...Hurricane Camille was on the way out of our lives. Headed to WV where she would kill additional people. All the people that went through that one still mark it on the calendar. We were lucky in that it didn't affect our lives much beyond the typical no power, no gasoline, no ice type of thing. If you aren't familiar with the hurricane drill be thankful.
I don't remember much before it hit because I didn't care about hurricanes during that teenage timeline. There were plenty of OTHER things that got my attention. Now, you must understand about my mother. When I was small and a thunderstorm would come along, she'd get frantic. And later in life I more or less understood. She was from upstate and thunder and lightning up THERE meant severe weather was likely. As in tornadoes. It took many years of her living on the coast to realize that a lightning storm was just par for the course in the summer. And a real live tornado is very rare in this belt along the coast. Yeah, once in a while a water spout would come ashore and tear off a roof or knock down a couple of pine trees. Very isolated and almost never catastrophic. Later in life I got to see what a REAL tornado would do, and that's when I began to understand her fear.
I suppose it was the media coverage that made us run. But then again, we'd run before because of said fear my Mom had. And we lived within a half mile or so of the beachfront. All I remember was that her and Pop talked it over with the constant updates from the weatherman coming in, and they decided almost too late to run. Running meant going north for almost everybody and we'd usually head upstate to stay with relatives. I suppose that was the plan but I also know and understand plans, and they are usually only viable for the opening acts of a situation. This one was no different.
The weather accuracy was much less back then. Better than a few years before, but still not up to today's standards. You couldn't pull up GOES East and have a look yourself because that was still 25 years in the future. There was a tracking map ( Even the grocery stores gave them away) and everyone plotted fixes...lat and lon. And this one was the Real Thing, not a big thunderstorm. So her and Pop loaded us in the car and headed north.
Back then, the highways were as different from today as night and day. Two laned and narrow. Counter flow wasn't even dreamed of yet. The interstate was years in the future. You had to go through DOWNTOWN Moss Point and cross a very low causeway to get across the river. There were thousands of OTHER people that got scared away too. It was VERY SLOW. We crossed the river as the water was lapping at the pavement on the causeway. (Tidal Surge). And then it seemed like forever before we got clear of the coastal county.
By that time the first winds had arrived and my parents knew they weren't going to be able to make it upstate. Pop was having trouble keeping the car in the right lane in the wind. That brought on a crisis because we had nowhere to go. As we came into Barton ( a small community north of us), the lights were on and people present at Barton Baptist Church and we pulled in and asked if we could shelter there. And of course, those people were as accommodating as you would expect. Many of their congregation lived in house trailers and were present themselves.
And so we spent the night there, hunkered down among the pews and praying. I got a little concerned when they moved everyone out of one of the northern rooms because the walls were flexing. And I got a LOT concerned listening to the wind. I can describe but you'll hardly believe it. It sounded like... a freight train coming through the room, a thousand wailing banshees, a terror in the night. It would blow so hard you'd think it couldn't POSSIBLY blow any harder, and then a gust would hit and it would blow TWICE that hard. The church shuddered all night long. Thank God, I've never heard the like since. Nobody slept until it finally started abating some.
We emerged from the church the next morning to go home. Radio reports were talking catastrophic damage. There was a big pecan orchard behind the church and every single tree was on the ground. The wind speed was never known because it blew the instruments away. It was widely believed to be 200 mph at the worst. And people were already streaming back toward the coast to see if they had anything left.
So we joined the long, slow, caravan and made it back to the bridge I had previously mentioned. The HWP was there letting one car at a time across. And they closed it due to rising tide before we could get across. We were the next vehicle and must have spent two hours or more waiting our turn. That meant detouring through Alabama and coming in from the east. We spent ALL DAY LONG in the car trying to get home on a journey that today you can complete in under 30 minutes. And when we finally did manage to pull up to the house, not a shingle was out of place!!!
My brother took a quick tour (he had a car and could drive) and came back and said, "we all ought to get down on our knees and give thanks that we are still alive".
That's pretty much all I remember from a very long time ago. But I still remember the sound of that wind. I'll never forget that. Each storm is different and presents different problems. Katrina had a wall of water come ashore and thankfully came ashore in daylight. One of the only storms in my memory to do so and that fact alone probably saved many lives. Georges had tornadoes all night long. I wasn't here for Fredric and that was the most homesick I've ever been. Elana ran everyone on the Gulf Coast to and fro. I've heard that wind blow several times since, and it has never touched Camille's winds. Not even close.
