By the beginning of the century, most of the older cities and port towns in this region had been hit repeatedly by tropical blasts. Insecure buildings had been eliminated. From bitter experience, the natives knew what to do when a storm threatened. They had built houses and other structures to withstand hurricane winds, placing nearly all of them above the highest storm tides within their memories. Down in the hurricane belt of Texas and Louisiana, a sixty-penny nail was known as a “Burrwood finishing nail.” The town of Burrwood, at the water’s edge on the southern tip of Louisiana, had no frame buildings that had survived its ravaging winds and overwhelming tides except those which were put together with spikes driven through heavy timbers. Learning to deal with hurricanes takes a lot of time. Most places on these coasts have a really bad tropical storm about once in ten or twenty years. And so it happened that while the population was increasing rapidly in the years from 1920 to 1940, many thousands of flimsy buildings were constructed in the intervals between hurricanes. Too many were built near the sea, where they would be wrecked by the first big storm wave. To build near the water is tempting in a hot climate. And so it happened that after 1920, widespread destruction of property and great loss of life attended the first violent blow in many of these rapidly growing communities. Newcomers—and there were many—didn’t know what to do to protect life and property. After the first calamity, they were alarmed by the winds which came with every local thundershower and they were likely to flee inland in great numbers whenever there was a rumor of a hurricane. Here they became refugees, to be fed and sheltered by the Red Cross and local welfare organizations. By the middle thirties, this had become a heavy burden on all concerned. To get things under control, local chapters of the Red Cross were formed and other civic leaders joined in seeing that precautions were taken when required, and panics were averted at times when no storm was known to exist. But when warnings were issued by the Weather Bureau, coastal towns were almost deserted. The greatest organized mass exodus from shore areas in advance of a tropical storm occurred in Texas, in 1942. On August 30, a big hurricane with a tremendous storm wave struck the coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston. It had been tracked across the Caribbean and Gulf, and ample warnings had been issued. More than fifty thousand persons were systematically evacuated from the threatened region and though every house was damaged in many towns, only eight lives were lost.