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

2. Of Love and Life

CHAPTER 2 Of Love and Life No disaster—indeed, no human event—is ever written on a blank slate. Collective knowledge, the local culture, and the consequences of prior social decisions and indecisions all combine to affect the human toll when nature goes on a rampage. When their plans and expectations go awry, leaders, followers, those who would prefer to be left alone, and outsiders—including scientists and government of‹cials—‹nd themselves interacting in new and unfamiliar ways. How effectively they cooperate depends on what they know, what they don’t know, and what they may erroneously think they know. The story of Hurricane Camille began long before that particular storm made its debut in August 1969. In fact, it may be argued that the tale began more than three centuries earlier, when European immigrants—unlike the indigenous (and wiser?) American Indians— started building settlements on storm-vulnerable coasts. Perhaps it was natural for the European colonists to exercise a man-over-nature bravado in their patterns of settlement; after all, it was through that same kind of audacity that their culture had managed to develop the maritime technology that brought them to the New World in the ‹rst place. But there was also the matter that, in an era of slow and limited communications compounded by language differences (French, English , and Spanish), harsh meteorological lessons learned by one pocket of coastal dwellers did little to inform people elsewhere who were similarly at risk. This continued to be the case through the nineteenth century and even well into the twentieth. In 1893, for instance, a hurricane struck Cheniere Caminada, a barrier peninsula near Grand Isle, Louisiana, destroying a palatial resort and the nearby town and claiming as many as twenty-three hundred 12 lives. The cruel lesson of that site’s vulnerability was heeded by New Orleans investors and vacationers, and the resort was never rebuilt. A mere seven years later and three hundred miles to the west, however, a similar hurricane ›ooded most of the geographically comparable city of Galveston, Texas, killing about eight thousand. What effect did the Cheniere Caminada disaster have on mitigating the great Galveston catastrophe of 1900? Apparently none whatsoever. As communications technology advanced during the twentieth century, so did the timeliness and accuracy of the news about hurricanes . Seldom, however, did such information about disastrous tropical storms mobilize any community to plan for them. True, Galveston reacted to its own catastrophe by building a concrete seawall and bringing in ‹ll dirt to raise the entire city. But the Galveston disaster wasn’t news to the residents of that municipality; it was part of their direct experience. News is what happens to someone else. And for many decades, that continued to be the general attitude in virtually all of the nation’s coastal communities—at least those that hadn’t already experienced a recent disaster of their own. It was in 1957 that Louisianans harboring this attitude of collective aloofness were kicked in the pants. The educational stimulus was a hurricane called Audrey. If there was any meaning to be extracted from the misery of Audrey’s victims, it was in everyone’s hope that at least some public of‹cials and scientists may have learned important lessons from the calamity. Audrey was a disaster that should not be allowed to repeat itself. And, indeed, it would be largely because of Audrey that, twelve years later, Camille didn’t claim many more lives than she did in Louisiana. Southwest Louisiana, 1957 On the afternoon of June 24, 1957, which is early in the season for a major hurricane, the New Orleans of‹ce of the Weather Bureau picked up a radio message from a Mexican shrimp boat reporting heavy seas in the Bay of Campeche, with winds of forty-‹ve miles per hour and gusts above sixty. That evening, after corroborating reports arrived from several other ships in the area, the Weather Bureau 13 Of Love and Life issued its ‹rst bulletin that a tropical storm had developed in the Gulf of Mexico about ‹ve hundred miles south of the Louisiana-Texas border. The next morning, June 25, with the storm escalating to one hundred miles per hour and inching twenty miles closer, the Weather Bureau posted a hurricane watch for the Texas and Louisiana coasts. The name of that slow-moving storm, the ‹rst of the 1957 season, was Audrey. At...