Hurricane Camille Remembered
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Bring your own pen. 15 foot accuracy when hidden. Not as difficult as the original hiding spot; the river ate it. Like all caches all in this series, you are looking for a necessity when the power goes out. As you may have learned by now, you can use the trails to get you very close to the cache.
August 19, 1969 Camille hits Virginia. Where was Brother Zeke? I was living nearby on the 9000 block of Cherokee Road. I vividly remember walking down “snake hill” and watching cows float down the James River. So before I catch you complaining that it hardly rains at all, let me take you back to a night in 1969. That night brought a rain the likes of which few places on earth have ever seen.
Hurricane Camille arrived in Virginia on the night of August 19th, one of only three category five storms ever to make landfall in the United States since record-keeping began. In eight hours close to 28 inches of rain fell on Nelson County. The bulk of it fell in less than five hours. The rain fell so hard that mountainsides turned to pudding and swallowed up forests and farms. In the flashfloods and avalanches that followed, 125 people were drowned, crushed or buried so deep they'd never be found.
On the same night rain fell and destruction on the west side of the mountains, in Rockbridge County, killing another 23 people. The U.S. Department of the Interior would later call the cloudburst ''one of the all-time meteorological anomalies in the United States.'' The Army Corps of Engineers labeled it ''one of nature's rare events.'' Hurricane Camille cost Virginia just under 150 lives and $116 million in damages.
After Hurricane Camille, the landscape had so changed in parts of Nelson County that topographical maps were obsolete. Mountain contours had shifted, riverbeds straightened or bent. Cropland lay deep under mud. Woods had vanished.
The inland destruction caused by Camille resulted in a rethinking of the planning for natural disasters. Until that time coastal communities were presumed to be at the greatest risk from hurricanes; Camille proved otherwise and prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the Disaster Relief Act of 1969. Hurricane Camille, along with other massive disasters of the 1960s and 1970s, including Hurricanes Carla (1962), Betsy (1965), and Agnes (1972), led to U.S. president Jimmy Carter's 1979 Executive Order 12127 that merged many separate disaster-related organizations into the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The agency is charged with coordinating recovery efforts after natural disasters in the United States.
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