It's Raining Fish and Spiders (15 page)
Read It's Raining Fish and Spiders Online
Authors: Bill Evans
WHAT SEASON HAS THE HIGHEST BATTING AVERAGE?
The hurricane season of 2005 was certainly extreme! There were so many storms that we ran out of names! The National Hurricane Center had to turn to the Greek alphabet to name stormsâthere were Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta.
Altogether, twenty-eight tropical storms formed, producing fifteen hurricanesâwhich also was a record.
WHAT SEASON HAS THE LOWEST BATTING AVERAGE?
Only one storm made it to the plate in 1890 and 1914. There must have been really good pitching.
THE BASES ARE LOADED!
Back on August 22, 1893, four raging hurricanes were cruising through the Atlantic Ocean.
One of those storms, which on August 22 was located between the Bahamas and Bermuda, went on to hit New York City!
Two storms were near the Cape Verde islands off the African coast, and a fourth was approaching Nova Scotia.
The Cape Verde storms eventually came ashore over Georgia and South Carolina on August 27, killing as many as 2,000 people.
Meteorologists really needed a scorecard to keep track of these!
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
HEY! YOU MUST BE IN THE WITNESS PROTECTION PROGRAM!
What's in a name? One hurricane had three names! Imagine a storm crossing from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific and back againâ¦.
In the name game we haveâof naming storms different names in different oceansâyou knew this was bound to happen some day. If a storm crosses from one ocean to another, say from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the name of the storm changes from an Atlantic name to a Pacific name. And vice versa.
Tropical Storm Hattie developed on October 28, 1961, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. After crossing Central America, the storm re-formed in the Pacific Ocean, where she was given the name Simone on November 1. Two days later, she curled back toward Central America, crossing back to the Atlantic through Mexico and reemerged in the Gulf of Mexico as Inga!
I hope she got frequent flier miles!
Living Through Hurricane Camilleâor, How I Came to Be a Meteorologist
I grew up in the 1960s (I know that's a long time ago; some people think I used to forecast the weather for President George Washington!). It was a wild and sometimes frightening time. There were race riots, war, assassinations, environmental disasters, and even the god-awful threat of nuclear weapons being used, all beamed by television right into our living rooms.
I grew up in the rural South where, during this time, communities did their best to sort of cut themselves off from this tumultuous time in our nation's history. Soon that came to an abrupt and horrifying end.
As a nine-year-old boy in August of 1969, I personally had a front-row seat to see a disastrous monster of a hurricane named Camille shock our state right out of its isolation with the most powerful hurricane to strike the U.S. mainland in recorded history. Camille's winds, at the time, were clocked at 174 mph with winds as high as 201 mph extrapolated by the Hurricane Hunter aircraft from above. Her storm surge, reaching more than 28 feet, also set a record.
As the storm approached the Mississippi Gulf Coast from the central Gulf of Mexico, I kept a homemade hurricane tracking chart. It was a Texaco road map of the southeastern United States that showed just enough of the Gulf of Mexico to give me room to write in Camille's position. Listening to the radio and watching the weather reports on TV, I wrote down the longitude and latitude from each report. Camille clipped the far western tip of Cuba to the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, coming ashore just east of Biloxi, Mississippi.
Rainfall along the track of Hurricane Camille, August 1969
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
Advisories like this were issued:
National Hurricane Center Miami
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ADVISORY NO. 2 Â 6 PM EDT Â THURSDAY AUGUST 14, 1969
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â¦YOUNG CAMILLE ADVANCES SLOWLY TOWARD THE GULF OF MEXICOâ¦
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NO FURTHER REPORTS HAVE BEEN RECEIVED FROM THE DEVELOPING CENTRAL AREAS OF CAMILLE DURING THE AFTERNOON AND BOTH THE MOVEMENT AND PRESENT INTENSITY MUST BE INFERRED FROM ISLAND STATION REPORTS. AT 6 PM EDTâ¦2200Zâ¦CAMILLE WAS LOCATED APPROXIMATELY AT LATITUDE 19.9 NORTHâ¦LONGITUDE 83.0 WEST OR ABOUT 440 MILES SOUTH SOUTHWEST OF MIAMI. IT IS APPARENTLY MOVING NORTHWEST ABOUT 12 MPH. BASED UPON THE ESSA 9 SATELLITE PICTURE JUST RECEIVED THE STORM HAS NOT SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED IN INTENSITY DURING THE LAST 6 HOURS AND STRONGEST WINDS ARE ESTIMATED TO BE 60 TO 65 MPH OVER A SMALL AREA NEAR THE CENTER. GALES EXTEND OUTWARD 70 TO 100 MILES IN THE NORTHERN SEMICIRCLE OF THE STORM.
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INDICATIONS ARE THAT CAMILLE WILL PASS NEAR THE WESTERN TIP OF CUBA TONIGHT OR EARLY FRIDAY MORNING MOVING NORTHWESTWARD ABOUT 10 TO 12 MPH. WHILE IT IS TOO EARLY TO DETERMINE WHAT FURTHER LAND AREAS MAY BE AFFECTED BY THIS STORM THE STEERING CURRENTS INDICATE THE LIKELIHOOD OF A TURN TO A SLIGHTLY MORE NORTHERLY COURSE FRIDAY. THIS WOULD CARRY THE CENTER INTO THE EAST CENTRAL GULF OF MEXICO THIS WEEKEND.