Growing up I lived in Rockaway Beach NY (which is in Queens, a borough of NYC). We lived on beach 48 street, about equally distant (3 city blocks) between Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic ocean. I remember several storms which covered our block in water when the ocean met the bay. Brought in sand, debris and transformed empty sandlots into temporary ponds. We would spend hours catching little fish left in those ponds. We moved further out east on Long Island when I was 15. Many years later Hurricane Sandy destroyed our house. A few years after Sandy I drove by, sad to see our home was now another sandlot.
I remember one storm that flooded the block so badly that a friend of mine came by in a little skiff (he lived on Bay 45th st). Naturally we went fishing.
My dad was 3 years old living in Miami when the hurricane of 1926 came ashore. One hundred years ago this fall before they had names No one knew a hurricane was coming until the day before as offshore ships radioed in about the storm. His father came back home and told them what was happening. that night the house next door was blown into their house. My grandmother was pregnant as they waded through knee high water to the only block house on the street. Every family on their block was there except for one which drowned inside their house. The next morning, they went home. The garage roof had collapsed on their Model A Ford and most of the steering wheel was missing. His dad managed to clear the debris from the car and returned the house keys to the man he bought it from. He said it was his now. They drove to Orlando to stay with one of his dad's bothers and find work.
My Dad never did like a storm, and he taught me how to use a tracking map when I was just a boy. We had metal hurricane shutters on all the windows on the cider block house we lived in Rivera Beach. FL. In the fall of 1960, I remember playing in the flooded street and yard with minnows swimming at our feet in the aftermath of hurricane Donna after the storm. Our house didn't have any damage. Dad passed away last October 2025 a week shy of 102.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_Miami_hurricane
Three hurricanes have affected my life directly. Camille would be the first. I'm from VA. My grandparents and other relatives lived in Nelson County. After hitting the gulf states it crossed the Blue Ridge Mts and hit Nelson County with an enormous amount of rain. Estimates range from 2' up to maybe 3.5'. Well over 100 people died in that county. We weren't able to get there for several days. My grandparents lived about 10 miles from the hardest hit part of the county. I remember as a 13 year old boy going up several weeks later and driving through Lovingston. Mountainsides laid bare of trees, huge boulders washed down into town, bridges out, cars buried in mud, refrigeration trailer with bodies. Joey Davis wrote a song about it called The Bypass (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8pTNExrFwI&list=RDG8pTNExrFwI&start_radio=1) referring to the Rt 29 bypass around Lovingston which was used as a landing zone for rescue recovery efforts. Some of my uncles and relatives were involved in the aftermath.
The second was Agnes which hit VA in 1972. It was a rain event. I was playing football for John F. Kennedy HS at the time. One of our players lost his dad in the flooding. He worked on an island in the middle of the James River which flooded. Apparently they tried to go back to work before the flood waters were down enough and he was swept off a boat and drowned. The whole team went to the funeral.
The third was Floyd in 1999. We were living in Roanoke Rapids, NC. Tropical storm Dennis had already dumped a lot of rain due to the fact the it essentially hit eastern NC twice. If you look at the track, it passed close, went out to sea, and doubled back for its landfall. Shortly thereafter Floyd, a category 4 hurricane, hit with his fury. We had many in our church who spent the night in the church. The winds blew 70 mph all night. It blew the rain through our church walls. We had two giant oak trees in the church yard that were blown over. Fortunately they fell in the street. At our house, we lost numerous large trees. We heard them coming down throughout the storm. One fell close enough to lay its uppermost branches on our picnic table with no damage. It was almost impossible to get around town with all the downed trees. In the weeks following, I remember driving around, particularly taking a few trips to Greenville for hospital visits. IIRC 60% of Pitt County was under water! Driving through there was one of the most pitiful things you'd ever see. In front of almost every house was a pile of debris: carpet, insulation, furniture, ductwork, you name it. Sad, sad, sad. The little town of Princeville was totally submerged.
