Usually my PBS station shows a pretty good old movie on Saturday night, but there are in pledge week, so it's the Doo-Wop special that they've been showing for the last 20 years to bring in donations, so I wasn't interested.

I found a good movie on the Documentary Channel: All Over But to Cry about the devastation around Cameron Parish, Louisiana by Hurricane Audrey in 1957.

From Wikipedia: "Hurricane Audrey was the first major hurricane of the 1957 Atlantic hurricane season. Audrey was the only storm to reach Category 4 status in June. A powerful hurricane, Audrey caused catastrophic damage across eastern Texas and western Louisiana. It then affected the South Central United States as a powerful extratropical storm. The heaviest rainfall directly from Audrey fell near the Gulf coast, though heavy rainfall across the Midwest was caused by its moisture flowing towards a weather front to the north. In its wake, Audrey left $1 billion (2005 USD) in damage and 431 - 500 fatalities. At the time period, the devastation from Hurricane Audrey was the worst since the Great New England Hurricane of 1938."

Most of the survivors who described their experiences were children back then, and they talked of how multiple generations of their families gathered together to help one another through the storm, but even so, they watched the 12 foot tidal wave suck their mother or sister or grandmother or their aunt away. One man talked about how his father tied his two sisters and mother together at the waist. They were all sure they were going to die, so they wanted the bodies to found together. This man described another family where the father tied the six children and mother together by the hands and they all died maybe because they didn't have the uninhibited use of their hands.

He also talked about the fact that all his neighbors died. There were 14 boys who were his best friends, and they all died, as well as their mothers. To this day, you could tell he still couldn't believe the carnage was so complete.

Another man talked about how their house was breaking up, and the refrigerator came floating by, so he and his mother grabbed onto it, and stayed with it through the night. The next morning, when the water receded they were hungry so they opened the refrigerator, and it had stayed watertight and the food in it was still edible.

The next day the water receded, but people were miles from home and shoe-less. There were cotton mouth water moccasins hanging from almost every bush as they made their way to a stranded barge. They managed to find a corner away from the snakes and curled up next to an old tire that had a bunch of baby skunks sheltering in it.

There was still a lot of standing water, and one of the guys said he and some of the other older boys had to take younger kids up on their shoulders to get them across. He was carrying a fat kid, and stepped into a deep hole where a tree had been ripped out. They went underwater, and the fat kid grabbed onto his neck and head 'like... like a raccoon, and he flipped me completely over. Finally, I managed to beat the kid off with my fists, get upright, and get us both out of there.'

After the storm he developed malaria from the mosquito bites he got that night, which it took him several weeks to get over, almost died, and then he got pneumonia and almost died from that.

It was a well-done documentary, all the more so because it took place before we had all the media coverage that we have now. A lot of it was re-enactments done in black and white because that's how coverage would have been presented at the time, but the survivor stories were so descriptive, we can still feel their panic and fright and sadness for the loved ones they lost, even after all these years.