Hilda, Betsy, Beulah, Camille & Eloise
It was 1964 when Hilda came into my life and left quickly. All I remember of her was that she left a big chlorine smell in Baton Rouge because Hilda had overturned a barge in the Mississippi creating a gas emergency.
Betsy made more of an impact in 1965 although the news was about New Orleans to the south. Worst tidal surge there since 1947; 256 people killed with the damages at $1.4 billion.
I reported on New Orleans Mayor Vic Schiro saying on live television: ”Don’t believe any false rumors unless they come from me.” That was Mayor Vic, the master of the malaprop. It was the first hurricane to go over a billion dollars in damage.
In 1967, Hurricane Beulah mainly hit Texas but, if there was a storm in the Gulf of Mexico, we worried it to death with coverage, although we did get some bad weather.
WVUE-TV News Director Alec Gifford sent me out early on August the 17th, 1969 with Kenny Grevenburg [sic] to wait for the storm of Hurricane Camille on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
We checked into a Holiday Inn on Highway 90 between Gulfport and Biloxi with the Gulf of Mexico just a stone’s throw away. I remember it was a 2nd floor room.
We decided to go to the Civil Defense HQ up the road, about a mile from the Gulf, because we would have the latest information on the storm and a telephone line. We parked out front (more on that later) while businesses such as Denny’s Restaurant were bringing in all their food because when electricity went out it would all go bad anyway. We gorged on cream pies and chili with no limit.
We listened to the radios reporting all the preparations for the storm; mostly just waiting.
I do remember sticking my head out the door and it was blown from facing left to facing right in about quarter of a second. A mega-slap across the face gave me the message this was a big storm.
Meanwhile Camille had become a Category 5 storm with a 25 feet surge of water crashing into the Mississippi Gulf Coast, inundating everything, even the dinosaur park just down the road with life size concrete replicas, within two miles of the beach from Henderson Point to Biloxi. Tides ran 15 to 32 feet above normal. Along the coasts of southeastern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, 5,238 homes were destroyed.
As it was calmer outside about 4 o’clock in the morning, and we were certain it wasn’t the eye of the hurricane (there could have been more hurricane coming), Kenny and I ventured outside.
It’s dark in pre-dawn hours and we had to turn on the camera light to see what was ahead of us (the light was a Frezzi, powered by batteries worn around the waist in a belt that was so big it looked like it was a part of the Michelin Man’s costume).
Light on.
The first sight was a line of cars crushed by a 50-foot pine felled by Camille. The top of the tree hid our car but, while the trunk crushed the other cars, ours was under fluffy needles and, other than a few scratches, was OK.
Light off.
Beyond, lay unimaginable horror.
Light on.
We reached Highway 90, what used to be the main artery, but now appeared in Frezzi-light as if someone had dropped a deck of cards.
Light off.
Light on.
Everywhere each illumination revealed more destruction. I remember the library-hush as the earliest bit of sunrise revealed more destruction. It was almost as though the iris of reality made sure we got small doses, to better take in the whole picture.
Light off.
(As a sidebar, in 1953 I once went to see The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms with my cousin Clyde Sweet in Toledo, Ohio, a film that impressed the horror of discovering an atomic test has awakened a buried Tyrannosaurus Rex which goes on to terrorize New York dock workers.)
Light on.
In this Frezzi-lit scene before me, was a Full-Sized T-Rex Head, visible between the slabs of concrete.
Light off.
The quiet was broken by me screaming like a girly until I was brought back to reality when I realized the Rex was colored in Day-Glo orange. It was bigger-than-life-size debris from a tourist attraction along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
♦
As the daylight increased, people came out of their cocoon-like safety nests, checked their limbs and children’s limbs, and then put their heads in hands at the scene they witnessed.
We stumbled along the wreckage of big houses along Highway 90. In one case a home was standing while next door was a pile of rubble. Rescue crews were tending to bodies and, at the same time, next door a family – a mother and two teenagers and a 10 year old boy- were wandering around shell-shocked.
I interviewed the mother who told me they were vacationing from Michigan. Neighbours had assured them it was perfectly safe to stay there because the house had survived numerous hurricanes before. So they felt secure despite the orders to evacuate. Then the winds and rains came at night. First, they had flooding on the ground floor, so they went upstairs to the first floor. Then the water rose there, so they went to the second floor. Still the flood water was rising so they went to the attic and held on near a window as the water still threatened them.
Out of the attic window they could make out a 10-year-old boy clinging to a mattress floating by and they reached for him and brought him inside. He was the only survivor out of a family of eight next door, the place where rescue workers were trying to recover the bodies as we did our interview.
Afterwards the woman asked a favour of me – would I call her husband in Ann Arbor and tell him they were safe because the phone was out?
The final death count for the U.S. was listed at 256, including 143 on the Gulf coast, with damage estimates exceeding $1.4 billion along the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts.
The casualties were higher than that by about 120, but eventually officials didn’t count bodies that were disinterred in a cemetery in Bay St. Louis. I know this because we tracked down the high body count story and saw the scene.
And that room at the Holiday Inn. A couple days later I had dropped by to pick up my briefcase and found that there had been 7-feet of water in my 8-foot ceilinged, 2nd floor room. The storm surge had been that high.
Another hurricane, I think it was Eloise in 1975, saw me assigned (with Kenny Grevenburg again) to an area of Louisiana to track the path the storm might take. I was in some backwater Cajun town, something like Poufette near Erath.
It was raining heavily and the winds were a-blowing. Protective plywood had already been put over windows by the time we were there and folks were nestling in their homes.
The two-way radio wouldn’t reach to New Orleans so I saw, in between the windscreen wipers going full speed, a pay phone box on a corner. I managed to get there in the wind and rain, dropped a nickel in the slot, got a dial tone and called the newsroom and the assignment editor Jim Kemp (later with CNN). I told him the situation of being late to the party and he proceeded to shout: “God damn it, we need PEOPLE. People doing things like putting up plywood – emergency meetings with PEOPLE – PEOPLE – PEOPLE.”
I replied: “Jim. We’re the only assholes out in this storm. They’ve already done the preparations.”
We left it with us going in search of PEOPLE – PEOPLE – PEOPLE.
♦
Since my assessment that we were the only assholes out in this weather was correct, I had to do next best thing – become the people who were out in the hurricane. Kenny and I decided I would do a stand-up out in the weather while he would lay down on the seat, holding the door of the car open against the wind with his feet. I would stand in the open part of the door, in the wind and rain, being PEOPLE in the storm.
It went to plan until the wind gusted to over 100 miles per hour (my estimate); what the film showed was me talking, holding a mike, then – whoosh – I disappeared from view.
All I remember is going head over heels down a bank toward water, maybe the Poufette Canal, with my mind filled with one thing – water moccasins. The fear of landing among them gave me the super powers needed to climb the bank in record time.
Soaked through, wet hair, I made it back to the car snake-bite free, to be greeted by Kenny convulsed in laughter. He continued to laugh at the image he had just seen of my disappearing act. Even when I threatened to NOT let go of the mike cord the next time, he continued the laugh track.
Years later, I was contacted by America’s Funniest Home Videos programme who wanted permission to use the film, because WVUE-TV had used it the night of the hurricane coverage. All the ignominy and embarrassment would be re-visited – oh yes, and they paid $975.
It had a laugh track supplied by Kenny.