I guess I could add a fourth. My daughter was at Pensacola Christian College in 2004 when Ivan delivered a direct hit on that city. The college assured us they could handle a storm. Well, they lost water and power. She lived on the 9th floor. No working toilets and no elevators. No one hurt, but it was miserable.
Without a doubt, wind and water can do a lot of damage!!!!!
I remember it well. It happened on a Sunday and I was finishing up a Marine Corp drill. They were going to let us go early to take care of our families as soon as they got enough Amphibious tractor crews to run search and rescue all night during the storm. My MOS was not a crew member slot but they would press us into service if necessary. They finally let us go early afternoon. Those crews that stayed were heroes for sure.
I lived about a quarter mile from the beach on a street near the Edgewater Hotel and the street was dead end to the north, the only way out was highway 90. An upstairs apartment in an old brick house, just married about six months earlier, we didn't have a lot of stuff to lose, but knew we needed to get out of there. Our landlords who lived downstairs were an old couple and the husband had just had surgery for a brain tumor and they had no place to go. So we gathered them up and took them with us to my inlaws place in Bayou View, about two miles from the beach. I remember the noise for sure, when it came through it sounded like a freight train coming through the den. I watched the den sliding glass door actually bend noticeably. The eye passed just before daylight then all that water that had been pushed up in the back bay and bayous came out much faster than it came in so we watched the water rise and come into the house without knowing how much of a flood it would be. Thankfully it stopped at two feet and then receded at about the same rate as it entered. I remember spending the rest of that day pulling up all the carpet in the house and pushing it out of the windows. The damage was extensive, a war zone as far as we could see.
It took better than a week to get back to our place and then it was drive most of the way and then hike the last mile or so. Highway 90 had not been passable at all until then. Ironically while the bottom floor had some flood damage, the three apartments on the top had zero damage.
All kinds of memories one in particular was standing in the line down town Gulfport at the ice house when it felt like 120F and wondering if I was lucky enough to get a block before they ran out, could I even get it home.
I was a welder at a company that made offshore oil and gas well head production equipment, going to night school to finish a degree. Hourly worker, no pay if your not working, didn't know when they would call us back so my friend Dan Cooper and I started going around cutting trees of houses to make money. I remember one lady chastised us for asking for money for the service, and Dan just looked at her and asked where her husband was. She said at work, then Dan very calmly said that's very nice but we are out of work. On a Sunday one lady said we shouldn't be doing this on Sunday. Dan very calmly replied that the Good Lord saw fit to let this storm hit us on a Sunday, guess it would be alright to clean up after it on a Sunday.
In a two weeks the Company I worked for let it be known that if you could come to work to do repair on the building come on. I, and about 12 of the 250 who worked there did that for a week to get the plant ready to open. Then they decided to pay everyone for the full down time and we were paid twice for showing up.
I've been through a number of Hurricanes mostly with neutral impact to my life. Camille was actually positive. Because they considered our Marine Corp unit to be hardship status they did not call us up for active duty as they had told us to prepare for, and since this was the Viet Nam era that was good. Additionally, my FIL was in the construction equipment sale and rental business and things were not going all that well. He credits the Camille rebuild and the Stennis Space center construction as what kept them afloat.
That one happened a few years before I was born. My first real disastrous hurricane was Andrew, but I had gone in the Army a couple of years before. As an Engineer, once Andrew was done having his way with South Florida, we were deployed down for cleanup and looter control. We arrived in Homestead as darkness fell, but we were weaving in and out of downed trees and powerlines. We arrived at the bivouac site (a roadrock packed parking lot that hadn't been paved yet. It was too dark to start setting up camp, so we slept in the vehicles in the muggy heat. Waking up we saw extreme devastation. We were next to the Saga Bay apartments, and the whole wall was ripped off the side of the building, with the tenants still living in there, we could see them going about their daily lives as if nothing had happened. We were there about a month as I recall, they never did get power back. Our sister company was patrolling, and Zulu (a nasty gang down there) confronted the patrol, backup came very quickly, and Zulu dispersed without any casualties on either side. Miami Herald published the next day that the MP's were the only ones that were issued ammo (we didn't have any either). Again Zulu stopped one of their patrols, took all their weapons, and stripped their Sargeant and sent him back to the tent city buck naked. Miami Herald had a field day with that one.
