Anniversary of Hurricane Camille

If you like reading about Hurricanes try Isaac’s Storm by Eric Larsen. Really good book about the storm that destroyed Galveston in 1900 (I believe)

quote:

---

I guess that means 57 years ago tonight I spent the night in a shelter in Lafourche Parish somewhere. I was too young to remember.

---

I was probably right there with you in Lafourche...too young to recall tho...went through Besty there as well as a 1 year old....our roof nearly came off with me and my 2 month old brother in bed in my mom's arms...

It’s wild to me that if you overlaid the storm paths of Katrina and Camille, there would be an X where the pearl river passes by Bogalusa. Both of those storms absolutely wrecked that area.

Camille "lived" a very long time, first emerging as a tropical wave on August 5th and not really dissipating fully until August 22nd.

After wrecking havoc on Virginia and other parts of the area, it strengthened and became a tropical storm again over the Atlantic.

I remember all the old folks talking about that one. And Betsy.

I was also in the eye of CAT5 Camille in Mississippi, about 20 miles inland in a high school gymnasium. A section of the roof blew off when the school was hit by a tornado, and rain was pouring in like firehoses were up there. I was a teenager and that was the night I learned to pray under the bleachers. In days afterwards I helped people salvage belongings from homes in Louisiana paddling a flatboat. There were dead horses and cows on top of roofs, and the worst was having to hold your breath and paddle fast away from floating dog carcasses still on their chains in backyards. Didn't see human bodies as I think the Coast Guard had collected those. Saw a 200 ton barge in the middle of a highway and a destroyed bank's safe on the levee.

Camille is such a great name for a hurricane.

Katrina?

quote:

---

I was in Bogalusa for Camille and it was brutal. We heard pine trees snapping all night long. I didn't expect to see a single tree standing the next morning.

---

Having seen the aftermath of various hurricanes in different areas even inland I will never allow a pine tree close enough to my home that if it fell it could damage the house.

They snap.
They uproot.
They drop limbs.

Last thing I want to have to deal with in a post storm clean up is cutting down some garbage pine tree I can’t even burn for firewood.

Unless it’s a live oak or a palm tree I have no interest in having trees near my house in a coastal area.

my parents lived and worked in Pascagoula
they had a second floor apartment about five miles inland
they had decided before the storm to move for new jobs back closer to home
he worked at his job a couple of months after hurricane on coast majority of which was clean up