Below is an article, "A Nightmare Called Camille," written By Marge Atkins on the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Camille.

It began with trickles that became torrents on the slopes of the Blue Ridge.  Before it was over, Virginia had suffered its greatest natural disaster in history.

The rain started that Tuesday night, August 19, 1969, as many mountain residents watched the final returns from the Democratic primary runoff on television.  When they went to bed they were not alarmed.

Before daybreak many of those same people were dead.

The rain increased until it fell in torrents.  In a matter of hours, entire villages were destroyed.  Bridges and roads were swept away.  Death and destruction stretched across the James River basin.

The first reports came in shortly after 2 a.m., Wednesday, August 20.  They were from Albemarle, Fluvanna, Louisa and Nelson counties.  The reports did not stop coming until 153 persons were dead or missing and believed dead.  President Nixon declared the state a disaster area and Governor Godwin estimated the damage at $113 million.

The flood was spurred by Hurricane Camille, thought to have blown herself out before reaching Virginia.  She had enough life left, however, to dump up to 30 inches of rain on the river basin within eight hours.

Normally insignificant tributaries of the James—the Tye, the Piney and the Rockfish—began to swell rapidly, pouring down the mountainside.

Large trees were uprooted and hurled down the mountain.  They acted like battering rams, crashing through houses, overturning automobiles, sparing nothing in their paths.

Entire families were swept away in the raging waters.  Twenty-four members of the Huffman family perished in the Davis Creek area of Nelson County.  Whole sections of mountainside slid down in the form of mud, heaping tons of silt on houses and their inhabitants.  Many residents, attempting to escape the rising waters, left the safety of their homes, only to be caught by swift currents.  Some survived by clinging to trees; others drowned or were never seen again. 

The desolation was staggering.  Postcard pretty small towns nestled in the natural beauty of the Blue Ridge became scenes of stark horror.  It has been compared to a giant claw scratching down the mountainsides, scraping away the trees and earth clear to the granite bedrock and dragging it all in a tangled mass to the valleys below.

Motorists driving in the pre-dawn darkness plunged into raging creeks, which once were roadways.  Near tragedies occurred for many, and death came to some whose cars or trucks pitched into creeks, which the day before were little more than a trickle.  A tractor-trailer vanished and was never found. 

Flooding and mudslides caused $19 million worth of damage to Vir­ginia highways, roads and bridges, cutting off statewide transportation and isolating hundreds of persons in various areas of the state.

Some 200 miles of primary and secondary roads were washed out and 133 bridges were damaged or destroyed.  Worst hit of the primary roads was a section of U.S. 29 between Amherst and Charlottesville.  Five major washouts were found along the 47-mile stretch, in addition to about 30 landslides, which made the dual-lane highway impassable.  Approximately 50 percent of the primary roads and 75 percent of the secondary roads in Nelson County required some type of major repair construction.

The four major railroads serving Virginia were among the industries hardest and most quickly hit by the flooding.  Water destroyed several rail bridges across the James and other waterways and ripped sections of track—in some cases up to 500 feet long—from the roadways.

As the waters swept down from the mountains, they picked up added dangers that increased the threat to life and property.  It started in Massies Mill in Nelson County, one of the state's hardest hit flood areas.  A ton of DDT and about 100 gallons of pesticides in steel drums were swept down the Tye River and into the James River when floodwaters washed more than 50 kinds of chem­icals from the Millers Chemical Company.

The mighty James, swollen with muddy floodwaters pouring into its basin from the state’s mountainous western region, continued its de­structive advance.

Small riverfront communities— Buena Vista, Glasgow, Broom Bluff, Howardsville, Scottsville—were par­ticularly hard hit.

Buena Vista, with 6,500 residents and a half-dozen industrial plants, suffered severely.  Sandwiched between the South River and the western foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city was virtually isolated from late Tuesday night until shortly before noon the follow­ing Thursday.

One Buena Vista man drowned in a downtown restaurant where the floodwaters rose 30 feet high.  He was unable to hear the sirens warn­ing of the flood due to a hearing impairment.

Three 1,000-gaIlon tanks of pro­pane gas, washed away from the General Cable Company in Buena Vista, were recovered at Glasgow and in Bedford County.

