Fifty years later: Remembering Hurricane Camille
Published 8:48 am Saturday, August 24, 2019
He didn’t tell her the sound was tornadoes destroying their home near the beach and their town, she said. The next morning was sunny when they stepped outside and stared along the street that had been lined with businesses.
“There were no buildings there,” she said. “Nobody ever thought it was going to be like that.”
Katrina strengthened to a Category 5 as it nearly filled the Gulf of Mexico and was a Category 3 when it came ashore in Mississippi.
So how was a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale — devised after Hurricane Camille to show the intensity of a storm — so much more powerful than a Category 5?
“It’s because Katrina was huge,” Sullivan said. “It threw so much more water so much higher,” he said, killing more people and damaging much more property.
Camille was believed to be as bad as a hurricane ever would get on the Coast. Camille was power-packed, he said, but was a “third-grade fist fight compared to Katrina.”
The eye of Camille was 11 miles in diameter compared to 37 miles in Katrina.
Camille’s winds extended 60 miles to the east from the center and Katrina’s were 120 miles.
The storm surge was 24.6 feet near Pass Christian in Camille and 27.8 feet during Katrina.
“The bad thing was we gauged everything by Camille,” said Bobby Eleuterius, longtime Harrison County supervisor.