As noted on page 120 of the Almanac, Hurricane Audrey, which hit southwestern Louisiana in 1957, was one of the "special" hurricanes of modern times and deserves a place in the list of significant historic hurricanes.

Hurricane Audrey

Landfall: Thursday, June 27, 1957

1957 Radar animation:

The crawdads knew it was coming.

By 1957, there was "modern" weather-radar coverage of the Gulf of Mexico and hurricane forecasting was reasonably mature. Forecasters were monitoring Hurricane Audrey as it quickly moved through the tropical depression and tropical storm stages to become a hurricane in the southwestern Gulf on Tuesday, July 25. The official record's first mention of Audrey shows that a 70 mph tropical storm formed in the early morning hours on that date and reached hurricane status just six hours later.

The storm moved north paralleling the Texas coastline prompting the New Orleans Weather Bureau to issue Hurricane Warnings for the much of the northern Gulf coast. The people of the small town of Cameron on the southwest Louisiana coast knew that a hurricane was out there and it was heading in their general direction. Many of the residents evacuated, but several hundred that thought they "knew hurricanes" did not.

The consensus among the old-timers in Cameron was there would be time on Thursday morning, June 27, to get out, if the storm were still coming. If Audrey had continued to do what it had been doing they would have been right.

But, the atmosphere is always changing, and sometimes the changes lead to unforeseen consequences. What nobody at that time understood was that the Gulf water was exceptionally warm and the atmospheric conditions were unusually favorable for Audrey to quickly strengthen.

By morning the escape routes were already flooded and people that stayed in Cameron were stuck. Audrey had increased overnight from a manageable category 2 to a 145 mph, category 4 nightmare.

A storm surge estimated at 12 feet with 20-foot waves swept through the bayous of southwestern Louisiana pushing inland up to 25 miles. Seventy-five percent of the town of Cameron was destroyed.

Interestingly, the crawfish apparently knew that something was up. The evening before the storm thousands of them evacuated the marshes around Cameron. People picked them up ready for a good feast after the storm. That feast, of course, never happened.

Audrey is the most intense June hurricane in the official record that goes back to 1851. The death toll in Cameron and Vermillion Parishes is estimated to have been over 500 - many people were swept into the bayous and never found - making Audrey the deadliest hurricane of the modern (post-war) era until Hurricane Katrina.

Audrey was the nightmare scenario that forecasters and emergency managers most fear. On occasion, atmospheric and oceanographic conditions come together to allow storms to dramatically strengthen just before landfall. The lesson, of course, is to prepare for the worst - normally a storm one category stronger than you think is going to happen.

The only other major (category 3 or stronger) hurricane to make landfall in the U.S. in June occurred in Louisiana as well. On June 16, 1934 a category 3 storm made landfall near Morgan City and Houma. "Not a single building escaped unharmed", according to contempory reports unearthed by David Roth, then of the Lake Charles National Weather Service office.