As residents of the James River Basin felt the full impact of the floodwaters that hit there early on August 20, the city of Richmond started preparation for the impend­ing flood.

Reports of the upstream flooding provided enough warning to save many lives and prevented millions of dollars of property damage in Richmond.

Even with the advance warning, damage was estimated to be $9 million.

In Richmond, as the floodwaters began to crest, city firemen worked to remove four tanks of deadly sodium cyanide and one 100-pound drum of caustic soda from the path of the rising river.  One tank washed away.

As the high water began to recede in Richmond, a storage tank con­taining 300,000 gallons of 100-octane gasoline sprang a leak in the inun­dated plant of the Dominion Oil Company.  A 29-block area of South Richmond was evacuated and placed under National Guard control.

And as the floodwaters continued on their path to the Virginia coastline, debris was carried into the channel at Hampton Roads and beyond.

Upon entering the Atlantic off the coast of Virginia, Camille was upgraded to a tropical storm.  On August 22 she was downgraded to a depression and eventually dissipated over the North Atlantic.

Camille’s journey from the South Atlantic on August 14 to its demise on August 22 left behind death and destruction unequalled in Virginia history.

The amount of rainfall was described by meteorologists as a "once in a 1,000 years occurrence.”  An estimated 1.2 trillion gallons of water fell in Nelson County during a six-hour period.  Given the severity of the rainfall it is doubtful that any single action could have altered what occurred.

The Response and Recovery

The first calls to the State Office of Civil Defense in Richmond came early on August 20 from the Regional Coordinator in Roanoke stating he'd heard "something terrible has happened in Nelson County." The Nelson County attorney also called in on a State Police radio.

Information was received slowly, due to the failure of radio and telephone systems.  According to Major General Alfred B. Denniston, coordinator of Civil Defense at that time, "We reacted with less speed... because the information was fragmentary and the total import of the disaster was not apparent."

James Tribble, regional coordinator (state), was sent in a state plane to survey the area, make an evaluation, and call the report back from Amherst.  He was told to return to Nelson the next day.

Little did Jim realize what he would be facing in the weeks and months ahead.  (Jim Tribble worked in Nelson County from August 20, 1969 to May 1, 1970.)

In Richmond, the decision to activate the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) was made early on the 20th and the facility operated 24 hours a day for three weeks until September 9.

According to Charles Sawtelle, operations officer at the time, a state emergency operations plan did not exist.  "All we had was a two-page SOP."

State agencies were alerted to the magnitude of the disaster and were told to "help flood victims in every way possible."

In Nelson, August 20 was a day of chaos.  No one yet knew the impact, the significance of all that had happened.  As the day evolved, the comprehensiveness of it all became apparent.

A command center was set up in Nelson County at Lovingston on U.S. 29.  Jim Tribble served as the state coordinating officer on the scene.  Clifford E. Wood, vice-chairman of the Nelson Board of Supervisors, served as the county director and coordinator.

Because of the mountainous terrain and extensive damage to roads, helicopters were vital for search and rescue.  Twenty helicopters were used—two from the C & P Telephone Company the first few days, and the remainder from all departments of the military.  A landing strip was designated on U.S. 29 near the command center.  This was dubbed "Lovingston International."

Rescue parties formed by hundreds of volunteers were taken into the devastated areas.  After the first day, the rescue operation was primarily searching for bodies.

Helicopters were used for body search until the second week of September.  Each time it was announced that use of the helicopters would be discontinued, additional bodies were recovered and the search continued.

Requests for state assistance were made through Jim Tribble in the Nelson command center.  For the most part, requirements were then called to the Regional Office in Roanoke.

Help poured into the stricken areas.  So much help came in, in fact, that five days after the disaster, state civil defense officials asked private agencies to halt shipments of food and clothing.

Several prefabricated bridges were installed by units of the National Guard in conjunction with the Virginia Department of Highways.

Between August 27 and October 1, 1969, HUD installed 237 mobile homes as temporary residences for families whose homes suffered major damage or were destroyed.

