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Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane
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Product Description
"This highly readable account aimed at a general audience excels at telling the plight of the victims and how local political authorities reacted. The saddest lesson is how little the public and the government learned from Camille. Highly recommended for all public libraries, especially those on the Gulf and East coasts."
—Library Journal online
As the unsettled social and political weather of summer 1969 played itself out amid the heat of antiwar marches and the battle for civil rights, three regions of the rural South were devastated by the horrifying force of Category 5 Hurricane Camille.
Camille's nearly 200 mile per hour winds and 28-foot storm surge swept away thousands of homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Twenty-four oceangoing ships sank or were beached; six offshore drilling platforms collapsed; 198 people drowned. Two days later, Camille dropped 108 billion tons of moisture drawn from the Gulf onto the rural communities of Nelson County, Virginia-nearly three feet of rain in 24 hours. Mountainsides were washed away; quiet brooks became raging torrents; homes and whole communities were simply washed off the face of the earth.
In this gripping account, Ernest Zebrowski and Judith Howard tell the heroic story of America's forgotten rural underclass coping with immense adversity and inconceivable tragedy.
Category 5 shows, through the riveting stories of Camille's victims and survivors, the disproportionate impact of natural disasters on the nation's poorest communities. It is, ultimately, a story of the lessons learned-and, in some cases, tragically unlearned-from that storm: hard lessons that were driven home once again in the awful wake of Hurricane Katrina.
"Emergency responses to Katrina were uncoordinated, slow, and--at least in the early days--woefully inadequate. Politicians argued about whether there had been one disaster or two, as if that mattered. And before the last survivors were even evacuated, a flurry of finger-pointing had begun. The question most neglected was: What is the shelf life of a historical lesson?"
Ernest Zebrowski is founder of the doctoral program in science and math education at Southern University, a historically black university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University's Pennsylvania College of Technology. His previous books include Perils of a Restless Planet: Scientific Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Judith Howard earned her Ph.D. in clinical social work from UCLA, and writes a regular political column for the Ruston, Louisiana, Morning Paper.
"Category 5 examines with sensitivity the overwhelming challenges presented by the human and physical impacts from a catastrophic disaster and the value of emergency management to sound decisions and sustainability."
--John C. Pine, Chair, Department of Geography & Anthropology and Director of Disaster Science & Management, Louisiana State University
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #708698 in Books
- Published on: 2005-11-21
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Camille, which swept through coastal Mississippi and Louisiana in August 1969, was the storm that inspired the five-level scale currently used to predict the damage inflicted by hurricanes, and remains the only Category 5 stormâthe strongestâto make landfall in modern American history. Zebrowski and Howard ground the storm's story in personal narratives, opening with the tale of a couple who fear their son has been killed when the storm hits the Mississippi coast. They interview other survivors in the region and up in Virginia, where Camille collided with another storm system, tracking the destruction and the confused response of local authorities. Zebrowski, a physicist, and Howard, a political columnist for a northern Louisiana newspaper, also focus on the role of Southern racial politics in shaping the civic response, particularly in one remote Louisiana parish. It's a serviceable recounting, with a thin layer of analysis discussing how Camille influenced the eventual creation of FEMA. Brief reference is made to Hurricane Katrina, but at this early stage, the authors can't say more than that authorities appear not to have learned from the earlier storm's effects. Photos, maps. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Following his Last Days of St. Pierre (2002), Zebrowski collaborates with Howard to examine 1969's Hurricane Camille. Partly a narrative and partly a pondering of how people and authorities prepare for predictable risk, the work focuses on the areas devastated by the maelstrom: Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana; Mississippi's Gulf Coast; and faraway Nelson County, Virginia. As prelude, the authors recount the local living memory of hurricanes, and further set the stage with the local political and social landscape (segregation hung on in 1969). Settling in with events, they chronicle forecaster Robert Simpson's monitoring of the advancing storm, then magnify its climax with several harrowing survival stories. The authors tell of Luke Petrovich, a Plaquemines politician who found refuge in a water-treatment plant, and Ben Duckworth, a Mississipian swept inland by the storm surge. Closing with Camille's aftermath--years of reconstruction and some reform of disaster preparedness--the authors sound a pessimistic note about society's short-term memory in their sobering, able history of Camille. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Customer Reviews
Hurricane History
Enjoyed reading this book. I had family who survived Camille in Nelson County, spent several weeks there during the summers visiting during my youth and remember vividly going there as soon as we were allowed in to see the damage. This book did an excellent job describing the storm, the aftermath and how it changed the lives of so many people who lived in that area.
Let Us Never Again Forget the Lessons of Camille
The authors of this book were putting the finishing touches on it when Katrina made landfall in generally the same area as Camille. They went back and added a chapter but for the most part the book was left to stand on its own in light of the more recent disaster and it stood up quite well. All through the book there are obvious parallels between the two storms and especially the response that came in their aftermath. It is to be hoped that government officials took the lessons of Katrina to heart in a much more effective way than they did the lessons of Camille and that when the next major hurricane devastates a costal area the outside response will be far more effective.
One of the few things that did improve in the years between the hurricanes was the ability of forecasters to predict the track of the storm and to get the word out. In 1969 radar tracking and computer models were in their infancy and up until shortly before landfall forecasters were sure that Camille would strike Florida. Once they did realize that it was headed for Mississippi they had trouble getting the word out and had it not been for the foresight of local officials the death toll would have been much higher. These authors take the meteorological aspects of this story and present them in a remarkably easy to understand way and do so to the extent that the reader will almost be able to feel the angst of forecasters as they try to figure out just what Camille is up to. These Hurricane Center people are remarkable.
These authors do an excellent job of relating how local authorities had taken to heart the lessons learned from hurricane Audrey in 1957 and the precautions that they had taken because of those lessons. It is not hard to see in this narrative that state and federal authorities were far behind the local authorities in preparedness for Camille and that the same was true all those years later when Katrina came ashore. This is not however just a story about the failure of government though, it is also very much a story of the people who were the victims of this great storm. This is a story of the heroism of and resilience of people who were hit with the worst that nature has to offer.
These authors do a marvelous job of relating the stories of individuals and families who were in the path of the monster Camille. Through the reminiscences of those who survived the authors tell the stories of families ripped apart and of whole families who just vanished. They tell the true story of the much publicized collapse of the Richelieu apartments in Pass Christian, they tell the story of a group of men out for a sail who end up weathering the storm near the mouth of the Mississippi as their boat breaks up around them, they tell the story of people who sought refuge in local churches only to find the large old building disintegrating around them and they tell the story of quiet communities in Virginia where the people went to bed with no warning at all that many of them would be washed away before dawn. Through it all the survivors immediately turned their attention toward helping each other once the storm had passed and these survivors, many of them wounded or in mourning themselves immediately began rescue efforts that saved untold numbers of people. It is the heart and soul of these people that is the true story to be found in this book and these authors have truly done these people justice in this highly readable account of one of the great disasters in American history.
Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane
Once you pick this book up, you won't want to put it down until you've read the very last page and the dust cover notes as well. As a reader all too familiar with the wrath and destruction of hurricanes, I found the historical facts eerily accurate and the human drama so tense that the reader is drawn into the story as if sucked into the vortex of the storm itself. Category 5 is gripping and powerful like a well-written novel and not the true account of devastation and suffering that it is -- without the dry, clinical approach of a mere assessment of storm damage. The human element is often invisible when looking at the overall picture. Howard and Zebrowski take us to ground zero to examine the personal lives of those affected and no reader can ever put those images out of his or her mind. Excellent read!
Tom Aswell
Baton Rouge, LA.
