The Roanoke Times

File 1969 A family of five escaped this house that was largely washed away by Davis Creek in Nelson County during the floods caused by the remnants of Hurricane Camille on Aug. 19 and 20, 1969. Fifty-six people died along Davis Creek alone, more than a third of the 153 who were killed in Virginia floods related to Camille, according to the state Department of Emergency Management.

Kevin Myatt is The Roanoke Times' weather columnist.

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Imagine 2 to 3 feet of rain -- feet, not inches -- falling in about six hours.

Turn your bathroom faucet on full blast, and then imagine that coming out of the sky everywhere around you.

For Roanokers, the November 1985 floods from the remnants of Hurricane Juan are the closest comparison. Those floods came after a little more than half a foot of rain in a day, during a week when not quite a foot fell. That put water in places it's never been seen in the Roanoke Valley, killing 10 people.

But on Aug. 19 and 20, 1969, a torrent roughly the equivalent of Roanoke's average total rainfall from January through September cascaded onto parts of Nelson County within a few hours as the supposedly dying remnants of a once-vicious hurricane lumbered overhead.

Ancient ridges turned to gooey slime and tiny ditches transformed into mountain-chewing rapids. Amounts of rainfall as much as 27 inches were confirmed, with up to 36 inches estimated, during a horrible, lightning-lit night in which 153 people died.

That was Camille in Virginia 40 years ago.

While Nelson County was the epicenter of flash flooding's version of a magnitude 8 earthquake, Alleghany and Rockbridge counties were among those severely hit by rainfall topping 10 inches.

Water engorging tiny streams and washing out hillsides roared into the Maury and James rivers, inundating Buena Vista and Glasgow, and later choking low-lying areas of Lynchburg and Richmond with what, at the time, were 20th century high-water marks.

Hurricane Camille's initial impact was its Category 5 hit on the Gulf Coast. Coming ashore on Aug. 17 with winds gusting over 200 mph and a massive storm surge up to 24 feet, it decimated several Mississippi Gulf Coast communities.

Incredibly, Camille's once seemingly unchallengeable legacy on the Gulf Coast has largely been supplanted by that of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Though Katrina had weakened to a Category 3 storm at landfall, it was a much larger hurricane than Camille and had been a Category 5 hurricane just hours earlier, so it projected an even bigger wall of water over a wider area.

Compounded by levee failures in New Orleans, Katrina's death toll topped 1,800 -- about six times the number of people who died from Camille's attack on the Gulf Coast and Virginia's floods and landslides combined.

Camille was a puny tropical depression when it approached Virginia from the west. But, though its fierce winds had weakened, the clouds born over the distant tropics still carried thick moisture.

The evaporative process that forms tropical systems creates smaller water droplets that pack into clouds much more tightly than do processes that form typical thunderstorms and rain systems over land.

Camille's remnant moisture was unpacked at an extreme rate over central Virginia by a slow-moving cold front, which lifted the water droplets and condensed them into intense torrents. The Blue Ridge, as it often does, served as a source of added lift, and Camille also drew new moisture and energy from the Atlantic.

Camille was nothing special for the Roanoke or New River valleys. Roanoke and Blacksburg each received between 2 and 2¹₂ inches of rain over three days -- a substantial rain, but not a torrential one. Camille was simply not our storm.

Just as its path of utter destruction on the Gulf Coast was narrow compared to Katrina 36 years later, Camille's trail of terror in Virginia was razor thin compared to later tropical-related flooding.

Just three years after Camille, the remnants of Hurricane Agnes -- a lowly Category 1 at landfall in the Florida Panhandle -- created much more widespread flooding throughout the East. Agnes rains drove the James River 8 feet higher than Camille did at Richmond, to 36 feet, eclipsing a 200-year-old record.

Roanoke's 1985 nemesis, Juan, sent the James River 9 feet higher at Lynchburg than did Camille, while also sending the Maury back into Buena Vista.

But for the sheer extreme of what water alone can do in a few counties within a few hours, Camille has never been equaled in Virginia, and we should pray it never will.

Weather Journal appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.