No group during the recovery period distinguished themselves quite as much as the Mennonites.  The disaster was only hours old when they began to infiltrate stricken areas that officialdom needed another day and helicopters to reach.  They came from Augusta and Rockingham counties; later from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Canada.  Many were assigned to body search and recovery crews, and when this gruesome task was completed, they set about cleaning and rebuilding.  A year after the devastating rain, the Mennonites were still there, hammering together houses for the homeless, and gently planting grass to erase the scars of scoured earth.

Assistance continued for many months and years following the disaster.  Thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars were spent in the devastated areas.  Bureaucratic procedures were short-circuited whenever possible, but many federal assistance programs were later described as "another disaster.”

Six months after Camille, a special U.S. Senate subcommittee studied permanent legislation for federal disaster relief.  It was obvious from testimony of key state and local officials at the hearings in Virginia that changes needed to be made for effective federal response to natural disasters.  This eventually resulted in the Disaster Relief Act of 1974, recently amended by the Stafford Act.

Following Camille, the Virginia Office of Civil Defense redirected its activities "less toward reacting to the bomb," and more to the relief of areas struck by natural disasters.

In 1971, the states first natural disaster plan was prepared, tasking state agencies with their responsibilities in responding to disasters.

Prior to 1969, the National Weather Service broadcast tornado watches and warnings; however, similar bulletins for flooding conditions were not issued.  Camille was a turning point for the Weather Service, as officials realized they were not adequately prepared to foresee meteorological events— particularly those with the potential to produce huge amounts of rainfall —as occurred in Virginia.  The National Weather Service began issuing flash flood watch and warning bulletins in late 1969, just weeks after and largely as a result of the Virginia flood.

Reflections

"I don't think our governing body ever fully understood their responsibilities," said Cliff Wood recently.  "If there's any one statement I'd like to make, it's responsibility goes with authority.  I've tried to make this point over and over ever since the flood," states Cliff.

"We were all expecting people to be generally depressed, and it didn't happen," he said.  "One of the reasons was the quick response in getting dozers and heavy equipment in—we went to work!"

In reply to criticism made on stream clearance, Cliff states, "Environmental concerns these days would not permit a quick response.  SCS (Soil Conservation Service) came up with a channelization program and that's where money came from to clean streams up.  Most of the streams did not have a channel.

"The attitude was—Get in—do the work!  Environmental concerns were not as important as getting things back to normal.  That was our primary concern."

Cliff was pleased to hear of improvements in the federal disaster laws, and admits, "Federal was where we had problems.”

"Everyone thought people in Nelson couldn't hack it.  We had to be innovative.  The county just wouldn't tolerate negatives—they wouldn't take "no.” 

On one of Governor Godwin’s early trips to Nelson after the disaster, he stated, "Do what you have to do and we'll worry about paying for it later.”  This thought prevailed.

Governor Godwin’s reaction to the devastation has been described as that of "passionate" concern.  His many trips to the area and personal involvement have not been forgotten by Cliff and others directing the emergency operations.  States Jim Tribble, "I was surprised when they told me the Governor was on the phone asking for me by name for a situation report"

What has happened in the ensuing years?

At Davis Creek where 52 residents died or are missing, homes have been rebuilt, many by new residents of the county since Camille.

Events are often described as occurring "before the flood" or "after the flood."

Proceeds from the sale of Torn Land relating the disaster were used to build the Nelson Memorial Library.

Children who survived the loss of parents are now grown and themselves parents.  People do not dwell on the flood, but it is not forgotten.

References: Torn Land by Paige & Jerry Simpson;

Flood '69—Richmond Times-Dispatch supplement;

Memories of Camille— The Nelson County Times;

A Year of Rebuilding (Federal Response to Hurricane Camille) — Federal Office of Emergency Preparedness

About the Author: Marge Atkins was employed on September 17, 1969, by the Federal Office of Emergency Preparedness to administer the claims for damage to public property earned by Hurricane Camille.  The following year she became a permanent employee of the Virginia Office of Civil Defense (now the Virginia Department of Emergency Services).  She served as the state’s Public Assistance Officer for all major disaster declarations until January 1986.  She is currently the VDES Regional Coordinator for Region IV and has held that position since 1983.