In memory of hurricane Camille

When my mother was 9 years old, she watched from her aunt's house in Pass Christian, Miss., as the flood waters from Hurricane Camille rose to the doorstep and 200 mph winds ripped huge pecan trees from the ground.\nShe and her family fled slightly inland to weather the storm because their own home stood mere blocks from the beach. The 20-foot high storm surge filled her home to the ceiling. The house was otherwise spared in an area demolished by winds so powerful that pine needles were driven like nails straight into tree trunks.\nThe aftermath of the storm is what has the potential to crush people's spirits and flood their hopes.\nMy mother's childhood home was spared, but fear of disease led her family to throw away almost everything they owned because the filthy waters had saturated their belongings. My mother watched, brokenhearted, as the prized possessions of her girlhood were hauled away by the truck load.\nThe brutality of Hurricane Camille lingered for years as some people slowly rebuilt and others simply abandoned the hardest hit areas. But in August 1969, my family was lucky. It had an intact home to return to, which could not have been said of many people at the time. And it cannot be said of them now.\nThe home my mother grew up in that survived Camille now lays completely destroyed in an area of Mississippi that is not making front page news.\nWhile the eyes of a nation are focused on waterlogged New Orleans, the stories of Pass Christian, Waveland, Long Beach, Bay St. Louis and the other small Mississippi towns between New Orleans and Gulfport are being virtually untold. You cannot imagine the destruction in the area that was arguably hardest hit by Katrina.\nThe aftermath of Katrina left no food, clean water, power, telephones, gas or very little hope in the areas television cameras are not showing. Parts of the coastal area near the Pass (as it is called) are closed because of an outbreak of Staph infection. Mold and mildew now cling to any wall left standing.\nEven where my mother and sisters now live, about one hour inland, power and water is only slowly returning some two weeks after Katrina hit. The conditions were so unbearable that my sister was forced to flee to Bloomington for a week. Her home survived, but her two small children became sick in the sweltering heat, and they were desperate for food and clean water.\nOne might wonder why more people didn't leave before the storm hit. Those people, like my mother's family who weathered every storm that battered the Gulf Coast for the last half century, stayed behind because they never dreamed a hurricane could be more powerful than Hurricane Camille. \nOld-timers would board windows and stock up on water when storm alerts came through, but they would not evacuate. As my mother says, everybody thought, "I survived Camille, so I can survive anything."\nNow there is a new benchmark. In the future, people will sit on rebuilt porches. They will gaze out on the waves of the Gulf Coast and say, "I survived Katrina, so I can survive anything"