Late in the day of August 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille slammed into the Mississippi coast near Biloxi with a force of near-biblical proportions. In just a few hours, Camille, accompanied by 170 miles per hour winds and 28-foot storm surge, literally scraped civilization clean off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, obliterating decades of human activity. In the storm's wake lay not only epic devastation but a humbled nation clearly unprepared for such a disaster. While the historic catastrophe of Camille sounded a wake-up call to the unimaginable complexities of disaster management, many of the lessons that should have been learned from Camille were lost in the rubble of her equally destructive offspring, Katrina. This is the story of Camille, the most violent hurricane ever to strike the U.S., and of the lessons that remain to be learned about human failing in the face of nature's fury.
