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"They need another boat down behind the cotton shed on East Main . . . Anyone with a wrecker is asked to report to the sheriff's office; he'll be needing you soon." With all roads south of San Antonio impassable and telephone poles uprooted all down the line, the ubiquitous transistor finally proved itself more than a medium for music. Beulah also knocked out power in many communities, and water taps ran dry while gallons cascaded from the sky. Throughout the area, Texas braggadocio never flagged. One Laundromat in Brownsville boasted a sign that read: "Come on, Beulah, we'll dry you out."
Out of Fuel. The state suffered grievous losses nonetheless. Hardest hit were the rich citrus and pepper orchards that stretch from the Gulf on up the Rio Grande and provide Texas with $75 million a year in harvest. This year's crop was to have been the best in seven years; fully 70% of the Lower Valley harvest was wiped out, along with thousands of young trees that will take up to five years to replace. The worst losers are the thousands of Latin American fieldworkers whose fall jobs are gone with the wind.
Moving out onto the barren prairies of the vast King Ranch, Beulah's 250-mile front spun off a hundred snarling tornadoes—one eviscerating the town of Sweet Home, another killing three persons in Palacios. Then, deprived of the warm water that fuels her vast heat engine, Beulah degenerated into a mammoth rainstorm, causing the worst floods in the Rio Grande basin in 34 years. As Texans sloshed out from under Beulah's deluge at week's end, competing with diamondback rattlesnakes for the high ground, they could only look skyward in thanks that more lives had not been lost. Their gaze was fixed somewhere short of the Deity, on cartwheeling, camera-eyed Essa.