Category 5

As the unsettled social and political weather of the summer of 1969 played itself out in the heat of antiwar marches and the battle for civil rights, three regions of the rural South were devastated by the record-setting horrifying force of Category 5 Camille. The catastrophe spared New Orleans by a mere hiccup. Scientists and public servants took serious note of the dire implications.

Thirty-six years later, Category-3 Katrina made the same landfall just east of New Orleans. This time, the city did not fare so well. Most of hard-learned lessons from Camille had been recently forgotten.

Camille’s 201 mile-per-hour winds and 28-foot storm surge demolished tens of thousands of homes and businesses along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. Twenty-four oceangoing ships sank or were beached; six offshore oil drilling platforms collapsed and dozens were damaged. Two days later, Camille dropped 108 billion tons of moisture drawn from the Gulf onto rural Virginia--nearly three feet of rain in six hours.

The human tragedies and triumphs surrounding that 1969 disaster were products of more than a record-setting hurricane. Those outcomes were also driven by Southern politics and culture, as well as the sociopolitical upheavals of the turbulent 1960s--including the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the space race.

Poor victims, largely ignored by the South's social mainstream and disproportionately burdened by the disaster's aftermath, drew their coping strategies from their own subcultures rather than from the growing body of understanding about the psychology of trauma.

In the storm's wake lay not only epic devastation but also a humbled nation clearly unprepared for such a disaster. In 1969, the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) was a part of Civil Defense, which was focused on responding to a nuclear attack by the Soviets. Dealing with natural disasters was not a priority. Camille was a wake-up call to lawmakers, scientists, and engineers, leading directly to the creation of the Saffir-Simpson potential damage scale, improved building codes, and eventually to the replacement of OEP by FEMA. The catastrophe of Camille sounded a wake-up call regarding the scientific and political complexities of disaster management.

Most importantly, Camille tipped the scales of the debate regarding federal versus purely local responsibility for disaster relief. For three decades afterward, the memory of Camille guaranteed that Washington would play a major role in disaster mitigation and relief.

But we have since come full circle. Since March of 2003, FEMA has no longer been an independent agency, but instead is one of twenty-three under the Department of Homeland Security.

Category 5 tells the story of common folk, their local leaders, and the forces of history, in the face of the most violent hurricane to ever strike the American mainland

And it raises the question: What is the shelf life of a profound historical lesson?