We helped clean up alot that month, but it was a drop in the bucket. Once clean up crews arrived, we supported them more than anything, grunt labor basically.
Later on, in my first house, Wilma came through and did a bit of damage to my house, and we were out of power for 10 days, meanwhile I had reef tanks that I had to keep alive. Fema declined my generator I had just bought. FPL prorated our electric bill as if we had power for those 10 days. The house needed a new roof, new screen enclosure, new pool pump, I did most of the work myself except for the roof. The insurance companies did what insurance companies do when there's a lot of checks to be written, they filed bankruptcy and ultimately closed their doors without giving us a check, even though half of the work had already been done. The roof was torn off, the first couple courses of shingles had been put down, and they had to stop and wait for an inspection. The inspectors were spread extremely thin, so it was around 3 months before one showed up. Our a/c was getting inspected (had to replace that also), and the other inspector showed up and promptly drove away. The a/c inspector called me and said he saw the roofing inspector leave, because there wasn't a ladder on the house. The ladder was laying right next to the house, since it had been so long, and our neighbor had a special needs kid that loved to climb. I told them this, and they said that's what we have homeowner insurance for. I paid extra for a quicker turnaround on the next inspector. Ultimately it took 7 years to get a check for the damages, the 3rd insurance company that inherited my claim called and settled for around $15k if I remember, total damages had been $23k.
Even with both of those stories, I still know that I am luckier than alot of people that go through hurricanes. My wife has a friend that lives in Fort Myers that is on her 3rd rebuild in only 4 years. I would have left forever after 2.
Riley,
Will Rogers once said: "A Recession is when your neighbor is out of work; a Depression is when YOU are out of work!"
Kind of works the same way with hurricanes, I think.
I remember reading about Camille and watching it on TV, but it was much like any other disaster you see on the 6 o'clock news, and only of mild intellectual concern.
For me, it was '60, '64, and '65; Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, and Betsy.
THAT'S when it got visceral! :o
Hurricane Donna:
Water came up to the 3rd step (of 4) in my grandmother's house (where we were staying) and for a 10 year old, the water in the yard was waist deep.
Remember well, the freight train sound and watching beads of water form on the walls, literally driven through the concrete block by the winds. Grandmother waited in line 2 hours for a block of ice. When we could again go back to school, the giant ball on top of the Aviation Building (A WSR-57 radar dome) that we usually walked by, was missing and rumored to be somewhere in the Everglades.
Aviation_Bldg.jpg
Hurricane Cleo:
Helping my dad board up the house and wondering if our house was built as good as my grandmother's house.
Eye went directly over the house, which is when we went outside to look around and my Mother bemoaned the loss of her Orchid tree laying on its side. After the rest of the hurricane passed us, we went outside and discovered that Cleo had obligingly knocked the tree upright again, albeit, at a slightly different angle.
Still there, to this day.
Hurricane Betsy:
Not a particularly violent hurricane, but very wet.
Not good for a boat that was currently tied up in a slip, after our trailer fell apart.
Fiat_1100.jpg
My Dad and I took our Mom's car, a Fiat 1100, under the idea that it had more road clearance than Dad's car and we could get over debris better. Hauled @$$ to Baker's Haulover, when the eye subsided the winds a bit, weaving around palm trees and power poles, on Sunny Isles Boulevard. Got to the boat and the power head of the outboard was still (barely!) above water. Too low in the water for my Dad to safely board, so I climbed in and started bailing with a PVC 5 gallon bucket, while my Dad bailed by kneeling at the dock and leaning way over.
We heard the winds picking up and decided that was enough bailing for one day. The ride home was memorable, as the Fiat's road clearance advantage, was off-set by the liability of its' light weight. Forget blowing side to side on the road; we were trying not to get blown over on our side! :o At the worst point, I jumped in the back seat so I could move back and forth, side to side, to counter the wind forces. :P
The REAL Hurricane Blast came when we returned home.
Hurricane Mom: >:( "You risked my SON and my Car just for Dat Damn'ed BOAT!! >:(
And went loudly downhill from there; the only time in my life, I ever felt pity for my Father. :(
Hurricane David:
1979, and my Wisconsin Wife's first hurricane and she was frantic, to DO something!! :P
Had her tape the windows with masking tape. She figured that if a coconut came through a window, the tape would catch some of the shards and blunt the shattering. Why not use sturdier duct tape, you say? ???
