Audrey's Day of Horror

Hurricane Audrey, the season's first, was born as a Gulf of Mexico squall in a wide low-pressure area. As it blew north, U.S. weather bureaus warned the Gulf Coast that a dangerously violent storm was on the way. But the bayou people of extreme southwestern Louisiana felt secure in their swamp-girded isolation and their simple faiths ("I wasn't much afraid," said one woman, "because the Lord told us he would never destroy this earth with water again"). Many of them stayed in their homes--and Audrey killed them in a day of sheerest horror.

Out of the Gulf, source of livelihood for the area's shrimp fishermen, across the tiny communities of Pecan Island, Creole,

Grand Chenier and Johnsons Bayou ("Those towns are nothing but hills in the swamp," said Cameron Parish Sheriff O. B. Carter) rolled Audrey's vicious tidal wave, ripping and twisting hundreds of homes, crumpling four fuel storage tanks under the hurled weight of a huge offshore oil barge, flinging two 50-ft. fishing boats onto the main street of Cameron (pop. 3,000), the seat and only incorporated town of the parish.

The bayou folk swam, clung, gasped and prayed for their lives. Those lucky enough to reach specks of dry land found only more terror: with them were alligators and water moccasins, tossed out of the torrent, snapping and striking in their fury (Mrs. Stephen Broussard lost three children to the tidal wave--and a fourth died of snakebite). In Cameron, a fisherman stumbled sobbing through the streets. His father, his pregnant wife and two children were gone. He was swept into the Calcasieu River--and was rescued to continue his grieving. On the courthouse steps sat a towheaded lad in hand-me-down overalls. "My brothers are dead," he said quietly. "We don't know where daddy is." Haggard Dr. Cevil Clark, Cameron's only physician, trudged doggedly along muddy streets, giving shots, treating and comforting the injured--while two of his own children lay dead as Audrey's victims.

Hurricane Audrey swept on north, at some 35 miles an hour, carrying winds up to 80 miles an hour. It drenched and stirred up twisters through the Ohio River Valley, crashed lustily through western Pennsylvania and New York and jaded out in Canada. But in Cameron the bodies were still being stacked in the ice house, with about 350 dead in the area and uncounted others floating out to sea in Audrey's sullen ebb.

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