Just a quick note on the subject then I'm done. Here's some more on Camille:

"Camille formed near the island of Grand Cayman in the Caribbean on August 14 from a tropical wave that had been tracked from the African coast where it emerged on August 5. " (from CHC - Canadian Hurricane Centre)

"Camille started as a tropical wave that moved off Africa on the 5th but did not get organized until she reached the Caribbean Sea" (from Midwest Hurricane Center)

"She was born on August 5, 1969, like so many of her Atlantic predecessors, a modest tropical wave off the western coast of northern Africa. Over the course of the next several days, the as-yet unnamed system migrated across the Atlantic, its barometric pressure gradually dropping, its winds increasing. " (from Disasterrelief.org)

"The course taken by the storm was a small tropical wave on August 5, 1969, off the African coast to its landfall at 10:30 p.m. on August 17 with top winds over 200 mph and having inundated Pass Christian with its highest recorded flood surge of 24 feet." (personal account)

There are many many more, of course, but all y'all get the idea. Lets just hope we don't see anything like Camille ever again, in Pass Christian or anywhere else in the gulf.

LI Phil

(yes, Ed, I know this belongs in the Hurricane History forum, but as you so eloquently put it yesterday, nobody puts their posts in the appropriate forums. Feel free to move it there if you so desire. It's where it belongs)