45 Years Later – Camille She Was No Lady

The year was 1969 and the events of August 17 and 18 of that year changed the Mississippi Gulf Coast and most of the Gulf South region forever. It was on the night of August the 17th Hurricane Camille came ashore near Gulfport and Biloxi Missisippi.

The storm was a monster. Hurricane forecasting was still in its infancy and Camille's fury showed all of us that lived in this part of the world what a Category 5 hurricane could do.

The winds of Camille were so strong that the weather service instruments of the time could not withstand their fury. We were not nearly as aware of storm surge the way we are today and because of that many people lost their lives. There is the story of the infamous "hurricane party" in which party guest ignored the warnings to evacuate and were washed out of a three story building. That story turned out to be part of the lore of Camille and according to reports never really happened.

For me, living inland in Mississippi was still a pretty big deal. We lived several hours north of the landfall and still suffered damage. There were tree limbs down, roofs that lost shingles and some structural damage too. The system brought torrential rains to the area and then moved northward into the Appalachian Mountains where the copious amounts of rainfall caused flash flooding and took more lives.

The storm also became infamous for school kids of the 1970's. The film was called "Camille, She Was No Lady" a civil defense film that we had to watch. That is what spawned my interest in weather, hurricanes, and forecasting.

The devastation of Camille and the destructive force that created that devastation is probably the reason the science of forecasting hurricanes has progressed so much over the past 50 years. The knowledge gained from Camille helped saved life and property during 1992's landfall of Hurricane Andrew and 2005's Hurricane Katrina.