![]() Harvey, in contrast, made landfall with maximum sustained winds of about 130 mph. 11, 1961, as a strong Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of about 145 mph and a storm surge as high as 22 feet. (AP Photo/Ferd Kaufman)Ĭarla made landfall on Sept. High tides, heavy rains and a break in the river levee inundated much of the city as Hurricane Carla hit the Texas coast. "As soon as we showed the picture to our studio in Houston, the program director Cal Jones and the whole studio group back at Houston said a collective, 'Wow.'"Īn aerial view of a portion of Dow Chemical Company's huge chemical plant at Freeport, Texas, on Sept. After convincing the Weather Bureau that the images wouldn't cause a panic, Rather produced the first broadcast of live radar images showing a hurricane.Īnd like that, Rather had "literally changed the way the world sees hurricanes," one KHOU Channel 11 reporter would write decades later. He took the transparent sheet with the Texas coast and placed it over the radar display of Carla. "On the radar, you do get a sense of how big and dangerous it is, but you don't get a sense of proportion with the Texas landmass for which it's headed," Rather said. There, he asked a meteorologist to draw a scale map of Texas on a transparent sheet of plastic, because the radar screen had no geographic boundaries. "I might as well have been speaking Swahili or High Norse," Rather said, though the program director gave him permission to take a cameraman to the island office. In a 2012 interview with Mediabistro, Rather said that the position "basically meant I was the director of myself because we had no other full-time employees." Long before he took over the anchor chair at CBS Evening News, Rather was the news director at a small TV station in Houston, KHOU Channel 11. That is until a young reporter by the name of Dan Ratherhad an idea. So while the United States Weather Bureau, the precursor to the National Weather Service, issued evacuation orders, many residents didn't have a sense of just how devastating the storm would be, so they remained in the path of the charging storm. But, TV stations back then didn't yet have the technology currently available today to show the full path or strength of a storm. Hurricane Carla, which formed during the 1961 Atlantic hurricane season, was the first tropical cyclone that forecasters could track all the way to the coast using weather radar. However, as Carla grew over the Gulf of Mexico back in September 1961 and strengthened into a major hurricane, people were slow to evacuate. (NOAA)įor more than 60 years, Hurricane Carla has been the benchmark for landfalling hurricanes in Texas - even the devastating Hurricane Harvey in 2017 failed to match Carla's intensity. A National Weather Service technician monitors Hurricane Carla on a WSR-57 radar on Sept.
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