Roar Of The Heavens: Surviving Camille, the Worst Storm in American

by Stefan Bechtel

"Rain is likely tonight, ending tomorrow. Thursday will be fair and cooler." So began the final and most destructive act of Hurricane Camille, a storm so ferocious that scientists calculated the odds as once in a thousand years. In 1969, meteorologists were yet to have satellite and computer technology at their disposal, and the National Hurricane Center’s director, Dr. Robert Simpson, could only rely on his instincts to predict Camille’s track. The Category Five storm, with wind gusts over 200 miles per hour, tore into the Mississippi/Alabama coast, erasing entire towns. At a hurricane party on a rooftop a few miles from where Camille made landfall, the nearly three-story tidal storm surge—the highest ever measured—collapsed the entire building and swept 23 people to their deaths. Incredibly, the worst was yet to come. As Camille hit the mountains of western Virginia she also collided with two other weather systems that squeezed millions of tons of water out of the storm like a sponge. It didn’t just rain; the air held nearly the maximum amount of water theoretically possible, becoming a solid body of descending liquid, and lightning flashed sideways. Eight hours and more than two feet of rain later, 124 people in rural Nelson County were dead. Many of them, taken by the devastating floods, would never be found. Roar of the Heavens tells Camille’s destructive hour-by-hour story through the riveting first-person accounts of survivors and key players, including Dr. Simpson, who would later help to pioneer the universal Saffir-Simpson Scale for hurricanes; Mary Ann Gerlach, the lone survivor of that hurricane party, who was later found clinging to a tree five miles away; and William Whitehead, the very untraditional sheriff of Nelson County, who became a central figure in the storm’s aftermath. At the height of school desegregation, blacks and whites came together to rebuild, and students worked together with locals who had so recently attacked them for demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Camille’s ferocity exposed the inadequacies of the nation’s ability to deal with such a cataclysmic event and led directly to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet Roar of the Heavens is also a cautionary tale, as the United States is still terribly unprepared to deal with hurricanes. When Katrina came ashore as a Category Four hurricane in 2005, over 1,000 lives were tragically lost, and experts agree that it is only a question of time before another Category Five storm hits the U.S. mainland.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, American History

308 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2006

Reviews

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, excellent, book. Though I was just a young teenager at this time, I was there on the Mississippi Gulf coast, on vacation, until the morning of the night it hit. It took us 10 hours to travel what was usually an hour and a half or 2 hour trip. I found it fascinating to hear about the sand scouring people. As we were packing to leave, early that morning, my dad sent my little 8 year old brother & I out to the car to put some things in it. We came flying back into the cottage, telling him that there was some kind of tiny bugs biting us out there. Daddy stepped out, came back in and said, that's the sand from the beach. He wrapped us in our beach towels & told us to look down.
I remember that the "tourist court" manager was being very calm about it all, telling my folks that we might be better off just moving back off the beach to another place, if we were heading to Louisiana.

I vaguely remember about the disaster in Virginia. Now, through Mr. Bechtel's terrific interviewing skills, I felt as if I knew these people, and cried for them.He also did a marvelous job explaining the weather anomaly that was Camille, it was fascinating.

Informative, fascinating, heart breaking, book.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well written, an exhaustive and thrilling account of Cat 5 Hurricane Camille that devastated the Gulf coast and then snuck up on and blew away Nelson County, Virginia, in August 1969. Highly recommended - not only for those who lived in the area (I was 16 and living in nearby Lynchburg, VA, where we only belatedly learned what had happened 30 miles away due to the concentrated nature of the storm), but also for anyone fascinated by the phenomenal power of nature run amok.

[Elizabeth Cottrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Morbidly fascinating and well researched saga of Hurricane Camille -- a category 5 storm that in 1969 ravaged the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Gulfport and Pass Christian, then stealthily worked its way inland to mix with an unusual combination of weather systems and conditions to dump 31-36 inches of rain on Nelson County, Virginia, in eight hours. It caused massive mud slides and 124 deaths.

This book combines the style and drama of A Perfect Storm and Isaac's Storm, made all the more riveting to me because I knew two families directly impacted. Becky Moyers (maiden name Bryant) lost her mother and three sisters in that storm. Alice Craddock and her parents were driving through Nelson County that night when their car stalled out on Route 29 in rapidly rising water. They were rescued by a tractor trailer driver who took them to Lynchburg. Other tractor trailers, later in the evening, were washed off the road and drivers drowned.

The road I usually took to get back to Randolph-Macon Woman's College (it was the beginning of my junior year) was washed out in many places, so I detoured to get to Lynchburg about three weeks after the flood.

