August 3, 2015 (Monday)
Today’s date is engraved in my mind, evidently to remain there the rest of my days. It’s the anniversary of Hurricane Celia in 1970–45 years ago. Ancient history, now. The tropics are quiet today. So far this season we’ve had Tropical Storm Bill, which came ashore without doing much for 24 hours; then it rained and rained and rained. This is how our street looked for a while, in the wake of Bill:
A often-heard line from fighting scenes in television films is, “Is that all you got?” So we survey Bill’s floods and ask the 2015 Hurricane season for this area, “Is that all you got?” I certainly hope so. Would be nice to get through the next few months without a hurricane.
Before Celia, Texas had Carla in 1961 and Beulah in 1967, and several tropical storms, a few of which had devastating effects. After Celia, Allen in 1980 hit the valley hard but caused minimal damage in Rockport, Gilbert in 1988 threatened total destruction but went into Mexico. We went to San Antonio during Allen but stayed at home for Gilbert (unwise). In 2004 I began pastoring a church in Houston and saw local newscasts of chartered buses arriving at the Astrodome after Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, saw many abandoned vehicles on Freeways after Rita’s close brush in 2005, stayed up all night with Ike in 2008, and heard many stories of a 5-foot flood in our church buildings during Allison’s meanderings around Texas in 2001. People still talked about Alicia in 1983. There had been memorable storms through the years as I grew up in Houston. I still remember my grandmother placing pots and bowls and buckets all over the house to catch water from the leaks. There were stories galore, like someone having seen a man downtown holding a post and waving in the wind like a flag. There are many more Texas tropical depressions and storms, as well as hurricanes, that did a lot of damage, in the history books.
So, yes, I’ll be very happy if Rockport can say it went through 2015 without a major storm.