Disasters: The Wild One

No sooner had Hurricane Beulah stormed ashore to ravage the Texas coast than she began to perish, thrashing violently apart in the lush, low valleys of the U.S.-Mexican border. But Beulah died hard. Last week, as her final throes dumped 30-in. cloudbursts on the area, the worst floods in Texas' history came smashing down the usually somnolent Rio Grande River. From upstream Rio Grande City and Camargo down to Brownsville and Matamoros at the Gulf, south Texas and Mexico were wracked by a disaster more devastating than the hurricane.

From the air, reported TIME'S Houston Bureau Chief Ben Gate, the region was a churning, chocolate sea of muck that overwhelmed scores of communities in its path and obliterated every landmark within hundreds of square miles. Around the clock, Army and Coast Guard helicopters plucked wretched, barefoot refugees from the water, leaving their homes and possessions to the floods and their livestock to hovering buzzards. Evacuees far exceeded 100,000 by week's end, and estimates of the homeless went as high as 1,000,000. The full death toll will not be known until the flood subsides, but officials had already counted 44 bodies on both sides of the border.

Fighting for Life. Elaborate engineering works built over decades were disdainfully brushed aside by the rampaging Rio Grande—which is known to Mexicans as Rio Bravo, the Wild River. Flicking away a heavy, 200-ft. weir at the junction of a main emergency floodway and a small subordinate channel, the 44.3-ft. tide poured into Mercedes and Harlingen, where a Spanish-speaking radio station ominously warned: "Get the lame, blind and old people to high land." But there is no high land in Harlingen (pop. 41,100), a citrus-market city 36 ft. above sea level, and the pitifully inadequate Arroyo Colorado became a conduit delivering the full fury of the flood. Beulah had closed the highways north; southward seethed the Rio Grande; eastward lay the Gulf, and in from the west swept the flood. Harlingen was trapped.

Still the city fought for its life. Writing off fashionable Laurel Park's $50,000 homes because the area is lower than the arroyo lip, Harlingen took its stand in the central district, sandbagging dikes across streets wherever crews could find relatively high ground. Bulldozers gouged a 10-ft.-high earth embankment across one stretch, sacrificing the airport to save the city's core. Water mains burst and sewers backed up, spurting like geysers, as exhausted workers clung to the defense perimeter. Armed guards battled diamondback rattlesnakes as plentiful as worms after rain. Bushes turned black with water-shy tarantulas, and the mosquito population exploded beyond control.

A TB hospital was evacuated. A quarter of Harlingen's population was taken to higher ground in outlying areas. Upstream at Mercedes (pop. 10,081), frantic crews dumped twelve-ton bales of car bodies into the gap at the broken weir, but the arroyo swallowed everything with hardly a gulp, and downstream the tide climbed inexorably. Then liquid fingers poked through a levee north of Harlingen, sending a second spearhead of water toward the heart of town. Surrounded, isolated, exhausted, Harlingen was engulfed.