The Flood of 1954

From a rooftop in Nuevo Laredo, Mayo Bessan assayed that the International Bridge was gone; that the swollen mile-wide river had claimed hundreds of blocks of both cities

Wednesday, June 30, 1954.

The weather report on San Antonio’s WOAI radio said the worst was over.

Mayo and Robles carried the strong box and the basket to the little patio outside Robles’ back door.

Against the sandstone wall that protected the house from the street, the bougainvilleas drooped into the mud, their usually brilliant blossoms faded and sodden, crushed by the rising water.

The heavy rains to the north and west had ended their fatal siege before reaching Los Dos Laredos. The flooding of these Texas-Mexico border towns came from the overflowing Rio Grande, not from the skies.

The floodwaters engulfed the bridge between Nuevo Laredo and Laredo, stranding Mayo at the Cadillac, so he had spent the night at the modest home of his trusted major domo, Porfirio Robles.

At dawn the men already had been up for hours, drinking coffee, eating toasted, yeasty bollilos slathered with salty butter, watching the lightening sky and listening to the radio for the storm’s next verse.

Mayo trusted Henry Guerra, the San Antonio radio announcer who was a friend of his cousin Tony Bessan. If Henry said the weather was clearing, Mayo was ready to go back to work.

When first light hit the patio, Robles went first, climbing a ladder of uncertain stability up to the flat roof of his house. His ‘patrón,’ Mayo, handed up the box and a basket and followed with surprisingly spry steps for a 69-year-old man with a well-known fear of heights.

On that June morning in Nuevo Laredo, the post-dawn desert heat was atypically heavy, steaming upward from the standing water and drenched earth. By 9 a.m. asphalt was shimmering on the city’s few paved streets. By lunchtime, it would be 100 humid degrees.

The roof was already dry and hot to the touch as they set to work.  Peeling clumps of wet money apart, they dealt the soggy bills into neat rows to roast in the dawning sun.

From their vantage atop Robles’ house, they understood that Henry Guerra was wrong: The worst had just begun.

Looking north toward Laredo, the men saw that the international bridge was gone, swallowed by a river a mile wide. Later they would learn that the bridge was destroyed when it was struck by the floating railroad bridge, which had been hit by the debris of another bridge in Eagle Pass.

The Rio Grande had claimed more than 200 city blocks in Laredo and a like number in Nuevo Laredo. The second-story roof of the aduana, the Mexican customs building, was just visible in the roiling water. Miles away, houses and businesses submerged as the flow backed up into the creeks.

Hundreds of blocks in both cities were drowned, ruined.

No electricity. No running water.

I was five. My sister Clay was three months old.

Our house was on the American side, in the old Montrose neighborhood near the river. There weren’t any close neighbors then, and from our back yard, you could see the ledge of the canyon where the dry Chacón Creek sometimes managed a mild trickle as it meandered through a deep gully 65 feet below.

On this day, El Chacón was a mighty river, eroding the ledge with its new fury.

The roaring was scary enough to send me to my grandmother’s arms. When our nanny Mickey Mendoza arrived and told us about seeing drowned horses and cattle in the floodwater, my father decided it was time for us to leave.

Across the river, in Nuevo Laredo, my grandfather stayed at with Robles and his family for four days, drinking warm Coca Cola and cooking over an open fire on the patio after the power went out.

Our house in Laredo was never endangered, but because of my baby sister’s needs, my mother and my maternal grandmother, Odette Bessan, packed up and took us to our family’s summer home in the Hill Country.

My father’s mother Lil Garner and his sister Jean Claire, who had just graduated from Laredo’s Martin High School, headed to Cuero to stay with one of Lil’s sisters.

“Big Porter” Garner, my father’s father, took over command at the family compound, watching over the three houses, tending the pets and Odette’s chickens.

My father also stayed behind, awaiting marching orders from Mayo.

Mother said she remembers gagging at the sewer stench of the inundated water treatment plant as she packed the Ford station wagon for our retreat.

Ironically, as we escaped to our refuge in western Kerr County near Hunt, we entered the very storm zone that in just two days had pounded the Devils River-Pecos Divide with 38 inches of rain that flooded down the Rio Grande to Los Dos Laredos.

What followed was the largest known flood along the Rio Grande in Texas, according to the federal agency that measures disasters. The impact on life and property intensified because this was before Amistad Dam was finished in 1969 near Del Rio, upstream from Laredo at the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Devil’s River.

The floodwaters destroyed the bridge in Eagle Pass and pushed heavy debris down river to Laredo, where the fast-moving steel and concrete knocked out a railroad bridge and the city’s only bridge into Mexico.

Just six months earlier, the United States and Mexico had celebrated the dedication of the $50 million Falcon Dam project, about 75 miles downstream from Laredo on the Rio Grande. At its dedication some months earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower and Mexican President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines officiated at what Time magazine called the largest, joint border undertaking on record.

Today we talk about “100-year floods” as the literal high-water mark of something terrible. Paleo-flood hydrologic studies of ancient Pecos River floods show that the 1954 flood was on the order of a 2000-year event. That means the odds are 0.0005 of occurrence in a given year.

The rain started in Texas in the late morning of June 24, when Hurricane Alice left the Bay of Campeche and made landfall 20 miles south of Brownsville. The storm moved directly up the Rio Grande Valley to the Devils River-Pecos Divide and rained hard and steady for a couple of days.

The U.S. Geologic Survey says the flood stage in the Pecos River Canyon near Langtry exceeded 90 feet. In some areas, floodwater actually spilled out of the canyon onto the adjacent plateau.

Six days later, some 250 miles downstream in Laredo, the Rio Grande crested at 61.35 feet at 9:30 a.m. on June 30. The river was 15 feet above the international bridge. Damages for this flood were estimated to be approximately $113 million in today’s dollars.

The International Water and Boundary Commission came within six inches of predicting the flood crest but nobody believed them. It turned out to be the worst flood on the Rio Grande since 1932 when water got to the curb of the Cadillac Bar.

***

From the roof, Mayo and Robles surveyed the devastation. As the water receded over the next few days, the muddy, rubble-strewn landscape scarcely resembled what had been the sprawling, bustling border towns, their home.

Later, they waded from Robles’ house through the lapping, smelly murk towards Nuevo Laredo’s central business district. Debris floated in the pooled water, vegetation, broken wooden boxes, garbage and dishes, toys, dead cats and dogs and rats.

Staggered by the destruction along the route, when they reached the Cadillac they gasped in disbelief to see the collapsed walls and the crushed entrance gate to the parking lot. Inside it was even worse, little to salvage in the restaurant where the floodwater had etched its signature about 10 feet up on the painted columns in the middle of the main dining room.

Linen tablecloths wrapped grotesquely around overturned chairs. Buried highball glasses peeped out of the muck. The back bar shelves were bare, no bottles. Nothing.

The kitchen counters were coated in mud. Plates, cups arranged in a filthy tableau crowned by heads of soggy lettuce.

Mayo Bessan’s beloved Cadillac Bar had been swept away.

It would be almost a year before he and Robles served another Ramos gin fizz.