Hurricane Audrey Remembered, History: Cameron Parish, Louisiana Source: Lake Charles American Press Sept 14, 2003 Pg. 1 Submitted by Kathy Tell Date Submitted: Jan 2006 **** Legal Notice **** ** ********************************************** Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ********************************************** ** ~~~~~~ THROUGH GENEVA’S EYES Family struggles through rising water, high winds of hurricane BY GENEVA GRIFFTH AMERICAN PRESS EDITOR’S NOTE: Geneva Griffith is retiring as the longtime Cameron Parish correspondent for the American Press. Her journalism career began in 1956 with the Cameron Pilot; later, she began a longtime association with the American Press as well. Perhaps no story she wrote has had more lasting impact than her harrowing, and candid, first-person account of surviving Hurricane Audrey in 1957. Though she wrote it in 1987 on the 30 th anniversary of the storm, the memories were still fresh for her. In conjunction with her retirement, the story is reprinted here, in the first of a two-part series that concludes Monday. CAMERON — It seems like yesterday when the infamous Hurricane Audrey came roaring in out of the Gulf of Mexico and caused such devastating havoc in lower Cameron Parish. It will be forever etched in the memory of the survivors and their families. There was hardly a family in the wake of the storm that did not lose someone among the 529 who perished. The memory has been so painful to me all of these years that I have never been able to put it down on paper, even though I know it is important to leave this legacy to my family. The hurricane began down in Campeche Bay, just off the Mexican coast and played around down there before it started its slow move across the Gulf. We had been keeping an eye on it for several days, but no one seemed unnecessarily worried. I worked on the bottom floor of the Cameron Courthouse at that time, and I remember that all of the workers on that floor teased the Veterans Affairs officer because he was the only one that was concerned. He had moved to Cameron a few months earlier from north Louisiana and he was very worried about the safety of his family. Since this was the middle of the week, it was not feasible to travel to more than 60 miles north of Lake Charles with the whole family since no evacuation was imminent. Little did he know that later he and his family were to perish in the storm. Evacuations were expensive — what with renting hotel or motel rooms and eating out — if it was necessary. On Wednesday afternoon, June 26, my husband’s Aunt Nona Welch, who was the local registrar of voters, took me home after work to Oak Grove. When we got there, D.W., my husband, was busy nailing plywood across the picture window in front of our house. Aunt Nona and I laughed and commented on the cool Gulf breeze that was blowing in from the south. D.W. chided us for not being more worried about the approaching storm. He had just come in from his 10- day stint out there and was very busy trying to get everything battened down for what might eventually happen with the high winds that would probably come. D.W. was a captain on a service boat for Pure Oil Company servicing the rigs out in the Gulf and worked 10 days on and five days off. He had commented on how crazy the tides had been running around the platforms, but he had no idea what was causing it. Family was visiting D.W.’s mother and father were visiting from Port Arthur, having come over to can figs from the giant trees down at his Uncle Buster Welch’s house. We had gassed up the two cars and truck that were on the place, even heading them out so we could leave when the hurricane came closer, which we had determined would probably be sometime on Thursday. We had also filled the lamps with kerosene and stocked up with food in case the electricity went off. It was always our custom to listen to the weather each night at 10 p.m. on our shortwave radio, since this was supposed to be the most authentic reports put out. We tuned in to Galveston and the marine operator gave the storm coordinates on the slow-moving hurricane. She also said its location was approximately in the middle of the Gulf and was not expected to make landfall until Thursday morning. Thinking that we would have plenty of time to do the lastminute things with the animals and chickens before we headed out the next morning, we all went to bed peacefully. ‘Trapped like rats’ At 4 a.m. I woke up feeling ill. I tried to put on the hall light to see my way to the kitchen to get some pills. The electricity was off. I fumbled down the hall trying to get to the cabinet in which I kept the medicine. This woke my husband and he followed me with his flashlight, then went past me to the front door. He came rushing back to me and was as white as a ghost. "My God, Geneva, we are trapped like rats," he said. "The water is already over the road. It’s up to the rose garden. Get everyone up quick and get them dressed." The storm had picked up speed in the past six hours, and the water was being pushed ahead of the wind and had completely inundated La. 27-82 on which we lived, just two miles from the Gulf. D.W. ran out to the barn to do what he could with the animals, turning the horses and cattle out into the field and bringing in our little dog, Bootsie. I woke up my in-laws, Nannie and Papa Griffith. I dressed our children Leslie, 11, and Cherie, 5, in warm clothes. By this time, the water was inching closer in the front yard toward the house. There was no way we could leave. We had to figure out how we were going to weather the storm. A ‘giant fish bowl’ The water inched higher and higher. It started coming in under the doors. We stuffed towels and sheets around doors and windows. I remember looking at it halfway up the window and thinking, This is just like being in a giant fish bowl. We tore the furniture apart to nail it against the doors and windows. As the men were trying to pull the furniture — mainly my piano — up and out of the water, I grabbed Nannie and Cherie and took them back to my bedroom. I instructed them to get down on their knees with me beside my bed. We prayed. I asked God to lead us out of this awful predicament we were in. "God, you promised us in the Bible that where two or more are gathered together in Your name, You would be with them." I said. "So here we are, three of us, and we are begging You to be with us and help us know what to do." I got up off my knees, confident that God would be with us and that He would give me the wisdom to know what to do. I was later to realize that He would answer my prayer, but not in the way