Evil Alice

Hurricane Alice, first of the 1954 season, was gentle as hurricanes go. She barely reached hurricane velocity (80 m.p.h.), and the blow did little damage other than beaching a few shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico. But when she moved inland over parched southwest Texas, her humid clouds cascaded rain in torrents never before recorded. On eroded land, where 1 in. of rain can mean a flash flood, as much as 22 in. fell last week. It was disaster.

Wall of Water. After a night of cloudburst, sheriff's deputies roamed the little (pop. 2,885) cattle town of Ozona, 75 miles north of the border, to cry a warning before dawn. Church bells rang and sirens wailed, but too many people stayed to wait and watch for water in normally dry Johnson's Draw. At 5 a.m. the water came; a 30-ft.-high wall that crashed through town, carried away houses and cars, killed 15 people.

Furthermore, another normally dry gully (Sulphur Draw) flash-flooded the drought-stricken town of Lamesa. Said a survivor. Bible in hand: "The Lord sent the rain, and I don't hold it against Him." Floods from Sulphur Draw and hundreds of other roiling gullies roared into Devils River, the Pecos and other surging streams, which poured into the Rio Grande. The big, sleepy river, bone-dry in places, e.g., Laredo, a year ago, rose as much as a foot an hour, and trouble roared downstream.

River of Mud. At midnight, 19 hours after the Ozona disaster, the Rio Grande crested some 150 miles away at the trans-river cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. Forewarned, the Texans of Eagle Pass had moved out to watch in safety as their homes were flooded. Across the river, the Mexicans of Piedras Negras placed their faith in an earthen dike; they were huddled in their straw-thatched adobe homes when the dike collapsed and the Rio Grande swept over. "I heard hundreds crying for help in the dark,'' said one witness. "You could hear houses collapsing, then screams, then nothing." More than half the town was destroyed.

Some 15,000 homeless people struggled out of the muck to the barren hills beyond; 39 were known dead, 90 were reported missing, and many unrecorded migrants were lost. Downriver at Laredo, the sullen, muddy river crested at 62.2 ft., a good 10 ft. higher than the previous record and 20 ft. higher than the International Bridge, which was swept away.

Next day, just a week after Hurricane Alice blew in from the Gulf, the worst flood in Rio Grande history (153 dead and missing) ended abruptly at the new concrete face of Falcon Dam, 75 miles below Laredo. This week, as the river sank to only 9 ft. at Laredo, flood waters lapped up behind Falcon Dam and assured farmers downstream of irrigation in the searing months ahead. Hurricane Alice, for all her evil, had at last blown some good.

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