coastal Texas. My wife and I had everyone fill their bathtubs with water and we prepared Coleman lanterns and a few hurricane lamps. Then, we kicked off a hurricane party in the main room of the dormitory. The guys settled down for a poker game that was disrupted after a couple of hours when the plate glass windows and doors on the patio blew in and covered us with shards of glass.

The electricity quickly went off, but our natural gas did not, as the refuge had a line that fed off of one of the gas pipelines on the property. We were able to continue to cook food in the refrigerator and freezers before it spoiled. Next day, I met my dad up near Victoria and traded him two young grand-daughters for a generator that we used to keep what food we had left in the dormitory cold and/or frozen. Our electricity was out for over a month and the dorm was the only building on the place that had any power at all.

The pumps that provided water were down, but there was a large storage tank with lots of fresh water. We figured that, since the static water level in the tank was about 15 ft above ground level, we should be able to gravity feed water into the system even though it would be slow. The problem was that the lower drain plug was installed from the inside. We hooked up a shunt to put water in the lines. Since I was a scuba diver, I was detailed to go in through the small manhole in the top and dive down to pull the plug. It took a couple of tries in the dark tank to find the plug, but we soon had water at low pressure everywhere in the compound.

Things were so disrupted that my partner and I had to scrap the last three months of our research project. Although it was not a large hurricane, it was a very strong one. Power line towers that crossed Corpus Christi Bay that were engineered to withstand 130 mph winds were twisted like twist ties from a loaf of bread. After having experienced Hurricane Carla when we lived south of Houston in 1961, this one didn't seem so bad, but the grad students from New England and New Mexico probably didn't share those sentiments.

With the amount of construction I see on the barrier islands I think we're overdue for another hurricane like Celia.