Camille survivor fears Katrina will top savagery of '69
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 8:31 AM PDT
By Michael Williamson
Printable version
E-mail this articleI am a Hurricane Camille survivor.
But as big and bad as that storm was -- and it was the biggest to hit the U.S. mainland in modern times --- I fear Katrina will end up worse.
I remember the night in August of 1969 when the massively destructive Camille roared onto the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was still bad by the time it hit Mc Comb, Miss., the small town where my family lived at the time, more than a hundred miles inland.
I was distracted, getting ready for my second year of college. But as the storm neared the coast, I followed its course with a printed hurricane chart, pinpointing its location with hourly reports of map coordinates --- longitude and latitude --- and seeing it grow stronger by the hour.
By the time Camille hit the coast, it had winds of 200 miles per hour, the lowest pressure on record and a storm surge close to 30 feet. (A storm surge is the wall of water that pushes ahead of the storm itself.)
The hurricane literally covered the entire Gulf of Mexico.
The day Camille hit, my friend John Bonnabel asked if I'd drive him to Biloxi after the storm to help his uncle and cousin get their boat out of the protective Back Bay, and maybe drive them back to their home in New Orleans. At the time, it seemed like an adventure, a good way to pass the final week before returning to school. We'd be back that evening, we thought.
We never made the trip. The uncle and cousin had managed to move their boat to the entrance of the bay, but the approaching storm pushed waves all the way up to the bridge they would have gone under, and high winds made it impossible to move the boat anywhere else.
Soon, the boat was being hammered against that bridge.
In desperation, the uncle and cousin abandoned ship and tied themselves to the bridge railings, expecting to ride out the storm there. The next day, in the still aftermath of Camille, searchers found their bodies still lashed to what was left of the bridge. The boat, unharmed, floated free in Back Bay.
Memories of Camille came back as I watched Hurricane Katrina grow into the monster that hit pretty much the same area Monday morning. Today, the aftermath is more gruesome almost than the storm itself, and what's left of the Mississippi and Alabama coasts remains to be seen.
My wife and I still have relatives and friends who live in McComb. She's a native and I spent many years there, including finishing high school and, years later, working for the local daily newspaper, the Enterprise-Journal.
We spoke with her mother and my son over the weekend, wished them well and told them to let us know as soon as they could how they fared.
We figured any storm that hit New Orleans would also hit McComb. We also expected, since at the time Katrina was a relatively mild storm, the damage would be minimal. Like so many who've lived through hurricanes, I thought things would be OK.
When Gordon hit Central Florida in '96, I sat on our screened porch with the dog all night watching the gusts of wind, the pelting rain, the bolts of lightning, until the winds began blowing horizontally from the north and I had to seek shelter inside. Other than taking off a few shingles and sending a canoe flying into the neighbor's yard, for us it was a benign storm.
And last year, when six hurricanes hit Florida, four of them roared over the house we still own south of Orlando. We were here, not there, and subsequent damage to our property was relatively minor.
But I do not take hurricanes lightly.
Late Monday morning, at work at The Daily News, I kept an eye on the newsroom TV, switching from CNN to Fox to MSNBC and back to CNN.
My wife called to say she'd talked with her mother, who lives in a brick house surrounded by high pines and oaks. Her trees held, but all the leaves had been stripped from the trees. "It looks like the dead of winter," my mother-in-law said.
Worse news followed. A son's house had been hit by a falling pine tree, and his wife's car had been centered by another tree. The other daughter's house also was hit by a falling tree and their garage, which contained an antique Dodge, was obliterated by a large oak.
So far, the family reported no injuries.
As I left the paper just after noon, I tried to contact my son Matt, who is news editor of the Enterprise-Journal. Driving north on 11th, I tuned in NPR to follow more hurricane coverage.
I decided I wanted some relief from the dire news and tuned in Def Leppard on KRQT, which sent me right back to NPR, just in time to hear Talk of the Nation's Neal Conan say he had on the line "Matt Williamson, news editor of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb, Mississippi."
Wow.
I rang up my wife on the cell phone, yelled "Matt's on NPR, ninety-one-point-five RIGHT NOW!" and hung up.
Matt told the national radio audience that trees were down on all the roads and streets, rain was still falling hard, power and phones were out in many places, but that he knew of no injuries.
He said he'd gotten a call from his relatives --- he must have meant his mother -- who screamed into the phone that tree had hit her house. He told of a woman who had lost 21 acres of timber.
Matt said they had no idea how they were going to print the stories they'd been working so hard on. But he sounded good; it was good to hear his voice.
I'm anxious about the damage to the region. Nobody yet knows the extent, but it is horrific. Nobody knows how many people Katrina has killed, but it's too many.
Nobody knows how long it will take to bring a semblance of normalcy back to the region. And that's the most staggering thing to comprehend: Not a town, not a city, but a region has been devastated.
The power and mystique of a hurricane is difficult to convey. No other natural disaster looms so long before striking and is capable of doing such damage. So many people ignore the warnings and decide to ride out the storm. It worked in the past; it'll work again.
This storm may change all that. Since Camille, the coastal regions of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have become home to millions. Commercial and industrial development has burgeoned. Now New Orleans is under water. The coast is unrecognizable rubble.
And it's still early in the hurricane season.
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