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November 2008                                                                                                   Volume 15 - Number 2

    

 

Hurricane Tracks...

     

 

Remembering Camille

By: Cynthia Tara Ferguson

 

I was almost 7 years old when Camille hailed her winds and rain over my hometown of Moseley, Virginia in August of 1969.  It had been a blistering hot summer (no air-conditioning), and the rain, to me, was a welcome surprise.  My world was full of reading picture books, doing chores (such as gathering eggs from the henhouse) and watching early Saturday morning cartoons, and I knew nothing of hurricanes and/or disasters.

 

When the torrential rains began, I remember running out onto the front yard, which quickly collected with earthy water that went up to my knees, and dancing with my younger brother in the waterfall downpour.  My brother was two years old, and soon the water almost covered him. My mother, watching from the storm door of our white two-story farmhouse, showed no hint of concern in her face.  I’m sure she had no clue, at the time, of the disaster that would take place in Richmond.

 

Camille dumped over 25 inches of rain in the city of Richmond on August 20… the majority of it hammering down in a short space of three to five hours.  The Virginia Historical Landmarks Commission posted a marker in the city in 1972 to remember the event, which states that 114 people died, 87 people remained missing and the damage to the city totaled more than 100 million dollars.[1]  My childhood brain could not predict, nor comprehend, that Hurricane Camille would cause such devastation to those who lived on the banks of the James River.

 

Reports of the water rising in the James, coupled with the fact that my grandmother lived in the city, caused my mother and father to travel to Richmond to witness the effects of the Hurricane. We arrived to see the specter of fire trucks and emergency workers filling and placing sandbags all along the banks of the river in order to stave off the flooding.  Men, (old, young, black and white) worked hard together to fill and place those bags. For those who had homes and businesses downtown, the sandbags proved worthless, because in some places the water rose as high as 28 feet.

 

We went back to the city a few weeks later.  A seafood restaurant our family had eaten at a couple of times…a boat which had sat surrounded by serene water…was washed into a useless pile of wood by the flood waters. It was rare that our family ever went out to eat, and I’d had good memories of eating fried catfish on that boat. The boat, considered a second rate place reserved for the lower class to dine, had been one of the most picturesque and carefree places I’d ever experienced and I cried when I saw the ruin.  

 

High on the walls of the city buildings downtown, the watermarks of the flood left their testimony.  Businesses had been shut down, and some roadways were completely washed away. Windows were boarded up with plywood, and everywhere along the riverbank Camille seemed to have left her indelible mark.  For years, that part of the city remained almost abandoned, and buildings carried the watery tattoos of Camille’s floods well past the 1980’s.

 

After the hurricane, there was a reluctance to invest in the downtown areas again because of the potential of flooding.  Hurricane Agnes, claiming 13 lives in the city in 1972, reminded Richmond of its vulnerability to the rising waters of the James, and deterred development.  Much later, after the completion of the James River Flood Wall in 1995[2], businesses began to take a risk on Richmond once again, and invested in the area.  Shokoe Bottom, one of the greatest areas prone to flooding before the wall was built, now sports fine dining, trendy late night bars and upscale shopping. Today, Shokoe Bottom is considered one of the fastest growing areas in Richmond today.

 

References


[1] Virginia Historic Landmark photo. Retrieved on 21 September, 2008 from: http://lh5.ggpht.com/_-FQ9Jb-kj78/RzH9h6tgw8I/AAAAAAAAAEI/SvRNcbTRamA/Floods+Camile.JPG