On this day in 1909, the storm that had come all the way from east of the Leeward Islands finally dissipated inland over Mexico. Its course was ordinary enough for a hurricane: a crossing of Hispaniola on 23 August, a second landfall in eastern Cuba, then open water, where it strengthened to winds of about 120 miles an hour, over the northern tip of Yucatán, into the Gulf, and ashore in Tamaulipas.
What happened next was a matter of terrain. The Sierra Madre Oriental stands across the path of any wet air pushed west from the Gulf, and mountains wring the rain out of a storm the way hands wring a cloth. The water went where water goes. The Santa Catarina, which runs through Monterrey and is dry stone for much of the year, came up through the city. An estimated four thousand people were killed across northeastern Mexico. It remains the deadliest hurricane in the country's recorded history.
A river bed that is empty most of the year is still a river bed. That is the whole of it. The Wikipedia article is linked below, for anyone who wants the track and the dates.
Kit, the railways felt it too: the bridges into Monterrey were carried away, and the city sat cut off from relief trains for days while crews worked to reopen the line. Help that cannot reach a place is a hard thing to stand beside.
In the weeks after, the feeding was done where there were ovens: parish halls, bakeries, kitchens in houses above the flood line, cooking beans and rice and tortillas in quantity for people who had lost everything. Relief trains brought flour and maize into the city. It is plain work, and it was done.