Hurricane Camille

The story of how Hurricane Camille, which struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969 as a Category 5, changed the way the nation responded to disasters

Hurricane Camille, which struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, was one of only three Category 5 hurricanes to hit the United States in the twentieth century. In this book, Andrew Morris tells the story of how this one storm changed the way the nation responded to disasters. From that point forward, Americans came to expect the federal government to play a major role in aiding individual disaster victims and helping disaster-struck communities rebuild.

For most of US history, Morris recounts, this was not the case. Localities, states, and charities such as the American Red Cross were on the front line of disaster response. But after World War II, the nation's prosperity and growth put billions of dollars of homes and businesses in harm’s way—particularly in storm-prone regions like the Mississippi Gulf Coast—and exceeded the capacity of this system to respond.

When Hurricane Camille struck Mississippi, it ravaged a vibrant coastal economy buoyed by tourism and federal military and space facilities. Moreover, it struck a state that was in the last throes of resistance to the application of federal civil rights laws. And it struck at a particular political juncture in American politics during which a Congress still dominated by the Democratic Party had an expansive view of the nation’s commitment to the less fortunate while newly elected President Richard Nixon sought to draw conservative southerners into the Republican party.

Morris argues that all of these dynamics—the sheer scale of destruction, the activism by civil rights advocates for equitable care of African American disaster victims, the desire of southern elites for government subsidies to rebuild a risky coastal economy, and the openness of officials in Congress and the White House to broaden the reach of federal authority—led to a system in which, in the twenty-first century, Americans assume the federal government will be there for them in the wake of disaster.