Disasters bring out the best and worst in people, and its scenes haunt me still. Life is so darned fragile and uncertain. Each day must be cherished.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was born seven months after Camille arrived in Nelson County, Virginia, and having entered this life and been raised just 30 minutes away in Lynchburg that name - Camille - was a sad part of the local lexicon. I have memories of my father saying that even many years later, he could still drive to Nelson County and easily find visible signs of the storm’s impact. In this book, Stefan Bechtel has done an extraordinary job of putting the reader into the the events of the storm, his writing taking us beyond simply being bystanders and actually putting us in the role of witnesses. I wasn’t just reading about the events and experiences of the individuals and families he described; I was feeling them. Now later in my life I’m back home in Lynchburg, and this book is a reminder of the impact of nature, the resiliency of humanity, and the memories of the tragedy that are still evoked here more than 50 years later by that name: Camille.

[M.K.B. Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hands down one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I am astounded it didn't garner a national following. Because I grew up on the other side of the mountain from Nelson County, the story was especially compelling. Bechtel's telling of the events is heart wrenching, informative and fast-moving. I loved this book.

[Jeff Nicholson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of the books that have been written about Hurricane Camille, this is probably the easiest to find. It's a very important story that is almost unknown today. When working in disaster recovery on the Gulf Coast after Katrina, I heard many people mention Camille. Many people said things like, "I lived through Camille, but this..." or "Camille was a pimple on a baby's butt compared to this." No one in Louisiana and Mississippi seemed aware that Camille had a second act in Virginia, and this book rightly devotes most of its ink to that part of the storm.

The first-person accounts of the storm are extraordinary, and it's clear that the author absorbed many heart-wrenching personal stories researching the book. I was distracted, however, by his forced and stilted southernisms when trying to describe Nelson County, which is not really a southern culture at all. The narrator in a non-fiction historical account of a tragedy shouldn't really refer to the disaster area as "these parts." I also found geographic problems on almost every page. He misplaces the mouths of the Rockfish and Tye Rivers, refers to Buena Vista as east of Lovingston and Salem as "up" from Nelson. He also makes factual errors such as representing Linwood Holton as the governor of Virginia and simultaneously the teenage boyfriend of one of the Raines girls. This is all surprising as the author is a Charlottesville resident who must have spent a great deal of time in Nelson during the writing of this book. These details will escape anyone who doesn't live in the area, but for those people (and the author), maps of the Mississippi Coast and Nelson County would have been very useful.

[Suzanne Auckerman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall excellent book that explains a lot of the dynamics of a hurricane, how people predict their path, how categories are determined, how to best motivate people to evacuate, and how to clean up. It focuses on Camille, which hit the gulf coast in 1969, traveled approximately 800 miles inland, which is usually where a hurricane loses strength, what caused it to revive and destroy most of Nelson County in about 8 hours in the night with no warning. It happened in August of 1969 and I had just gone to college. I remember going over looking at the James and seeing all the debris, houses, parts of house, trees, logs and I am sure some people washing out to sea.

Overall it was well written, but it seemed at the end, he was stretching it and told some stories over again.

[Jeannie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fascinating read! Who hasn't heard of Hurricane Camille but who knew the storm affected the state of Virginia in such a horrific way? I didn't so this book really opened my eyes. The author laid the main characters of this true story out in such a manner that I felt as if I knew them personally. This was a heartbreaking read.

[Andrea Kepner · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most gripping weather-related books I've read. Everyone knows the devastation Hurricane Camille wreaked on the coast, but (unfathomably) often lost in the shuffle is what happened inland.

[Dennis Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of the interviews that this author conducted for this book were with people who's story has been told before but he also did interviews with and told the stories of many people who's story I had never come across before. Even when the stories were stories that I had heard before Bechtel told them in such a fascinating way that I still found them to be extremely gripping and moving. This author manages to convey the tragic loss that so many families suffered on both the coast and in Virginia in such a moving way that I would recommend that you keep a hanky handy just in case.

Camille and hurricanes in general have always fascinated me and this is one of the best books that I have come across on the subject. Bechtel tells his story with the deftness and skill of a David McCullough and although he did leave a strand or two up in the air he has given us a masterful narrative that not only entertains and informs but also manages to explain the meteorological events that caused the tragedy in Nelson County Virginia in a way that even I could understand.

[Ann Samford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Haha I really hesitated to put this book in a history classification because of all the errors… Maybe best in historical fiction.

Occasionally the book was riveting, fascinating and engaging. Often it was a slog.

