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

11. Rubble

CHAPTER 11 Rubble Pass Christian, Monday, August 18, 1969 Jackson M. Balch, manager of the Mississippi Test Facility (now the John C. Stennis Space Center), hugged his two young sons and led them down the hall. Although he’d primed himself mentally to ‹nd damage downstairs, the actual sight still astounded him. Most of the staircase was ripped away, and the walls of the ‹rst ›oor were essentially gone. The second ›oor was perched precariously on a bare skeleton of open studs that threatened to collapse at any moment. This, despite the fact that the home stood twenty feet above sea level. Although he ran a big show at the space center, with responsibilities for 2,682 employees and three government contractors, Jackson had a hard time getting his thoughts organized. The few local of‹cials he met were likewise in a daze, confused about where to start, what to do, how to do it. No communications whatsoever were reaching Pass Christian, and no physical resources were available—not even something as basic as drinking water. In fact, most of the infrastructure had been destroyed throughout all of southern Mississippi, and even the carefully planned emergency response mechanisms were in ragged shape. Help would be slow in arriving. With the sun promising a sultry day ahead, Jackson decided that he was probably in as good a position as anyone to try to get things rolling. He took his sons and walked to the bay. Debris was piled twelve feet deep for a stretch of 150 yards at the east end of the bridge; clearly no help would arrive from the west. Beyond the pile of jetsam, the pavement slabs were displaced crazily on the eastbound lane. They climbed over the rubble and made their way across the 143 bridge to the town of Bay St. Louis, which was also in a state of serious distress. Borrowing a car that had been parked high enough to avoid the ›oodwaters, Jackson drove the remaining ‹fteen miles to the space center, zigzagging around one obstacle after another. The Mississippi Test Facility had taken in twelve hundred refugees prior to the storm, and many of those locals were still there. Although none of the buildings had suffered structural damage, few windows remained unbroken anywhere, and that included the windows in the vehicles in the parking lots. The culprit was the gravel that had been used to weigh down the ›at membrane roofs; Camille’s vicious winds had scooped it up and blasted it into every object in the vicinity. When the eye passed through and the winds reversed, some of this same gravel was scooped up again and slung in the opposite direction. The secure underground phone line remained alive, and Jackson called his boss at the Marshall Space Flight Center in northern Alabama. That “boss” was Dr. Werner von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientist who had headed the development of Hitler’s V-2 rocket program at Peenemunde, Germany, and who had thereby contributed to the deaths of hundreds of London civilians during World War II. The man who had introduced the world to a whole new category of weapons of mass destruction, however, was also known to have a human side. When the ‹rst V-2 hit Chiswick, a London suburb, on September 8, 1944, he had remarked to his colleagues , “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.” Before the Allied capture of Peenemunde, von Braun negotiated the surrender of ‹ve hundred of his top scientists and engineers, along with their missile blueprints and several actual test vehicles, to the Americans. In 1960, von Braun was appointed director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, where he supervised the development of the Saturn V launch vehicle that had propelled three Americans to the moon in July, just one month before Camille. Werner von Braun’s ‹rst questions to Jackson Balch were not about the condition of the Mississippi Test Facility but about the nearby communities. Jackson replied, “You were in Germany under the Allied bombing raids, and I’m sure you well remember the devastation . That’s what Pass Christian looks like.” As for emergency assistance, Jackson explained that there wasn’t any, at least not yet, CATEGORY 5 144 and that nobody seemed to be in charge. Von Braun didn’t take long to mull over the matter. He told Jackson to do...