Hurricane Audrey came ashore between Sabine Pass and Johnsons Bayou at about 7 a.m. on Thursday, June 27, 1957, a strong Category 3 with 125 mph winds. Most of its dead were in Cameron Parish. Sources give 416, more than 400, or at least 500, and the National Weather Service says the exact number will never be known.
What the advisories said
The Weather Bureau had followed the storm since it formed in the Bay of Campeche on June 24. Its advisory on Wednesday morning told people in low, exposed places to move to higher ground and expected the center on the Louisiana coast late Thursday, with tides of 5 to 8 feet. Audrey then intensified and sped up. A bulletin at 1 a.m. Thursday moved landfall to before noon, and at 4 a.m. the Bureau gave tides of 9 feet. Years later a federal judge, hearing the suit of Whitney Bartie, who lost his family, found the advisories "technically more than adequate" but short on urgency, and found that Cameron had been given no evacuation order and that no law required the Bureau to give one. A broadcast after the Wednesday 10 p.m. news said "there is no need for alarm tonight"; the Bureau did not control it. Dr. Cecil Clark testified that Cameron was "really just forgotten, neglected."
Water and a courthouse
Before dawn the road out was already flooding. Clark, the only physician in Cameron, left home soon after 2 a.m. to evacuate his twelve-bed clinic and its eight bedridden patients, and rising water turned him back. Deputies with boats moved the patients to the parish courthouse, built in 1937 with Public Works Administration money. Several hundred people sheltered there, and one 1957 account counts about a thousand. The Weather Service puts high water at 12 to 14 feet at Cameron, Creole and Grand Chenier, while other accounts say 20. At the new South Cameron High School, more than 100 people lived by climbing the steam pipes.
Clark treated the injured for more than 24 hours with supplies salvaged from the clinic. His wife, Sybil, survived on the floating roof of their collapsed house. Their three youngest children, the youngest 2 1/2 months old, were swept away. His sons, 7 and 8, were at their grandmother's in Creole and were tied to the tops of oak trees; both lived. That December the American Medical Association named him General Practitioner of the Year.
The count and the work after
Of 371 bodies recovered, 127 could not be identified, and a 1957 Red Cross tally listed 191 people missing. Unidentified dead were buried in common graves at Combre Memorial Park and Highland Memorial Park in Lake Charles. Harold Mangum recalled that the mass burials were mostly of Black victims, handled by Black-owned funeral homes.
In the parish, 1,316 homes were destroyed and 1,206 badly damaged. The Red Cross served 141,000 meals over nine weeks. Cameron's census count was 2,721 in 1960, up from 2,276 in 1950.
The Cameron Parish Courthouse is still a working courthouse, and the Creole Nature Trail runs south into the parish. At Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, Pintail Wildlife Drive circles marsh and old rice fields.