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ALL INTERESTS IN THE FLORIDA KEYS AND SHIPPING IN THE VICINITY OF THE YUCATAN CHANNEL AND THE EASTERN GULF OF MEXICO SHOULD REMAIN ALERT FOR FURTHER ADVICES CONCERNING THE DEVELOPMENT AND MOVEMENT OF CAMILLE. WHILE THIS IS A VERY SMALL STORM AT PRESENTâ¦CONDITIONS ARE FAVORABLE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT.
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ALL INTERESTS IN WESTERN CUBA SHOULD BE PREPARED FOR WINDS OF GALE FORCE IN SQUALLS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF HEAVY RAINS AND FLASH FLOODS TONIGHT WITH TIDES ALONG THE SOUTHWEST COASTLINE 3 TO 5 FEET ABOVE NORMAL.
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REPEATING THE 6 PM EDT POSITIONâ¦19.9 NORTHâ¦83.0 WEST.
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THE NEXT ADVISORY WILL BE ISSUED BY THE NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER AT MIDNIGHT EDT.
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SIMPSON
*
As Camille roared ashore in the middle of the night over the Mississippi Gulf Coast with all its ferociousness, I kept up with the reports, even when the power went outâI had a battery-operated AM radio and a citizens band (CB) radio. The winds battered our home to the point where my grandfather moved the refrigerator behind the door to our home to keep it from blowing in.
Camille's winds destroyed the roof of our home, and our beautiful pecan orchard was stripped bare of every pecan and every single leaf. The winds made this eerie, moaning, deathlike sound like right out of a horror movie. Imagine what it must have been like to live through this at only nine years old. The numbers came in: 172 Mississippians were killed by Camille; 41 were never found, presumed washed out to sea. The national death toll was 347. Camille destroyed Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and dumped 32 inches of rain over Virginia, causing 150 mudslides.
Today, there are still bare concrete slabs, vestiges from Camille's wrath dotting the Mississippi coastline. In her wake, Camille left a wave of change for the better in the way the United States deals with hurricane disasters. Camille's legacy includes improvements in emergency management planning; the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); and increased support for scientific and engineering research, resulting in new building codes and the Saffir-Simpson Damage-Potential Scale, as well as better understanding of the psychological effects of disaster trauma.
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
Speaking of psychological trauma, here are two bizarre stories from Camille. The first is the story of how Camille got her name.
Before the creation of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which names hurricanes, storms were named by the meteorologists in the National Hurricane Center in Coral Gables, Florida. Early in 1969, one of the forecasters placed his daughter's name on the list for the upcoming hurricane season: Camille.
This is the only case known where a real live person's name was placed on the list of hurricane names. Camille the person is still around today, living with the distinction of having lent her name to one of the most destructive hurricanes in history. Camille the hurricane had her name retired. There will never again be a Hurricane Camille.
The next story is about the saucy cocktail waitress from Pass Christian, Mississippi, named Mary Ann Gerlach. She lived at the Richelieu Apartments complex, where twenty-three people had a hurricane party just before Camille made landfall. The Richelieu was a civil defense shelter, meaning the building should have been strong enough to remain standing in the event of nuclear war.
Well, it wasn't. As the hurricane party took place, on the third floor, Camille's storm surge washed the entire complex from its foundation. Mary Ann Gerlach was swept out of the building by the water. She managed to cling to a tree about half a mile inland by the railroad tracks in town. She claimed to be the only survivor of the festivity; even her husband was killed in the storm surge. However, two others from the Richelieu also survivedâ¦and they say the party never happened.
I've interviewed Mary Ann and I can tell you, with her sweet Southern accent, she was quite a storyteller. She also went on to have eleven (that's right,
eleven
) husbands.
Mary Ann had a dark side. Ten years after Camille, Mary Ann killed one of her husbands. She said her actions were due to the post-traumatic stress she had endured while clinging for her life to a tree during Hurricane Camille. Whoa, cue the
Twilight Zone
music! She was quite a character.
The Richelieu Apartments complex before Camille
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce; Photographer: Dewie Floyd
The Richelieu Apartments complex after Camille
National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce
But Mary Ann Gerlach wasn't the only character in the story of Camille. My favorite is the hero weatherman from New Orleans, Nash Roberts.
Nash was his own guy. He didn't rely on the National Hurricane Center's forecasts. He did his own forecast and predicted the path of Camille so accurately that it was eerie! Nash Roberts is the most beloved weatherman in the history of New Orleans.
Lots of folks like to compare 2005's Hurricane Katrina to 1969's Hurricane Camille because of their similar strengths and nearly identical landfall locations. Before Katrina, Camille was considered to be the benchmark against which all Gulf Coast hurricanes were measured. Katrina was weaker than Camille at landfall but was substantially larger, which led to both a broader and a larger storm surge. Katrina was described by those who had also experienced Camille as “much worse”ânot only because of the massive storm surge, but because Katrina pounded the Mississippi coast for a longer period of time. Camille also drew part of its record storm surge from adjacent coastal waters; Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain actually receded, sparing some of the city of New Orleans from flooding.
