Newswise — The day before Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on the Mississippi Gulf Coast last August, the National Hurricane Center issued a chilling declaration: Katrina, the NHC warned, appeared to be "comparable in intensity to Hurricane Camille of 1969."
For people on the Gulf Coast, that was terrifying news. Because as best-selling author John Grisham wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times: "It was not uncommon when I was a child and student in Mississippi to hear horrific tales from coast residents who had survived [Camille]. For almost 40 years, it was a well-established belief that... there could simply never be another storm like Hurricane Camille."
In fact, Camille was dramatically more violent than Katrina turned out to be. When she roared ashore on the Mississippi Gulf Coast near midnight on August 17, 1969, Camille's terrible core had sustained winds of 200 miles an hour, with gusts even higher. (Katrina's maximum sustained winds on landfall were 125 mph.) Her barometric pressure, a more reliable measure of hurricane intensity, was one of the most extreme ever measured. And the nearly 25-foot storm surge Camille brought ashore was the highest ever recorded in the United States at that time -- a smoking wall of water almost three stories high, which obliterated everything in its path and swept more than 170 people to their deaths.
Now a new book, ROAR OF THE HEAVENS, by journalist Stefan Bechtel, tells the complete story of this unprecedented storm, following a handful of survivors through the great hurricane and its aftermath. In the process, the book elegantly explains the science of hurricanes, with the assistance of meteorologist Jeffrey Halverson, PhD, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. From Camille's birth as a tropical wave off the coast of Africa, to her parabolic journey across the South Atlantic and her transformation into a deadly, spinning "hot tower" over the superheated Caribbean Sea, the reader is invited inside the magnificent physics of the storm itself. The wave mechanics of storm surge, by far the deadliest aspect of hurricanes and also one of the most complex, is laid bare for the lay reader as well as the science buff.
The result, says John Grisham, is "a riveting account of what it was like to live through the most intense hurricane ever to strike the U.S. mainland." Adds Jay Strafford, of the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "Bechtel's heart-breaking subject and heart-rending prose brought tears [to this reviewer's] eyes"¦ A powerful book."
One of the many remarkable things about Camille was the fact that, two days after her rampage through Mississippi, she had a ghastly "second act." Again in the middle of the night, but this time completely without warning, Camille triggered one of the heaviest overnight rainfalls ever recorded -- thirty inches or more in eight hours. So much rain fell in a small rural hamlet in central Virginia that people had to cover their mouths in order to breathe. A National Weather Service report concluded that the event "approached the probable maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible." A team of geologists later estimated that the flooding was so severe that two thousand years of erosion occurred in a single night.
If the meteorology was amazing, so were the experiences of those who lived through it. The characters described in ROAR OF THE HEAVENS include:
* Dr. Robert Simpson, director of the National Hurricane Center at the time of Camille, whose lifelong fascination with hurricanes was born at the age of six when a hurricane storm surge swept him out of his house and nearly killed him in Corpus Christi, Texas;
* Mary Ann Gerlach, a saucy cocktail waitress in Pass Christian, Mississippi, who decided to ride out the storm in her apartment and became one of only three survivors in the building when the entire complex was washed out to sea;
* Nash Roberts, legendary New Orleans weatherman and TV meteorologist whose accuracy in predicting the storm-track of incoming hurricanes was so accurate it seemed to border on the supernatural;
* And Warren Raines, a fourteen-year-old boy living in rural Virginia who survived the great flood by clinging to a tree all night, but whose parents, brother and sister were all lost in the storm.
Stefan Bechtel is the author or coauthor of seven books, which have sold over two million copies and been translated into ten languages. He is a founding editor of Men's Health magazine. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, American Way and other national publications.
ROAR OF THE HEAVENS is published by Citadel Press, a division of Kensington Publishing Corporation.
RSS