When “The legacy and mythology of Camille in Virginia 55 years later” appeared in the weekly Cardinal Weather column two years ago, thoughts of liquefying mountainsides and rivers choked with turbulent, muddy water seemed distant in time and space.
But just over a month later came a weather event that at least in some ways seemed to echo Camille.
Southwest Virginia is still very much in the recovery phase of the inland impacts of Hurricane Helene in late September 2024.
Before this column, the word “Helene” has appeared in 282 articles posted on Cardinal News in the past 22 months, including eight since the start of July.
Helene is still very much at the forefront of regional discourse, with owners and renters of damaged properties still struggling as they wait on government assistance, but also hopeful news of the expected restoration of the Virginia Creeper Trail by next spring, as told by recent articles in Cardinal News.
Today is the 57th anniversary of Camille’s legendary-but-true impacts on Nelson County and nearby areas. We are also barely a month before the second anniversary of Helene’s impacts on Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area, which were a ring or two out from the most extreme impacts focused on western North Carolina.
There are some obvious similarities between Camille and Helene.
Camille and Helene were both high-end hurricanes that made destructive Gulf Coast landfalls then tracked inland. Both led to catastrophic and deadly flooding and landslides on steep Appalachian terrain.
The official death tolls were similar: 343 in Camille, 252 in Helene, with more than 100 in each case occurring in a far-inland region — 153 in Virginia, mostly in Nelson County, with Camille; 107 in western North Carolina with Helene.
But beyond these heartbreaking similarities, the two storms diverge significantly when analyzing exactly how they affected our region and nearby areas.
Not an effort to rate the worst
This is strictly an exercise in meteorological and geographical comparison and contrast — not an effort to rate which disaster was the “worst.”
I’m never one to rate disasters because the worst disaster to any particular individual is the one that affected his or her loved ones, friends, community or property the greatest.
Every disaster or tragedy — natural, accidental or manmade — is comparable to an earthquake, with an epicenter of its most extreme events and then concentric rings of lesser effects outward to others.
People on the outer rings of an event’s effects may underrate its deepest impacts and prematurely encourage that “it’s time to move on” while those in the center are still unable to “move on,” financially or emotionally.
Helene is not over for many in Southwest Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and other heavily affected states. And Camille, in a sense, has never completely ended for some who survived it or lost family or friends nearly six decades ago.
Inland evolution
The differences in how these storms evolved after landfall influences many of the other differences between them.
Camille’s track north and then east was fairly typical for a landfalling tropical system.
Separated from the warm ocean water that fuels it and exposed to the friction effects of winds blowing over land, Camille lost most of its wind by the time its circulation reached near the Memphis area. However, it did maintain enough of a circulation center to still be considered a depression when it crossed Virginia four days after landfall.
Helene’s inland evolution was highly atypical. It was captured by a strong upper-level low centered to the west. Instead of following the typical steering flow that would take it more north and then east like Camille, it was pulled at an odd northwest angle.
Augmented by the upper-level low, Helene’s rotating winds stayed intact more intensely much farther inland than the vast majority of tropical systems, the impact of those winds widening as they only slowly weakened.
Helene entered an elite category of tropical systems like Hazel in 1956 and Sandy in 2012 that became a baroclinic-tropical hybrid “superstorm,” in effect, combining the effects of hurricanes and strong extratropical low-pressure systems.
Camille, while more typical in its inland track and evolution, had a few unusual influences — atypically strong winds aloft paralleling a stalling front, plus upslope moisture draw against the Blue Ridge — that enabled it to become something virtually unprecedented over a relatively small area of central Virginia.
Continuity of impacts
Camille was almost like two different horrible storms — extreme winds and storm surge centered on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and the epic rainfall and landslides in and around Nelson County, Virginia. Each extreme impact zone had a similar number of fatalities.