Because I didn't want to deal with the duct tape adhesive on the windows, later on.
After I had everything boarded, up she asked me: "What had been the purpose of the masking tape?" ???
Told her it was to keep her out of my hair, until I could get things under control.
Not one of our more rewarding discussions, :-X especially after I told her that the shards thing went out in the '40's, with the introduction of tempered safety glass.
Hurricane Andrew:
We were in Broward County in 1992 and escaped the brunt of the storm. We had one window pane cracked and our shed was gone, though miraculously, the yard tools contents were completely undisturbed. Paint cans on a shelf had moved about a half inch as indicated by the dust marks on the shelf.
What I mostly remember was being sweaty and tired for over a month, helping out co-workers and friends that lived further south.
Hurricane Wilma:
That was a bad one for us. 15 days without power. Discovered my generator had been killed during a previous hurricane (Dennis) when an FPL&L worker re-connected our house power mains, while I still had my generator attached (the reason I had DISCONNECTED them!) >:( I was across the street, helping a neighbor fix his generator and not there to stop the well-meaning worker in time. After 3 days without power, ventured out to my generator parts store to discover the roof missing and all the contents "Gone With the Wind". Started calling around (on my old-fashioned land line; all the cell towers had blown away) and found a generator for sale in Port St. Lucie (None available from Orlando, south). Got it hooked up, relocated my satellite dish from where it had been pointing at Arizona, and re-directed it back into space and got the grandkids watching Nickelodeon, in no time.
Came home from work one day to see the coffee table had been moved to another room and a whole gaggle of kids were all over the living room floor, watching cartoons. "How sad!" I thought, pitying the kids for their TV Addiction, while I walked to my bedroom to use the bathroom.
Seated completely around my bed were several neighbors, watching CNN.
As bad as hurricanes are, they sure can make for some memories, can't they?
Charles Brennan
Wow! How about that tree!
South Florida... figures you have some fantastical stories. ( that is a word isn't it?)
I remember one particular hurricane season when I called my good friend Benton who lived in Boca Raton in one of those old orginal canal subdivisions, street in the front, canal in the back, mostly small block ranch houses. When he answered he said let me get some lights on so I can see, this in the middle of the day. I asked him about that and he said he had boarded and unboarded three times already so they decided to just leave them on for the rest of the season, live mostly on the screened patio.
I've been through many but the impact storms, those that may have changed life direction in some manner were Camille, Opal, Katrina, and Michael. I was only present for Camille.
Can't remember what storm, but for one while living in Gulfport, MS, happened to have a generator from my FIL's business and we had extension cords run to five houses, everyone got an hour in rotation to keep their freezers operating until power came on. In storms without that luxury, we had some mighty fine neighborhood cookouts those first few days.
Boats often would go from the front marinas to the back bay then the industrial seaway and raft up against the south bank. I was fortunate, had a Columbia 8.7 at that time and the company I worked for was at the end of the seaway and had a canal that actually ran inside the building, 220 feet long, 80 feet wide. I got a choice spot inside the building.
Yes, Charles, you're right about the visceral. And for instance, you'd THINK this hurricane season has had almost negligible impact from storms as far as media goes and you'd be dead wrong. You see, there is an unwritten rule in television and it is to not mention the name of the land mass between Alabama and Louisiana. Arthur, that thing that almost missed getting a name this year, floated a bunch of dry land people on IT'S waters. Massive rain that stayed in one place for an EXTENDED time. I'm feeling more confident that we'll escape without a big one but I've been fooled before. The shear has picked up a bit in the last few days and although it is still has hot as Satan's groin here, there has been the smallest hint of cool at daylight.
I think the worst for me personally was Georges. Our house flooded then and so did my job. Whatcha gonna do? We survived, so that means we can START OVER!!!! It resulted in massive sleep deprivation for months, extra (unwanted) job opportunities, and a promise to move from Helena, Mississippi. And a oath to not go through that ever again if I can manage it.
So far so good! Although, I look across the waters from the porch of the Labrot House and figure one day one will came and take that one too. I don't want to be around when it happens.