Some of the errors include reference to a non existent Kroger in Lovingston, horse tails and water hyacinth in the Tye River,hickory nuts and acorns falling here in August, roadsides littler with bodies of squirrels, Godwin was governor, Village Inn has always been a motel and has never had a bar or a restaurant, Dick Whitehead was not a wrestler and the HS didn’t have a wrestling team at the time, Route 29 is not (and was not) an interstate, lightning description not sure, haha

I’ve talked to Dick Whitehead about the book and he had an advanced copy or something and told Stefan Bechtel about the errors he saw and Bechtel said it wasn’t worth correcting….

Very frustrating to see a book portrayed as the “documentation” of Camille turns to fictionalization because the author is too lazy to do his homework.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

The personal stories and tragedies were gripping, and the author did a great job highlighting just how unprecedented the rainfall in Nelson County was. However, I thought the first part of the book was a little bit slow and repetitive with how it described the workings of a hurricane. Instead of repeating the same information throughout the book, I would have rather seen a few diagrams of the physics behind a hurricane. Some of the portions of the book felt like a textbook, but without the helpful visual guides that a textbook provides.

That being said, it was an excellent read and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the history of the area, or in weather events in general.

[Mark Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a read. At turns aching in it's description of the human component of the story and fascinating in it's thorough analysis of the science and inner workings of hurricanes. The story is essentially divided into two parts: the powerful Category 5 Hurricane Camille, with at least 200 mph winds, making it's landfall in Mississippi; and the unbelievable and heartbreaking damage done by Camille's remnants in Nelson County, Virginia, where there was absolutely no warning of the perfect storm of conditions that presented itself, resulting in a deluge of in the neighborhood of 30 INCHES of rain in an 8 HOUR period. Many witnesses in Nelson County described the rain as falling so hard that they had to cover their mouths just to BREATHE. Hard to put this book down. It is highly recommended.

[Paul McBride · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! What a fantastic book.
All about Hurricane Camille. I had of course heard of Camille but I had no idea how powerful the storm was.
Yes Katrina caused far more damage, but that was because the area the Camille hit was no where near as built up and populated as New Orleans.
Camille was smaller in size but unlike Katrina Camille was a category 5 hurricane, with wind of over 190 mph.
I definitely knew absolutely nothing about the second punch Camille delivered two nights later on Virginia, with Nothing forecast and no warnings a couple of counties in Virginia were devastated with rainfall totals of biblical proportions. Between 17-31 inches of rain in less than 8 hours. Hills, rivers, and towns completely washed away.
This book tells the story of Camille fabulously!!

[Sloane Mayberry · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was quite eerie reading this during Helene. This book is a mix of the science around hurricanes and the personal stories that accompanied Camille in 1969. My inlaws are from Nelson Country so this felt so close to home. Their first hand accounts really matched what is written. What happened in Virginia all took place at night with absolutely zero warning (the devastating landfall of this storm in Mississippi was forecasted well ahead). One of the most devastating weather events in US history - the rain was averaging 3"/hour for 9ish hours and there were no exact measurements that captured the volume of water. The book is excellent but it is sadly out of print.

[Clover · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fascinating account of Camille, which is legendary here in Virginia. I learned a lot about how hurricanes form and how they work. However, the book needed a better editor. It is extremely redundant, often using the same anecdote or even phrase two or three times, 100 pages apart. The author did a commendable amount of research from primary sources, eyewitnesses, diaries, and news accounts, but he seemed compelled to include every single detail. The book went on too long and became repetitive. I’d give it a B-/C+—but I’m glad I read it.

[Dulcie O’Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing nonfiction that reads like a fiction. It felt like a light dive into Erik Larson style writing. It was emotionally hard to read and PG graphic with descriptions of bodies, human and animal. I loved reading about Nelson and Amherst county within the book and seeing the family names of old neighbors. The narrative is woven as a time lapse of many families accounts in chronological order. Some more scientific, others more descriptive. It is a memorable book as a whole and an important moment within an unforgettable year.

[Tomi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bechtel is a very descriptive writer; the scenery, the power of the storm, and the peaceful communities hit by Camille came alive at his hands. (With one exception - "quotidian" - really?) I liked the way he balanced the storm against the other things happening in 1969. People are dying in a storm while others are stoned silly at Woodstock...I enjoyed reading this book, although there was more science than I wanted to know about.

[Garry Walton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three days before I left home for my first year in college, Hurricane Camille hit. My first weekend at "the University" was spent shoveling mud out of homes in Nelson County, thanks to a pair of socially conscious RAs. I have never forgotten that experience. Bechtel brings it all back with his collection of on-the-scene interviews with the everyday citizens and public officials whose normal lives were washed away in 24 hours in August 1969.