While Camille continued a narrow stripe of somewhat heavy rain — mostly 1-3 inches — from its Gulf Coast impact to Virginia, there were little or no truly destructive or deadly impacts noted between the Gulf Coast and Virginia.
Helene, meanwhile, carried a continuous and rather broad swath of damaging wind and torrential rain from Apalachicola to the Appalachians, spawning 39 tornadoes along the way.
Helene was already affecting the Appalachians when it was officially a hurricane on the coast and continued affecting the region long after it lost most of its tropical characteristics and was absorbed into the upper-level low.
Wind
This is the one effect in which, for inland areas, Helene was clearly more impactful than Camille.
Helene was not officially a hurricane when its strongest winds were affecting the mountainous areas of North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, but there were terrain-focused zones of hurricane force winds, with swaths of forest leveled that will take a generation to grow back.
The northwest turn being pulled inward by the upper-level low focused extreme easterly wind trajectories on the mountains for many hours. A more typical north and east track of Helene inland would have only briefly sideswiped the mountains with damaging winds.
There were two fatalities in Virginia directly attributed to Helene. For all the flooding Southwest Virginia experienced, both deaths in the commonwealth — one in Craig County, one in Tazewell County — were caused by wind, not by flooding.
Camille, while it had some of the most extreme winds ever observed in an Atlantic basin hurricane at over 175 mph, had little or no significant surface wind once it made it as far as Virginia.
Many survivors of the horrible downpours reported the incredible straight-down faucet-like pouring of rain, not sheets or spray that would exist in high winds. Photos of the landslide and flooding impacts of Camille in Nelson County do not show the broken or leaf-stripped limbs in surrounding trees that one would expect to see in a high-wind event.
In writing the Cardinal Weather column two years ago about the legacy and mythology of Camille, I got some pushback from at least one reader insisting that Camille had to be a hurricane over Nelson County to do the damage it did.
But whatever Camille may or may not have been at that point, it could not have been a hurricane for the sole reason that a hurricane is entirely defined by its sustained wind speed around a close warm-core center of circulation. A hurricane must have 75 mph sustained winds to be a hurricane. Camille, over Virginia, did not.
Rainfall
At first glance, this would appear to be a strong similarity between Camille and Helene.
Camille’s heaviest rainfall officially is considered to be 27 inches, measured in barrels at Massies Mill in Nelson County, Virginia. Helene’s heaviest rainfall is considered to be 30.78 inches at Busick, N.C. In Camille and Helene, it is probable that were locations that received up to 36 inches of rain in locations beyond measuring capability. (Virginia’s highest reported rainfall in Helene was 10.89 inches in Grayson County just southwest of Galax.)
But when the time element is considered, the scale of rainfall becomes radically different.
The Busick total is for five days, encompassing the “predecessor rain event” tangentially related to Helene, the outer effects of Hurricane Helene’s circulation, the direct effects of Helene’s circulation center moving inland, and additional rain as Helene was absorbed into the upper-level low.
The 27 inches at Massies Mill fell inside of 12 hours, the vast majority of it in under six hours.
In Helene’s case, there were days of intermittent heavy rain, augmented by periods of torrential downpours, over a wide area.
In Camille’s case, specific to Nelson County and nearby areas, there was almost unimaginably intense rainfall for a few hours over a relatively small area.
Both led to destructive flooding, setting many records, including in some rivers downstream from where the heaviest rain occurred.
Landslides
This is one of the most stunning numerical differences in the two storms.
Helene was responsible for 2,217 landslides in four states, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
That is a lot of landslides.
But Camille, according to follow-up studies and satellite data, caused somewhere between 3,700 and 5,500 landslides in Nelson County alone.
That is jaw-dropping. Accounts of entire mountainsides sliding off and the visible geologic scars that exist to this day would strongly support this conclusion.
Considering rainfall and landslides, one could say that Helene was catastrophic on a regional scale, while Camille’s effects on Nelson County were cataclysmic on a local scale.
Some of the scars from both storms will last centuries.
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
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