"That Bitch Camille": Marking the 57th Anniversary of the Gulf Coast’s Original Monster Hurricane *

In August 2005, I was working on a novel. A family saga about a mother and her adult daughter set against the backdrop of Biloxi, Mississippi’s then-newish casino industry. I walked away from it when Hurricane Katrina and her path of destruction devastated that part of the world. The story I was telling didn’t matter compared to the awful reality.

Many years later, the mother from that discarded story was still living rent-free in my head. In need of a new writing project, I imagined a prequel, with the middle-aged mother of the original story as a young girl coming of age. I chose 1969 as the starting point, mostly because I thought of the cultural touchstone that was Woodstock. When I started writing and doing the research needed to set the piece in time, I discovered another event that occurred in 1969 that would have a much more immediate effect on my characters. Hurricane Camille, one of this country’s most destructive hurricanes, roared ashore in Mississippi at the very time Woodstock was taking place in upstate New York. The fact that I’d abandoned my first project because of a catastrophic hurricane, only to set its prequel right in the middle of another one, seemed prescient, don’t you think? 

This post, however, isn’t about my fictional characters or the book they inhabit (I’ll share more on that another time, I promise.) It’s about the real-life people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast who endured the nightmare of Hurricane Camille, a massive storm that made landfall as a Category 5 storm between Waveland and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi on the evening of August 17, 1969.

The Southern Documentary Project at the University of Mississippi produced Camille: The Original Monster Storm in 2019 to mark the 50^th anniversary of Hurricane Camille. The documentary features archival footage and first-person survivor accounts.

The actual maximum wind speeds of Camille aren’t known because all wind-recording instruments were destroyed in the storm, but data indicate peak winds were around 175 mph along the coast. Her colossal waves took out most tidal gauges, but estimates based on debris levels showed Camille produced tides as high as 24 ½ feet in some places—the highest ever storm surges in the United States until Hurricane Katrina came along in 2005. Camille cleared nearly everything along the Mississippi Coast for at least three blocks inland, practically washing away the towns of Pass Christian and Long Beach. Approximately 40,000 in Harrison County were left homeless.

In Mississippi, Camille killed 172 people, including 41 who went missing and were never found. There were 116 deaths in Harrison County alone, where Biloxi is located. Had it not been for Harrison County’s Civil Defense Director Wade Guice, the death toll would have been higher. Heeding the catastrophic storm surge projections, he took heroic actions to get people to evacuate ahead of the storm, including sending people door-to-door to spread the word. Those that chose not to go were asked to provide names of their next of kin—which turned out to be an effective way to get many of them to change their minds.

For those who survived the storm, the rebuilding process went on for years. But if there’s one thing people who live through horrors like this share, it’s resiliency. With the help of volunteers, towns and cities were rebuilt and life returned to a new, if altered, normal. Pass Christian and Long Beach came back. And other cities along the coast grew, as well. The danger wasn’t gone—a fact proven in spades in 2005—but people returned to the world they knew. Few things are stronger than our ties to home.

A final note: Although the history of Hurricane Camille most often focuses on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Camille wreaked havoc in another part of the country. Leaving out the rest of the story would do a disservice to the others who suffered. When Camille left Mississippi, she weakened to a tropical depression moving northward, but in Virginia, coming up against the Blue Ridge Mountains, the storm reintensified. An astronomical amount of rain fell in a short amount of time—one near the junction of the Tye and Piney Rivers received 31” of rain in a five-hour period, with rain falling so hard and fast it was almost impossible for people caught in it to breathe. Flash flooding and landslides claimed another 153 lives in Virginia, 123 of them in Nelson County—almost as many as had died in Mississippi.

Excellent resource books about Hurricane Camille

And in case you're wondering--or even if you're not--the Gulf in question? It was, is, and will always be the Gulf of Mexico to me!

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* About the title: A main character in my upcoming book (The Rule of Thirds, release date, August 3, 2027) is a shrimp boat captain who loses both his house and his boat to Hurricane Camille. "That bitch Camille" is his term of endearment for the storm.