Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1966 Mar
Contents
Burrwood Southwest Pass eastern end of the marsh. The storm rapidly lost strength as it bulled upstream, but not before its 150-mile-an-hour winds had hurled a nine-foot wall of Gulf water across the delta and Grand Isle, 45 miles westward. After the storm, I flew over the devastated area with Dick Yancey, Assistant Director of the Louisiana Wild Life and Fisheries Com mission, who wanted to survey damage to marsh wildlife. Banking his plane, Dick pointed to an ocean-going oil-rig tender perched on the Mississippi River levee where the tidal surge had lifted it (page 359). The streets of the towns that line the riverbank had become canals, and returning refugees poled pirogues between car tops peeping above floodwaters. Boxcars lay scattered like jackstraws in a yard where rescue crews found 15 bodies. In the occasional grove, the wind had blown the very bark from the weather side of what few trees still stood. Grande Isle was marked by a column of smoke from burning debris. Betsy had mauled it as severely as she had the delta. I recognized most of the surviving structures, but the storm had pushed them a block, two blocks, half a mile from where they belonged. Miles away in the marsh, buildings, trailers, and automo biles wallowed in the backwash. But a few miles farther west damage dropped off sharp ly. By the time we reached Cameron, at the extreme western end of the Cajun country, we didn't see a misplaced shingle. "Betsy hit Grand Isle hard," Dick said after we landed. "One man drowned there. Cam eron Parish lost 544 people in Hurricane Audrey in 1957, and hardly a building stood on its own lot. Today you'd never know the area had suffered such a tragedy. "Eventually the delta and Grand Isle will be as good as new. These are hardy folk, or they would never have lasted two hundred years on this coast." 357 A 6. BROWN PELICAN faMache SULPHUR
Links
Archive
1966 Apr
1966 Feb
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page