The 1964 Fall of the Erath Water Tower

Eight men died when Erath's 125-foot water tower fell on City Hall at about 5:15 p.m. on October 3, 1964, as Hurricane Hilda crossed Louisiana. City Hall was the Civil Defense headquarters, and the men had gathered to carry out rescues and clear trees from power lines. They were Joe Brown, Vernice Broussard, Duffy Broussard, Eutis Menard, Otto Bourque, Clifton Dugas, Felix Dubois and Scotty Bernard, 19, the youngest. Six men survived. Martial Broussard was pinned under steel for about 45 minutes. A multiple funeral Mass was held on October 5.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.1 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 14 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 17 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 17 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.

More markers nearby

• Private Farrell J. Vice — steps away
• First Lt. Brandon R. Dronet — steps away
• The Erath Sugar Company — steps away
• Acadian Prairie Settlement — 1.1 mi