Even More About Celia

This is an architect's rendering of the Driscoll Hotel in Corpus Christi.  It doesn't show all the other buildings around it, but it is pretty accurate. 

If you zoom in on the top of the picture

you will see that the top story had a Spanish tile roof that sloped toward the center, making the actual top of the hotel much smaller than the bottom.  That thing sticking up might have been the antenna for our FM radio station - that didn't exist at the time of the drawing, but it's about where it was located. Located, that is, before the hurricane - afterwards, we found the top third of our tower impaled in the street two blocks away. I have some stories about that, but I'll save them for later.

You can't see it here, but behind the hotel proper was an attached parking garage.  It was three stories tall, and on the roof of the garage was the hotel swimming pool. We had a great bird's eye view of this area from our studios in the hotel.

Honey had worked all morning at the blood bank, drawing blood and getting it distributed to local hospitals.  Just before things got too dangerous, they shut down and she came to the hotel.  As tenants, KTOD had several assigned parking spaces in the hotel garage, and I had her take mine.  I ended up parked on the street just outside the garage.  Her 68 Camaro was untouched by the storm, but my car, a 64 Chevelle, ended up with no glass and no paint on the driver's side.

As I mentioned, we had a great view of the pool from our studio windows.  Once the storm hit, the winds created a vortex over the pool, and we watched as the pool furniture - chaise lounges and tables - circled the pool then went straight up and out of sight.  Then all the water was sucked out of the pool, followed by the glass windows and doors of the cabana units surrounding the area.

The only way from the cabanas to the main hotel was across the pool area, and there were guests in several of those rooms.  The hotel advised them to stay in their bathrooms, and when the eye of the hurricane passed, they were all rescued.  Amazingly, no hotel guests were injured.