1949 Texas hurricane
Category 4 Atlantic and Pacific hurricane in 1949
The 1949 Texas hurricane was a tropical cyclone that crossed over from the eastern Pacific to the Atlantic, contributing to extensive flooding in Guatemala and impacting East Texas. Forming in the Pacific Ocean on September 27, the storm meandered across Central America and southern Mexico as a tropical depression. Rainfall from the developing storm helped exacerbate a flooding event over southern Guatemala that may have killed as many as 40,000 people. The storm then crossed into the Gulf of Mexico on October 1 and began to intensify. It ultimately peaked as a high-end Category 2-equivalent hurricane on the modern-day Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale and made landfall near Freeport, Texas, on the morning of October 4. It rapidly weakened after moving inland and dissipated several days later. Damage from the storm was moderate, although the hurricane temporarily cut off the city of Galveston from the mainland. Rice crops suffered extensive damage in Texas and Louisiana, with losses estimated at up to $10 million (equivalent to $135 million in 2025). Three fatalities are attributed to the hurricane.
Meteorological history
The origins of the 1949 Texas hurricane are unclear due to the complex weather pattern that persisted over southern Mexico and Central America around the time of its formation.
“1949 Texas hurricane” enters the record as category 4 Atlantic and Pacific hurricane in 1949. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Texas, hurricane and Category can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q207619. The first chronological checks are 1949 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “1949 Texas hurricane” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.