Yikes. Making landfall tonight.

quote:

Hurricane Laura has strengthened into a Category 4 as it heads for a destructive landfall near the Texas and Louisiana border Wednesday night into early Thursday morning. A catastrophic storm surge and damaging winds will batter the region and a threat of flooding rain and strong winds will extend well inland.

https://weather.com/storms/hur...tion-texas-louisiana

The phrase I heard on the radio was "non-survivable storm surge".

Yikes.

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
The phrase I heard on the radio was "non-survivable storm surge".

Yikes.

Yeah, that one had me remembering Hurricane Camille and the people who tried to "weather" the storm in a waterside apartment complex. Twenty five foot surge took the complex down to the foundation.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

quote:

Originally posted by pianojuggler:
The phrase I heard on the radio was "non-survivable storm surge".

Yikes.

Yeah, that one had me remembering Hurricane Camille and the people who tried to "weather" the storm in a waterside apartment complex. Twenty five foot surge took the complex down to the foundation.

Since I grew up 60 miles north of Camille's landfall, our school showed us a movie about it every year that was designed to terrify us into never, never, NEVER underestimating a hurricane. It showed before-and-after shots of that complex and the bare slab that the storm surge left behind. The force of that storm surge was just unimaginable.

According to this, that party never happened.

https://www.nola.com/news/weat...c2-1ad983263903.html

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Originally posted by jodi:
According to this, that party never happened.

https://www.nola.com/news/weat...c2-1ad983263903.html

The pictures in that article are amazing.

Bunch of live feeds from the hurricane zone.

http://www.hurricanetrack.com/


https://www.click2houston.com/...ne-laura-approaches/

"Party" isn't the issue. The hurricane took a multi-story apartment complex down to the slab, and people were in the building. Do you dispute that, Jodi?

No. But I remembered the story about the hurricane party, and did not know that one of the survivors says that part was embellished, Or urban legended or whatever you want to call it. I’m fascinated by how many things I was told, and repeated as truth that have turned out not to be true at all. How things drift from the truth as they get retold. I googled hurricane camille party because I couldn’t remember the details and that’s the article that showed up. And I thought it was interesting so I linked to it.

I don't recall hearing about the apartment complex at all, party or not, so this was all news to me.

Steve's right. The pictures in that article are something else.

The problem with the area where the storm is going to hit is that it is very, very flat. They’re predicting flooding as far as 30 miles inland. That, combined with a 20 foot storm surge and waves on top of that could make for a lot of damage.

quote:

Originally posted by jodi:
According to this, that party never happened.

https://www.nola.com/news/weat...c2-1ad983263903.html

I believed in the party until I was in my forties, writing Artifacts. To write the hurricane scenes, I dipped into my memories of Camille and I read a ton of books. One of them was Florida Hurricane History and the other one was Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast. At some point, I read the article Jodi posted and was sad to learn that the Richelieu party was an urban legend. I didn't want to rain on P*D's parade (rain...hurricanes...har har har), so I didn't point that out. I believe the Richelieu scenes in the movie that was shown to us every year included Walter Cronkite's mistaken reporting on the party.

The Richelieu, however, was real, and it was wiped away right down to the slab. Here are before and after photos:



Even though the woman who told the party story was...mistaken...I used her story about floating out a window while clinging to a sofa cushion in Artifacts, when Cally floats out the window of a hotel while clinging to a floating dresser drawer.

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I didn't want to rain on P*D's parade

Please people, where did I talk about a hurricane party and blame people?

The anniversary of Camille was last week, and my Facebook feed is always awash in people's personal memories when August 17 rolls around. My uncle always talks about going down as a National Guardsman to help with the cleanup. My school friends talk about being terrified seven-year-olds.

It hit our house after dark, so I didn't see much, but I remember a tremendous cracking noise that was loud enough to hear over the wind. When we woke up, a tree across the street from us had broken off about fifteen feet above the ground. I used that sound and the way I remember the wind sounded when I wrote Artifacts. I also used the fact that Camille cut Ship Island in two.

A quarter-mile down the road, there was a small valley where all the trees were down in all directions, as if twisted into knots. There were tornadoes embedded in the storm, so we've always thought that one of them struck there.

When I read the book about Camille, I learned that nobody understood how bad it might be until some brave soul flew into the eye and reported a pressure of 900 millibars, which prompted civil defense folks to go door-to-door telling people to get out. The man in charge of civil defense for the area said that the pilot who took those readings saved a thousand lives.

quote:

Originally posted by Piano*Dad:

quote:

I didn't want to rain on P*D's parade

Please people, where did I talk about a hurricane party and blame people?

Did I say you blamed people? I didn't intend to.

I just didn't want to be that person who says, "Actually, that party was an urban legend."

And now I think I've insulted Jodi....

Shoot me now....