50 Years Ago June 27!!

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Fifty years ago June 27, Hurricane Audrey swept through Orange County and Southwest Louisiana. The storm surge killed an estimated 500 people, mostly in Cameron, Louisiana.

The storm came in the days before satellites and modern forecasting gave advanced warnings for evacuation. KOGT’s Richard Corder recalls the storm was far away in the Bay of Campeche when it suddenly turned north and started traveling at 15 mph, straight for the Texas-Louisiana border.

Corder went to the KOGT studio the night of June 26 to begin warning people of the storm. He found people who spoke French to give warnings to the Cajuns in Louisiana.

The Golden Triangle in those days had only two television stations, and they stopped broadcasting after the 10 p.m. news. The 10 p.m. forecast from the National Weather Service estimated the storm would reach land by the next afternoon.

Some people in Orange left in the night for shelters at schools or churches as the winds began to blow. The nation was in the Cold War at the time and neighborhoods had Civil Defense volunteers. The volunteers went door-to-door in the middle of the night telling people to leave.

Corder stayed on the air as the wind blew and people lost power. At one point, authorities asked him to tell people to hunker down in their houses and not travel through the storm.

The east side of Orange, including the large Riverside housing addition flooded, as did the Cove area. A lineman for Gulf States Utilities Company was electrocuted in flooded waters on Second Street near Gilmer Homes.

Corder recalled one special plea for help from a lady in Riverside. She was nine months pregnant and was having contractions. The National Guard was running trucks through the flooded streets to get people out as the water kept rising. Corder got word to the National Guard to go to the lady’s house. She delivered her baby soon after the truck got her to the hospital.

Susan Quigley was 14 years old at the time. Her parents, Jimmy and Anne Quigley, owned the Orange Leader. Susan recalls the damage along Green Avenue businesses and the large trees blown down at First Presbyterian Church.

The eye of the hurricane blew across Orange County and Corder warned people during the lull that the storm was not over. Finally it passed.

The National Weather Service reports a maximum wind gust of 100 mph was recorded by the Sabine River Authority in Orange during Audrey.

As Orange residents began to clean up and deal with the power outages, word began to come from Louisiana about the hundreds of deaths. Volunteers from Orange went to the marshes near Cameron to rescue the living and recover the dead from the snake-infested marshes.

Quigley said her father was gone for four days covering the story in Louisiana. Newspaper reporters from across the country camped out in the old Orange Leader office, which at the time was in the 500 block of Front Street. Her father was awarded a national Associated Press prize for his coverage of the storm.

Corder also worked for days, staying at the station to broadcast the news from Louisiana. KOGT became a source for names of the dead and he would answer questions from people calling to ask about their relatives.

The hardest part of his job, he said, was telling people that a relative was dead.

Volunteers from Orange told him of finding bodies hanging from barbed wire fences and tree limbs.

He also heard the stories of people fighting off poisonous water moccasins. Many victims had been bitten.

One of his friends found a family that had escaped into their attic. The father reported looking toward the Gulf of Mexico and seeing a “wall of water†coming. The tidal wave knocked the house off its foundation, but the family made it to the roof. “He was beating snakes off that roof with a boat paddle,†Corder said.

Lance Wingate, 88, of Orange was bitten by a water moccasin, though it didn’t seriously hurt him. Thirty-eight head of cattle were washed away from Grand Chenier in Cameron Parish to Orange. The owner told Wingate he could keep the cattle, so he and family and friends went by horseback to round up the cattle. The horses were swimming across Cow Bayou when Wingate dropped his whip. He went to pick it up and there was a water moccasin. The moccasin struck Wingate and bit him on his cowboy boot. One fang sunk through a split in the boot. He knocked the snake off, but the fang stuck. It was hours before he got to the hospital. The bite was not serious, perhaps because Wingate had been bitten before by a copperhead. (He had another copperhead bite later, making him a three-time snakebite victim.)

Hurricane Rita in 2005 was a stronger storm than Audrey and produced a larger storm surge in Cameron. Once again, the Louisiana towns along the Gulf, Holly Beach and Cameron, were wiped out. But the people living there evacuated before Rita, thanks to the advanced warnings.

Orange sustained a large amount of damage during Rita, much more than during Audrey. But people will never forget Hurricane Audrey and the deaths. Audrey is still ranked as the seventh deadliest storm in recorded U.S. history. Until Hurricane Katrina, he was the last hurricane with deaths rising into the hundreds.

A memorial service for the victims of Hurricane Audrey was set for 10 a.m. Wednesday in Cameron, a town that is still rebuilding after Hurricane Rita.