[Kristen Sloan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this book because I drove past a historical marker along the highway in VA (everyone else reads those, right?) which mentioned the deaths caused in the area by Hurricane Camille. My curiosity was piqued since we were hundreds of miles from the coast.

Traces Camille from her birth in the Gulf, through her catastrophic landfall, and the destruction she wrought on Nelson County, VA.

[Calvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars

[Lynn Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing story, well told.

[Jerry Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a lot of great accounts of storm related disasters (Isaacs Storm being one of my other favorites) but this stands there with the best of them. These accounts typically tread reasonably similar ground - massive storm, what that means for people in it's path, the uncertainty about where it will hit, the personal stories etc. This book isn't really an exception to that rule, but it is very well written and engaging, giving more than the usual explanation of hurricanes in general and Camille in particular. There are plenty or personal stories but these are not overdone and the overall scale comes across.

What I didn't realize about this storm, was the severe and almost unprecedented flooding that is caused in Virginia, killing a great many people there as well. This takes up at least half the book and is horrifying and fascinating in equal measure. The personal stories are more prevelant here and they deserve to be given the nature of the tragedy there.

Fascinating, well written and easy to read. Certainly left me far more informed about this monster storm and why it has such a place in storm history and lore.

[Kristal · Rating 3 out of 5]

On August 17, 1969 Hurricane Camille torn through the little towns of Pass Christian and Bay St. Louise, leaving total destruction. But unlike other hurricanes, Camille would have a second act. She proceeded north into Virginia and there she meet with some unusual weather conditions that produced "one of the all-time meteorological anomalies in the United States." Rain poured for eight hours straight, the equivalent of eight months of rain in one night. People were literally sweep out of the beds while asleep, never to know what happened.

Overall, a very well-written book describing the origins of Camille starting with her birth off the coast of Africa and peppered with other news of the day, like the famous rain-soaked festival at Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York. Well-researched and written.

[Kristal · Rating 5 out of 5]

On August 17, 1969 Hurricane Camille torn through the little towns of Pass Christian and Bay St. Louise, leaving total destruction. But unlike other hurricanes, Camille would have a second act. She proceeded north into Virginia and there she meet with some unusual weather conditions that produced "one of the all-time meteorological anomalies in the United States." Rain poured for eight hours straight, the equivalent of eight months of rain in one night. People were literally sweep out of the beds while asleep, never to know what happened.

Overall, a very well-written book describing the origins of Camille starting with her birth off the coast of Africa and peppered with other news of the day, like the famous rain-soaked festival at Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York. Well-researched and written.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably a book I shouldn't read just before moving to Florida. A great book for someone fascinated with weather and the strength (and lack of compassion) of "mother nature". If you don't want to read about wind, rain, floods, and related...then probably this book isn't for you. It follows the stories of a myriad of people who werecaught as Camille hit the Lousiana coast as a Category 5 with a storm surge over 20 feet and winds around 200MPH. it then continues with the story of a small area of Virginia (Nelson County) that was inundated with about 30 inches of rain in a space of 8 hours (in the middle of the night). I was fascinated, appalled, and filled with compassion and admiration.

[Marc Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

The blow-by-blow descriptions of devastation on the Gulf Coast and in the mountains of Virginia are fascinating... for a while. They go on too long and they become repetitious.

But it's undeniable: This was a monster of a hurricane with the weirdest trajectory of any on record. I had no idea it was even possible for a hurricane to almost literally tear apart a mountain so far inland, or drop so much rain in such a short time so many miles from the coast.

The scientific descriptions were an education. The personal stories were harrowing. The detail was incredible. This is a very good example of narrative nonfiction. But overall, it was simply too much and too disjointed.

[pianogal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. I've always heard about Camille, but I didn't realize that she was the strongest storm to hit the mainland US. She was an unmeasurable monster. I also had no idea that she inundated Nelson Co VA. That was almost harder to read than the stuff on the Gulf Coast b/c it was so unexpected. Well written.

[Eliza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very good, balanced well between the human interest stories and weather science. Overall it was well-written, but it could have been about 50 pages shorter and not as repetitive at the end.

I'm interested to see if the author published any commentary or articles after Super Storm Sandy.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the vein of non-fiction 'novels' like "Isaac's Storm" or "City on Fire," this excellent, sprawling account focuses on the infamous hurricane and its aftermath in two ravaged communities. The survivor (victim?) stories are the stuff of nightmares.