HURRICANE CAMILLE: MONSTER STORM OF THE GULF COAST

摘要

Camille. To many people over the age of 40, no further elaboration is needed to understand what that name represents. This is certainly true for anyone who lived along the Gulf Coast or further north and east along a winding path from Mississippi to Virginia in August 1969. Anyone with a passing or professional interest in weather from that generation also instantly associates the name with one of the most powerful hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States. I was a nine-year-old boy withan already obsessive interest in the weather when Camille took aim at Pass Christian, Mississippi, as that sultry August came to an end. Even though I was nearly 1,500 miles away in New England, I could almost feel Camille sucking the light and life outof everything ahead of it as it churned toward the Gulf Coast. This visceral feeling of dread was no doubt intensified by the eerie darkness and windswept rains that had settled in over my Boston home and across much of the Northeast that same weekend. Of course, the weather system that kept me indoors in Massachusetts and that was turning Woodstock into a mud-bath in upstate New York was very different from the one causing gales to whip up and precipitation to start falling in sheets from Mobile to New Orleans on Sunday, 17 August 1969. Nevertheless, as I listened to weather bulletins on the radio warning of a gathering storm half a continent away, it felt to me as if it was raining all over the world.