I expected. He gave the answer to someone stronger than myself — my husband. Escape to the roof When we got back into the kitchen, D.W. was standing on top of the kitchen bar chipping a hole in the ceiling with an ax. Then he sawed out an opening big enough for us to get through and instructed us all to crawl up into the attic. By the time we all got up, the water was waist deep in the house. D.W. got up on the kitchen stool on top of the counter and got into the attic, just as the kitchen bar washed away and out the back window. Once in the attic, he started cutting a hole out onto the roof. His daddy caught hold of his arm and said, "Son, please don’t do this; you will weaken your house. This is a strong house and will stand this storm. I know because I built it with plenty of nails." D.W. kept right on sawing the hole and answered, "I have to do this, Daddy. I have to try to save my family." The water was rising higher and higher in the house below us, and we could hear the raging wind. The boardwalk from the oil wells out in the marsh and debris from out in the gulf had formed battering rams to beat down the walls. The sheetrock and timbers underneath us had given way. We were literally just standing on the rafters. D.W. told me to climb out onto the roof first. I had grabbed my purse and stuffed it full of tiny treasures, including my great-grandfather’s Civil War picture I had on my piano, but these things seemed trivial now. I stuffed my wallet into my brassiere and was the only one to come out of it with anything at all, because I lost my purse as I slid off the roof later. My husband handed Cherie to me and told Leslie to follow her out. He then climbed out and took Cherie from me and told Leslie to let his little dog go because he was afraid that if the dog would fall off the roof, Leslie would drown trying to save him. We cried as we saw the little thing swim off toward the woods. There were so many of us on the roof that there was not enough room for everyone to cling to the hole, so I had to nose on down toward the edge, with my father-in-law not far behind me. The house then collapsed. Clutching an oak We sailed off on the roof. It bashed into a giant oak tree which stood northwest of our house. As we crashed under an overhanging limb, I managed to duck my head away just in time to keep it from getting crushed, but I could not move far enough away to save my leg. I heard my ankle crush as the roof and the limb crashed against one another. I was so thankful I had saved my head that I could not worry about a broken ankle. D.W. handed me a piece of rope that he had brought in from the barn when he got the ax and saw. I tied it around my waist and around Cherie’s while D.W. was tying Leslie onto the limb that we had landed against. He had told Leslie to hug the limb and tied him facing down horizontally. He then thought better of what he had done and started untying him. He told Leslie to get back on the roof and told me to untie Cherie. I later asked him why he had changed his mind. He said he didn’t know — but it would have been deadly for all of us if he had done it, because the limb was later to go completely under the water which rose more than 10 feet over the ridge. I probably would have drowned trying to save Cherie when I was washed off the roof later. After some time battering against the tree, the roof swung around and sailed off again up into the woods in back of our house and landed against another tree. When it hit the tree, Papa and I had nothing to hold to and were thrown into the water. We both caught hold of a "toothache" tree about 10 feet away from where the others were. D.W. got his mother and the children up into the tree, instructing Leslie to climb up as high as he could so there would be room for the others. He put Cherie on a limb underneath Leslie. He and his mother stood on lower limbs just out of the water. The tiny tree in which Papa and I had landed had only two limbs. He clung to one with his back to the gulf. As each wave came crushing over us, I would lose my grip and be thrown toward the marsh and would have to swim back. "Geneva, you must try to hang on so you can live to raise your children," he said. "Papa, I don’t know if I can or not," I said. "I am so tired." "You have got to," he said. "Don’t you hear Cherie crying for you?" Relative slips away I had to do something to keep from drowning. Then I remembered something my husband had told me about the gulf: There are always "three big waves, then a little one." So I started counting the waves. They were crashing down on us. I would stay underwater for the three big ones, then come up for air on the fourth one. I don’t know how long this went on, but during all this time of fighting the waves and trying to hang on and swim back, I saw that Papa’s head had fallen to his chest. The next wave took his body. I grabbed with my legs and clung to him, at least once losing my grip on the tree and swimming back with it. The next time I was washed away, I felt his body wrenched from the hold I had on him with my legs. He slipped away out into the marsh. I remember saying, "Goodbye, Papa, I’m not far behind you." I looked over at the others, through all the mist, and waved goodbye to them. (D.W. later said he didn’t realize how bad off I was until he saw me say, "Goodbye, I love all of you.") My husband pointed frantically to the limb to which Papa had clung. I saw a rope which D.W. had thrown that was caught over the limb. I managed to get to it, and D.W. pulled me up to the tree. Through all of the roar of the storm, I could hear Cherie screaming for me. It was the one thing that gave me the courage to try to get to them. Tree saves their lives When I got to the tree, my skirt got caught in a bramble bush and I was wedged under the tree. After some time, I managed to tear my skirt loose from the thorns. D.W. pulled me up into the tree, where I had to stand on my broken ankle until the storm was over. I have no idea how long we were in the tree. My watch stopped at 9:30 a.m., so that is probably when I was thrown down in to the water. One of the problems that we had, which I later learned other survivors had also, was with snakes. As soon as I got up into the tree and on the stump of a limb to stand on, I turned north and immediately looked straight into the eye of a water moccasin that was slithering on the tree limb behind Leslie. He was facing south into the storm and did not see it. I motioned to my husband to look and he put his finger to his lips telling me to remain quiet for fear Leslie would change his position and fall into the water if he knew.