Before Katrina, there was Camille

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
ASSOCIATED PRESS
While New Orleans and the Gulf Coast struggle to recover from Hurricane Katrina, some memories may extend a few decades earlier, to 1969. when Camille, an even more powerful storm, devastated the same area.
For those who don't recall that disaster, Ernest Zebrowski and Judith A. Howard revisit it in "Category 5," a riveting new book that stresses the human tragedy embodied by the storm and those it affected in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, Mississippi coastal towns and Nelson County, Va., where remnants of the storm deluged rural mountain communities.
The story of Ben Duckworth, a resident of the ill-fated Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, Miss., forms one of several running narratives in the volume.
The people-oriented book also offers a fascinating mini-history of boss Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish and provides insight into the tough residents of the Virginia hill country struggling to survive floods that washed away homes, businesses and roads, and isolated and killed dozens.
Taking refuge
Duckworth and a handful of other tenants had taken refuge in a top-floor apartment in the three-story building as the storm came ashore. As the building began to shudder and wobble, he helped people climb through a hole in the roof until suddenly he was swept away into the water and gasping for breath. The apartment building had disappeared.
He clung to a live oak throughout the night, most of his clothes gone and his skin punctured by nails in floating debris.
His father Hubert, in Jackson to the north, saw reports of the destruction on TV. Hubert gathered a few friends and set off to find his son.
Stopped at a roadblock, he was asked by a young soldier why he was going into the storm-damaged area. "Hubert took a deep breath. 'My business, young man, is that my son was just killed there. We're going to get his body."' The soldier let them pass.
Ben, meanwhile, made it to first aid then fell asleep.
"It was evening when he opened his bleary eyes," the authors report, and saw a sight he had never seen before. "It was his dad crying, and his dad never cried. When Ben sat up his dad hugged him, and his dad never hugged.
"'Come on son,' Hubert said, patting Ben's back as he wiped his tears on his other sleeve. 'We're going home.'"