Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane

12. Deluge

CHAPTER 12 Deluge A hurricane ceases to be a hurricane when its sustained winds drop below seventy-four miles per hour, at which time it is downgraded to a tropical storm. When the winds decline further to under thirty-nine miles per hour, the storm is reclassi‹ed as a tropical depression and is stripped of its name. Shortly after entering Tennessee around noon on Monday, August 18, as dazed Gulf Coast residents searched for loved ones, the remnants of Camille became just one of many other unnamed weather events that sweep across the nation from day to day in the general direction of west to east. Now the responsibility for tracking the system’s progress rested solely with the National Weather Service, and there would be no further input from the National Hurricane Center. As the clouds drifted over Kentucky, parts of that state received a smattering of rain: one-half to one inch in most places, with no ›ooding . On Tuesday evening, August 19, the Weather Service reported that the residual storm was expected to wane and “disappear over the Appalachians early Wednesday.” At 5:20 a.m. on August 20, an early arriving weatherman at the Louisville station reported that the rain indeed had ended and “the remains of Camille did a beautiful job of watering the farms and lawns across Kentucky yesterday.” Few meteorologists in the country had any hint of the catastrophe that had struck Virginia a few hours earlier. Despite the showers in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, most of the 108 billion tons of moisture Camille had vacuumed from the Gulf remained in the sky. The Blue Ridge Mountains de›ected those clouds upward, which alone was enough to increase the rate of condensation and to trigger heavier than usual precipitation east of the 159 mountains. But by a cruel coincidence, something else was also happening : a cold front—a giant ground-hugging wedge of cold heavy air—was moving in from the north. The two meteorological systems were on a collision course, and they would converge (more or less) over Nelson County, Virginia, where the summer air already hung thick with humidity. For the next several decades, meteorologists would speculate and disagree about the precise mechanism that precipitated the great Nelson County disaster. The tail ends of hurricanes had traveled this same general route many times before, and although those storms sometimes dumped a signi‹cant amount of rain east of the mountains, nobody had ever witnessed the likes of the deluge on the evening of August 19, 1969. The meteorological models of the time were too coarse to analyze microweather events that arose in a region only a few dozen miles across. Yet if all of the hindsight investigations by the weather scientists were inconclusive about why the Virginia disaster took place, they did at least relieve the meteorological community of its culpability for not having issued an advance warning. Given that the experts were still arguing decades later about the causes of the catastrophe , they scarcely could have been expected to predict it, or at least so the reasoning went. What happened that terrible night came as a total surprise—not just to the victims but also to the weathermen. Although rain clouds in these parts normally sweep over the mountains in a relatively smooth sheet, on that particular summer evening of August 19, 1969, observant locals noticed something strange about the sky. Instead of simply spilling over the ridge, the oncoming clouds were tumbling and rolling, growing darker by the minute, and billowing ever upward into a huge cauli›ower-shaped monster. Within that rapidly growing thunderhead, the turbulence was obvious and severe. Yet the cloud mass did not move on; instead it stalled over Nelson County and continued to grow and boil like a witch’s brew. Some said that the sky had a weird grayish yellow hue, while others said it was almost black. To everyone who gazed skyward, regardless of their vantage point, it was clear that these were no runof -the-mill rain clouds. At ground level, however, there was dead calm—no wind at all. Folks indoors had no inkling of the fury developing over their heads. All they knew was that it was beginning to rain. Again. CATEGORY 5 160 161 Deluge It had been an uncharacteristically wet August in Virginia. One frontal system after another had withheld its moisture from the...