With Western wildfires having been so prevalent this year, I thought it a good time to point out that Maine is not at all immune from very severe fires. In 1911, a large swath of Bangor burned (you’ll notice that many of the cornerstones there are dated 1912!) And in 1947, a fire ravaged parts of MDI, and a number of grand old Bar Harbor hotels went up in flames. So if you are new to Maine, we certainly can get fires here!
The rest of this column is going to deal with the infamous and deadly Hurricane Camille, which was in the midst of forming around this time is 1969. Camille intensified and came ashore on the Mississippi Gulf Coast on Aug. 18th, just as Woodstock, in Upstate New York was wrapping up. Camille came ashore as one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to make U.S. landfall in the modern record (the other two being the Labor Day Storm of 1935 in the Florida Keys, and Hurricane Andrew in 1992 in South Florida).
Camille was a small but very intense hurricane, packing extreme winds of 190 mph. But is was the surge, the vertical rise of the ocean, that was the real killer, in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a surge of 24 feet erased the Richilieu Apartments. You really should jump online and type into Google the name of those apartments. followed by the word “Camille”. You’ll be stunned by the before-and-after shots.
But what I really wanted to get to was what happened the next day, as the remnant circulation of Camille turned eastward, over the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
In a truly devilish way, the atmosphere came together in a very precise manner to squeeze out the theoretical maximum amount of rain. The result was ghastly. Hardest hit was Nelson County, Virginia, where one out of every 20 citizens did not survive the night of Aug. 19th. A stunning 27 inches of rain fell in eight hours and an unofficial total of 31 inches came from a farmer who had the day before just emptied a big barrel. Yet after the deluge, it had 31 inches of water in it. Entire mountainsides liquified, and sloughed down into the valleys. Over 150 died.
I want to leave you with a good way to visualize what the flow rate of the James River, where all of that water ended up, was a couple of days later. Close your eyes and imagine a gallon of water that you are holding from the grocery store. Feel its weight in your mind. Now, open your eyes, and stick your right arm straight out. 600,000 of those gallons you were just holding would have been flowing past your arm every second. This remains a record for a river discharge rate in the Eastern United States.
Ted Shapiro holds the Broadcast Seal of Approval from both the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. An Alexandria, Va. native, he has been chief meteorologist at WAGM-TV since 2006. Email him at tshapiro@wagmtv.comtshapiro@wagmtv.com.
