Hurricane Audrey

Southern United States, June 27–30, 1957 

Classified as a Category 4 hurricane because of its extreme storm tides, Audrey remains one of the deadliest tropical cyclones in U.S. history. With a central pressure at landfall of 27.91 inches (945 mb) and sustained winds of 105 MPH (170 km/h), Audrey beat an early-season path of destruction up the Gulf of Mexico, past Galveston and Port Arthur, Texas, and into the bayou lowlands of Louisiana between June 27 and 30, 1957.

While damage in Texas was on the whole considered minimal, the languid Louisiana towns of Cameron, Creole, and Grand Chenier were virtually destroyed by Audrey’s 97-MPH (156-km/h) winds, and pulverizing 20-foot (7-m) storm surge. Despite telephone and radio technology that made it possible to warn coastal residents adequately of Audrey’s imminent arrival, 518 people in Cameron Parish lost their lives to the first major hurricane to strike the area since 1918.

Audrey originated over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, 350 miles (563 km) southeast of Brownsville, Texas, on June 25. Although it was the 1957 season’s first hurricane, many gulf-coast residents received news of its sudden inception with an odd mixture of careful scrutiny and cautions inaction. After all, a majority of them had lived on the gulf for decades and had seen this sort of storm before. They believed that June hurricanes tend to be fairly small and of minor intensity and so were not overly concerned by the threat of torrential downpours and a few hurricane-force gusts. Only after it was reported that nine men were killed when a workboat being used to evacuate personnel from a deepsea drilling rig was battered and sunk by Audrey’s offshore winds did Galveston begin to fortify its famous seawall; the Louisiana shrimp fleet then hurriedly returned to its ports.

But in quiet delta towns like Cameron and Grand Chenier, Louisiana, where the population had over the years become seemingly inured to hurricane warnings, evacuation plans went largely unimplemented. Even as Audrey further intensified and as its barometric pressure slipped to 28.80 inches (973 mb) on the afternoon of June 26 and then to 27.91 inches (945 mb) in the early morning hours of June 27, hundreds of seaside residents continued to ignore the evacuation warnings issued by the weather forecasting office in New Orleans. Despite the fact that Audrey was a welltracked hurricane, several survivors from Cameron and Grand Chenier would later state that there was some question in their minds as to the course the storm would finally take. According to the weather reports, Audrey was moving in a north-northeast direction at approximately 17 MPH (27 km/h). This meant it would either make landfall in northern Texas or spin out into the central gulf and threaten west Cuba and Florida’s Panhandle. For this reason, they did not believe that the hurricane—when and if it struck Louisiana—would be too severe.

By midnight of June 27, the eye of Hurricane Audrey was centered 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Galveston and headed on a course that would take it ashore somewhere between High Island, Texas, and Morgan City, Louisiana. As Audrey’s central pressure continued to drop, as the titanic mound of water beneath its eye continued to swell, alarmed civil defense authorities issued a final series of evacuation orders for the west Louisiana coastline. Analogs indicated that in some places Audrey’s seething storm surge could rise as high as 20 feet (7 m) and that in such a scenario its impact on the marshy lowlands, on the farms and single-story cottages that ringed the shoreline would be cataclysmic. In addition, the inundation of the bayous would begin long before the surge itself arrived with the hurricane’s eye. The gulf would slowly but inexorably rise until it washed away the bridges and roadways that led inland. If a successful evacuation were to be completed, it would have to come at least six hours before Audrey’s predicted landfall at daybreak. Any later, and trapped residents would find themselves standing alone against the malevolent fury of the onrushing storm.

Audrey barreled ashore at Cameron, Louisiana, on the morning of June 27, 1957. With a central barometric pressure of 27.91 inches (945 mb), Audrey’s whirring winds and pelting rains stripped buildings of their roofs and siding, crumpled billboards, toppled trees and telephone polls, and caused massive flooding. Gusts of 130 MPH (209 km/h) drove before them a 20-foot (7-m) storm surge, the highest seen on the Louisiana coast in a most a century. The hurricane’s cresting surge—so powerful that only hours before it had sheered nearly 60 feet (20 m) of shoreline off the northeast tip of Bolivar Island, Texas—thudded into Cameron. Laden with splintered tree trunks, steel beams, automobiles, and even a fishing boat, the surge rolled inland like an enormous ram, battering most of the town into oblivion. Hundreds of wooden cottages were swept off their foundations as the surge covered the sandy lowlands with 15 feet (5 m) of water. Some houses collapsed upon impact, spilling their families into the deadly froth, while others crazily bobbed through the center of town before breaking up. Frantic victims clambered onto floating wreckage as hundreds of poisonous snakes slithered from bayous. Deranged by the salt water, the snakes swarmed through the flooded streets of Cameron, killing five people.

By midafternoon on June 27, a weakened but still deadly. Audrey began to recurve northeast over inland Louisiana. With its fitful gales still strong enough to level patches of forest, the rain-laden storm underwent extratropical strengthening as it passed through eastern Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, New York, and Ontario, Canada, on June 28. Before Audrey completely dissipated over the cold expanses of Canada on June 29, 30 more people had been killed. For weeks thereafter, the death toll in stormravaged Cameron Parish, Louisiana, would grow much higher. By July 3, as federal relief agents sent by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower diligently combed through the wreckage of the communities, the death toll stood at 296. By July 12, it had risen to 322, with 180 residents still missing.

As a search of the waterlogged countryside continued, additional bodies were found in the bayous and marshes, bringing the final count to 518 dead on July 22. In addition, five other casualties were

reported in northern Louisiana, and eleven from Texas. In Cameron Parish 1,900 buildings were utterly destroyed, while another 19,000 were badly damaged; 50,000 head of cattle were drowned.

At a time when the volatile civil rights issue occupied an increasingly larger share of U.S. consciousness, the fact that 90 percent of those lost to Hurricane Audrey were black Americans soon led to a heated barrage of criticism against local and state civil defense authorities. Virtually every organization tasked with alerting the public to the threat of incoming hurricanes from the Cameron Police Department to the National Weather Bureau was charged with bigotry, willful disregard for public safety, even mass murder. 

While it cannot be said for certain that in the process of warning coastal residents of Audrey’s possible arrival some isolated instances of racial prejudice and neglect did not take place, a more likely cause for the disaster lies in both public apathy and communication shortfalls. Subsequent investigations into the exact sequence of evacuation procedures taken by authorities revealed that many local radio stations did not broadcast storm warnings in their entirety, but instead paraphrased them or left out whole segments of vital information. In turn, this practice left many coastal residents with the mistaken belief that there was still time for them to evacuate their bayou communities before Audrey’s rising waters washed away the bridges and roadways that led to the elusive safety of higher ground. In view of the multifaceted significance of Hurricane Audrey, the name Audrey has been retired from the rotating list of North Atlantic tropical cyclone names.