About “Roar of the Heavens”
When Hurricane Camille roared ashore on the Mississippi Gulf Coast near midnight on August 17, 1969, she was a storm of superlatives, a cavalcade of terrible wonders. Her sustained winds were clocked at an astounding 200 miles an – far more violent than Katrina (whose sustained winds measured about 125 mph at landfall). Camille brought with her a storm surge over 24 feet high – a wall of water almost three stories high – the highest ever recorded in the U.S. at that time. And her barometric pressure, one of the most reliable measures of hurricane intensity, was also in record-breaking territory. Camille was, in fact, the most intense hurricane ever to make landfall in the mainland of the United States . In Mississippi, she obliterated whole towns and swept over 170 people to their deaths.
“Over the years, Hurricane Camille’s legend grew, and it was not uncommon when I was a child and student in Mississippi to hear horrific tales from coast residents who had survived it,” best-selling author John Grisham wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times in September 2005. “For almost 40 years, it was a well-established belief that… there simply could never be another storm like Hurricane Camille.”
But Camille had an even more terrifying “second act” in store. Two days later, on August 19, 1969 – once again, in the middle of the night, but this time completely without warning — Camille triggered another record-breaking meteorological event. In the mountains of rural Virginia, she collided with a complex weather system and so touched off one of the greatest overnight rainfalls ever recorded – over 30 inches in eight hours. Whole mountainsides collapsed, burying people alive. Tiny rivulets became roaring torrents. People had to cover their mouths even to breathe. And 150 more people met their deaths, most in total innocence, some asleep in their beds.
“Roar Of The Heavens” tells this astounding story in a compelling, novelistic fashion, following of handful of people through the great storm and its aftermath. In the process, the book also elegantly explains the science of hurricanes (with the help of a NASA meteorologist). And it discovers stories of heroism, faith and foolishness while painting a portrait of a sweet, fleeting moment in American history. Back in 1969, gasoline was 35 cents a gallon, color TV was still considered a passing fad, the Vietnam War was raging, and by some odd stroke of fate, the great rock festival at Woodstock occurred the very same weekend as Camille’s horrifying arrival on the Gulf Coast.
