re: 60 years ago today - Hurricane Betsy strikes Southeast Louisiana

Around the same age at the time of Betsy. I can remember all the downed pecan trees in our yard, tin from garages everywhere, and wading through leaves waist deep out in the yard.

I wasn't born until 1977...but my dad was a kid in the Baton Rouge area when Betsy hit, and Betsy was always the hurricane he talked about as being the worst he'd ever experienced.

I remember Hurricane Betsy well. My first big storm. My 3 day newborn brother and Mom were in Oschner Hospital Jefferson. My dad road the levee with his pirouge in the truck. Paddled from the levee to the hospital to get them.

People didn’t have generators like today. ( no China trade at that time ).
A man at the end of the street had one. He would freeze ice cubes overnight. He would bring us a bowl ( pre-Ziplock bags, we didn’t have those ) of ice cubes every afternoon. She would make a pitcher of ice water. That was the best motherfricking water I ever drank in my life.

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Isn’t it pretty odd that it turned SSW this late in the season?

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I assume there was an unusually strong front that passed to the north of Betsy at about the time she looked to be heading away from Florida.

Betsy felt the front and was almost pulled away northward, but a strong high pressure built behind the front and blocked Betsy which then tracked around the SE edge of the High in a SW direction and basically followed the periphery of the high through the Keys and around to SE Louisiana.

I believe other than Ivan which split over the mid Atlantic after Gulf landfall and one part circled back into SW Louisiana, that Betsy reached the highest latitude of any hurricane since known record in 1851 to have made landfall in Louisiana.

I was 15 months...my brother 3 months...my Mother tells the story that she lay in bed in Thibodaux with the house rocking and the neighbor coming over as the eye moved in to warn my Dad in french that the roof was "blowing away"...my uncle was a priest at Nicholls and stayed up all night drinking as he was so scared being there alone and the church windows were blowing out and caving in...nobody knew it was going to be as bad as it was. They all, to a person said they knew there was a storm, but had no idea how bad Betsy would end up being...

I was 13, my mother and my brother and sister rode Betsy out in Belle Chasse. My father worked for Freeport Sulphur and rode it out on the V.J.Vallot tied up to the dock in the Mississippi River at Port Sulphur.

The eye of the storm passed over our house.

Seem to remember a photo of a drinking straw driven into a telephone pole from that storm.

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How dare you bring this up so close to the anniversary of the only Hurricane to ever hit Louisiana and only Louisiana ever. Put some respect on Katrinas name.

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There was a breach in the industrial canal that flooded the lower ninth ward during Betsy.

Same thing happened 40 years later.

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The devastation caused by Betsy prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop the Hurricane Protection Program, a system of levees and flood control measures designed to protect New Orleans.

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Moved out of Westgate in August 1964. Lived on Massachusetts Avenue.

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weakest side of the hurricane

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True for wind, as NOLA was on the back (west) side of the storm, and didn't get as much wind as the MS Gulf Coast did, but it was almost a worst case situation for the surge.
For hours before landfall, westerly winds were pushing water down the Mississippi Sound and into Lakes Borgne and Pontchartrain. Then, as the storm passed, those back side winds (out of the north) pushed all the water in the lake over the pumping stations and into the canals, putting increased pressure on the floodwalls until they gave way. If Katrina had followed Betsy's path, the city would have had a lot more wind damage, but all the water would have been piled up on the Northshore. So "best case" and "worst case" depends. Usually the right-front quadrant is the worst case. But not always.
Betsy was no joke on the West Bank and along Bayou Lafourche. That's the one all the older generation always talked about, until Katrina.