Great Hurricanes of the Northern Gulf Coast

[donsutherland1]

Since 1900, the United States has experienced the landfall of 18 category 4 or stronger hurricanes. During that time, the northern Gulf Coast (an area running from the Texas-Louisiana border through the Florida Panhandle) has seen 4 such hurricanes make landfall:

• 1909: Hurricane #7: Grand Isle, LA (Category 4)
• 1915: Hurricane #5: New Orleans, LA (Category 4)
• 1957: Hurricane Audrey: Southwest Louisiana and Texas (Category 4)
• 1969: Hurricane Camille: Southeast Louisiana and Mississippi (Category 5)

At the time of landfall, none of these hurricanes was tracking to the north-northeast, northeast, or east-northeast. Rather all were tracking from west-northwest to north.

Trajectory at Landfall:
• Hurricane #7 (1909): Northwest
• Hurricane #5 (1915): North
• Hurricane Audrey (1957): North
• Hurricane Camille (1969): North-northwest

Tracks:
• Hurricane #7 (1909): http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atl ... /track.gif
• Hurricane #5 (1915): http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atl ... /track.gif
• Hurricane Audrey (1957): http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atl ... /track.gif
• Hurricane Camille (1969): http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atl ... /track.gif

These tracks might well suggest that these hurricanes encountered an absence of wind shear prior to landfall. A meaningful easterly component in a hurricane’s track in the region could be indicative of a degree of shear sufficient to weaken them.

News Accounts:
News accounts from the time provide a glimpse of the impact of these hurricanes. Excerpts from various stories in The New York Times follow:

• Hurricane #7 (1909):
A Gulf hurricane, which beginning early today, swept along the Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida coast, has inflicted heavy damage, and is continuing unabated. Communications with many points has been cut off. From these places now isolated the last word was that the storm was gaining in intensity.

The City of New Orleans during part of the day was entirely stripped of wire communication with the world. Reports which are trickling in from points along the Gulf between Pascagoula, Miss., and Pensacola, Fla., of high tides and winds of hurricane velocity, show that the Gulf storm has scored heavily in property damage.
--The New York Times, September 21, 1909.

Pleasure craft and ships of all kinds in the bayou inlets were destroyed, and the loss will be heavy. Storehouses, sugar mills, and dwellings of every character at Houma and other villages suffered heavily, and scarcely a structure was untouched by the hurricane.
--The New York Times, September 23, 1909.

• Hurricane #5 (1915):
New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast tonight were swept by a tropical hurricane that demoralized communication and led to fears of heavy loss of life and property. The Mississippi River and levees below New Orleans have broken and houses have been washed away.

The business part of Biloxi, Miss., is reported to be under six feet of water, and train service has been abandoned because of washouts near Bay St. Louis…

The wind had driven the water in Lake Pontchartrain above the sea wall, and Milneburg and other New Orleans suburbs along the lake were partially under water.
--The New York Times, September 30, 1915.

The maximum velocity of the wind was reported by the Weather Bureau as between 120 and 130 miles an hour. The wind blew at this rate for one minute between 5:30 and 6 o’clock last night. The highest sustained velocity was 86 miles about 5:40 o’clock yesterday afternoon.

For more than seven hours the hurricane swept over the city [New Orleans] at a rate of more than 60 miles an hour. The lowest mark registered by the barometer was 28.11 at 5:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon…
The New York Times, October 1, 1915.

• Hurricane Audrey (1957):
Smashing tidal waves swamped the Louisiana coast today in the wake of Hurricane Audrey, leaving an estimated 120 dead and hundreds injured.

The waves slipped slowly back to sea tonight, unveiling wild wreckage.
--The New York Times, June 29, 1957.

Survivors Tell of Surging Wave; Homes Swept Away in Minutes
--Headline, The New York Times, June 30, 1957.

A bureau spokesman said those who had failed to leave the lowlands either did not hear the bureau’s warning—which, he said, was unlikely—or simply did not heed them.

The specific complaint heard most often from survivors was that they had been tolda t one point that the hurricane would not hit the coast until Thursday night. It actually struck about 8 A.M. Thursday.

Others complained that they had had no warning of the “tidal wave.”
--The New York Times, June 30, 1957.

Mayor Sidney Gray of Lake Charles estimated the death toll at 150 but said it might not include the sixty-one bodies already recovered.

Some of them died Thursday under the savage whiplash of 105-mile-an-hour winds borne inland from the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricane Audrey, the season’s first. Most of the victims, however, vanished beneath a twenty-foot tidal wave that thundered in behind the big storm.
--The New York Times, June 30, 1957.

Hurricane Audrey was the deadliest storm to strike the Louisiana coast since Last Island was wiped out with the loss of 320 lives a century ago… The hurricane that struck on Aug. 10, 1856, wrecked the Hotel Trade Wind and leveled almost every house and building on the island.
--The New York Times, June 30, 1957.

• Hurricane Camille (1969):
The National Hurricane Center said today that Camille was the second strongest hurricane to hit the United States since the Weather Bureau began keeping records in 1886…

Neil Frank, a hurricane forecaster, said Camille’s pressure was recorded at 26.61 inches of mercury.
--The New York Times, August 19, 1969.

Just what will a hurricane wind of 190 miles an hour do?

It will snatch three large oceangoing ships from their moorings and set them down on the beach, nosed together like three rowboats tied to a single chain.

It will make a concrete-block service station disappear, leaving only the gasoline pumps to identify what once was there.

It will enter a broken window of a beach front house and stir the heavy pieces of furniture so playfully that the living room couch ends up in the dining room, and the heavy china closet holding a woman’s antique cut-glass comes to rest at a 45-degree angle, propped against he wall like a drunkard.
--The New York Times, September 21, 1909.

Slashing in across a shallow bay, Hurricane Camille stunned the Mississippi coast tonight with 150 mile-an-hour winds, high tides and tornadoes…

The storm, described as extremely dangerous, slashed first at a narrow stretch of Louisiana marshland. The eye skirted the mouth of the Mississippi River, some 90 miles southeast of New Orleans at the bottom of the table-flat delta land. Then it moved across Chandeleur Sound at about 15 miles an hour.
--The New York Times, August 18, 1969.

Excerpt of News Accounts from Hurricane #1 (1856):
This hurricane was likely a Category 4 storm when it came ashore.

We learn that there has been a tremendous storm between Mobile and New Orleans, and in that vicinity generally, rain having fallen for 110 consecutive hours. The roads were overflowed, and it was feared that great damage had been done to the crops. The telegraph was prostrated for miles, and workmen are as yet unable to proceed with the repairs; we are therefore without any particulars.
--The New York Times, August 15, 1856.

A terrible storm occurred in this vicinity [New Orleans on Sunday, which lasted all day, and until Tuesday evening.

Its effects, however, were most disastrous at Last Island, a great Summer resort, and which our accounts represent to have been entirely inundated. Every building on the island is said to have been swept away, and it has been positively ascertained that one hundred and eight persons have been lost.

It is feared that Grand Caillon Island, another watering place has also been submerged, and many lives lost as well as property destroyed.
--The New York Times, August 18, 1856.

[Stephanie]

Thank you for those news acounts don! Very interesting!