#TBT: Hurricane Anita gave Corpus Christi a good scare in 1977

While hurricane forecasting has improved over the years, there will always be those near-misses. In 1977, Hurricane Anita was one for Corpus Christi.

Anita began as a disturbance off the coast of Africa in mid August, crossing over Florida before hitting the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and becoming a tropical depression on Aug. 29 when it was about 500 miles east-southeast of Corpus Christi. The following day the depression reached hurricane status, the first hurricane of the unusually quiet 1977 season. 

Weather forecasters, city and county officials and residents along the Gulf Coast kept a wary eye on the storm as it continued a slow westerly course. Residents who remembered Celia’s screaming winds seven years earlier stocked up early at area hardware and grocery stores.

“We are having an extremely heavy run on plywood to seal windows,” Handy Dan Do-It-Yourself Home Center manager, Jack Jackson, told the Caller-Times. “People remember Hurricane Celia and seems like they know what to do.”

More:Corpus Christi’s 1919 hurricane brought destruction, but reshaped the city for the future

By Aug. 31, Anita was still sluggishly churning through the gulf, creeping closer to the Texas coast. Forecasters continued to warn South Texas residents to remain alert to the threat.

But as Sept. 1 rolled in, so did high tides, covering area beaches and roads. Low-lying areas had water creeping up to the roadways, like Surfside Boulevard on North Beach, Ocean Drive near the university and the naval air station’s north gate and Laguna Shores in Flour Bluff. Deputies blocked access to Park Road 22 to prevent people getting caught in the strong waves and undertows along the beaches. Nueces County Commissioner J.P. Luby reported many of the beach parks’ trash barrels had been washed into the dunes and a car abandoned on the beach succumbed to the high tides, buried up to its trunk in the sand.

And further inland, a few intrepid surfers even managed to catch some rare rideable waves at McGee Beach in downtown.

At the end of the day, most of Coastal Bend breathed easier as Anita began a southwestern turn and rapidly intensified. South Padre Island hotels and resorts emptied as the hurricane became a Category 5 storm on Sept. 2, then went even further south and made landfall in Tamaulipas, Mexico, leaving nearly 25,000 homeless and killing 11 in mudslides and flooding.

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By Saturday, and the beginning of Labor Day weekend, most residents were returning to their normal plans. Visitors had to contend with some cleanup as the city cleaned debris off the T-heads and traffic signs were washed away on the gulf beaches.

Residents on North Beach who had voluntarily evacuated their homes and apartments to the rising tides were slowly beginning to return, but to some damage. The owner of the Capri Motor Hotel, Witold Carter, lamented the two feet of water that swept through several of his rooms. Insurance would cover the flooding damage, but he lost the Labor Day revenue. 

“There is no storm drainage here and I’ve been fighting City Hall on that for three years,” Carter’s wife, Dorothy Carter told the reporter.

All told, Hurricane Anita ended up as one of Corpus Christi’s near-misses that only those who had clean up can remember. 

Allison Ehrlich writes about things to do in South Texas and has a weekly Throwback Thursday column on local history. Support local coverage like this by checking out our subscription options and special offers at Caller.com/subscribe