In the year since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, most of us have come to consider her the worst hurricane that has ever struck the United States. In his new book, Roar of the Heavens, Stefan Bechtel reminds us that in 1969, a hurricane of smaller proportions but greater intensity left lasting scars on the same area.
Bechtel tells the story of Hurricane Camille, a storm that not only led to massive damage and loss of life when she made landfall on the Mississippi/Alabama coast, but then moved inland and unleashed an almost unheard-of amount of rainfall which created flooding and landslides in the mountains of western Virginia.
The most readable portion of Bechtel's book is not the information about the meteorological conditions or the storm itself, but rather the wealth of personal stories and eyewitness accounts gleaned from those who survived a storm like nothing they'd ever seen before. From the residents of an apartment complex in Pass Christian who barely survived when the entire building was washed away on the storm surge, to two young boys who lost their entire family when they were swept away by flood waters in Virginia, these stories are riveting and make the book worthwhile reading.
Since much of his book was researched before Katrina hit in August of 2005, Bechtel also includes an afterword in which he suggest that many of the people who died as a result of Katrina were those who survived Camille and figured that they could survive anything after that, refusing to evacuate when they should have. It is also sobering to realize that many of the towns devastated by Katrina had been rebuilt after Camille in 1969, such as Pass Christian, and some of the memorials erected to Camille's victims were subsequently destroyed by Katrina.
Read this book for a real understanding of what it is like to survive a monstrous storm such as Camille, as well as a sobering reminder of how vulnerable we are to hurricanes --and not just on the coastlines of America.
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