Virginia state trooper spent long days in storm's aftermath

Special Report

- Read more stories about Hurricane Camille

- Audio slideshow: Hear excerpts from Trooper Ed Tinsley's audio diary and see 1969 photos of the hurricane's aftermath

- Check out an interactive map of Camille's path and more

Thirty-six hours after Hurricane Camille swept through Nelson County, Virginia State Trooper Ed Tinsley, along with several other rescue workers, climbed a hill to a home near Massie’s Mill to check on an elderly woman who lived alone.

She was trying to cook two hamburger patties — the only food she had left in her house, which was in six inches of water.

“As we approached she came up to the screen and told us how glad she was to see us,” a then-32-year-old Tinsley said. “I observed at this time that she had been sitting on the front porch reading the Bible, which was very touching to me.”

The observation is part of an almost hour-long audio diary Tinsley recorded during the two weeks following Hurricane Camille’s night of destruction in Nelson County in August 1969.

Each night, after working 12-plus-hour days in rescue and cleanup efforts, Tinsley would go home and pour his report of the day’s events into a recorder. He called the resulting audio diary, “Portrait of a Disaster.”

In it, Tinsley’s voice is quiet and somber. He speaks about those who are rescued in the days following the disaster, the devastation the county received from the floodwaters and the rising number of people discovered dead or missing.

“It’s just hard to believe the damage I am looking at — the damage I have seen, the damage I have flown over and walked through — could be so great and so extensive,” Tinsley says in the recording.

“My honest feelings are that there could never be an accurate record or description in the history books as to what had gone on here except what had been seen by my eyes and the eyes of the people who have been in it.”

Recording his thoughts was a type of therapy for processing the events of that time, said Tinsley, who is now 72 and living in Amherst County.

It also helped to preserve the history of what happened.

“Other than having to have food and shaving and washing and getting five, maybe six hours sleep at night, (work was) all I did during that time,” he said.

“The first two to three days I probably worked 18 hours, but most of the days I worked at least 16.”

Now, as a self-proclaimed lover of history, Tinsley wants to preserve his memories for future generations.

“Where history is concerned, you should record it and you should share it,” Tinsley said.

“I knew I had to do it. So much was going on, I couldn’t write it down.”

Tinsley’s recordings now are part of the Oakland Museum on U.S. 29 near Arrington, which is working to become a resource center for the history surrounding Hurricane Camille.

Woody Greenberg, the museum’s vice president, said the audio diary is a good asset for the museum to have.

“The idea of the Camille Resource Center is to have computer kiosks and have digitized versions of everything and (the diary) would be a very important part of that,” Greenberg said.

The museum recently received grants to help it develop a center that would make hundreds of documents, photos and videos related to Nelson’s greatest natural disaster easily accessible to the public.

Greenberg said Tinsley’s audio diary would be a “unique” addition to the center.

In the first of the 12 entries in the diary, Tinsley describes the route he took around Nelson on the first day, driving more than 250 miles just searching for a way to get into the county and assess the devastation.

“I drove up roads for two or three miles that had been washed completely out and no longer even resembled being a road,” he says on the diary.

On Thursday, Aug. 21, 1969, Tinsley told of picking up the Raines brothers, Warren and Carl, who were teenagers at the time of the flood and had lost their entire family in the Massie’s Mill area. They survived by clinging to trees throughout the night.

At the end of that day, Tinsley notes on the diary that there were 56 people missing and 26 known dead.

The next day, Tinsley came into work more than eight hours early to help with the search and rescue efforts being organized in the county. He began that day by traveling to the Massie’s Mill area, where they found the elderly woman with the hamburgers.

Massie’s Mill was one of the hardest hit areas of Nelson County.

“I was starting to get an idea of what sort of massive damage we had had,” Tinsley says on the diary entry. “Every low spot in the mountains had washed out from the top of the mountain down, which would indicate a terrific amount of rain involved.”

Later in the diary, Tinsley describes the devastation in more detail.

“This area of the Blue Ridge apparently had immense rain dropped right on top of it,” he says, the amazement evident in his voice on the recording. “And every gully, every little valley, every low spot in the mountain had been washed out as if some giant claw had grabbed hold of it and pulled everything out of it.

“It was washed right down to solid rock. Everything was gone.”

The Sunday after the storm, Tinsley was assigned to work the radio at the control center that had been set up along U.S. 29 in Lovingston.

From there, Tinsley had a front-row view of the search and rescue efforts. In the diary, he speaks about people’s attitudes after working long and tirelessly in the search for survivors and bodies.

“It was very obvious at this time that the 16- to 18-hour days were beginning to show on quite a few people,” Tinsley says. “Tempers were cut pretty thin and people were saying a lot of things that they probably would regret later.”

Through the rest of the next two weeks, the number of missing and dead continued to rise. By Monday, Aug. 26, Tinsley said most of the main and secondary roads were open.

The diary ends around Labor Day of that year. Tinsley describes the spirit of the county’s citizens then as a “there’s work to do” mentality.

He says there are 30 to 40 bodies that will probably never be found and by the end of the diary, the count is 71 dead identified, 15 unidentified dead and 49 people missing.

Now, looking back on the 48 years Tinsley spent as a state trooper, he said Hurricane Camille was the most prominent and biggest event of his career.

“In my career, from 1959 until I retired in 2007, I was a state trooper during one of the most traumatic times in our history,” he said.

If the state police were called out to go to a racial riot or anti-war protest, Tinsley was sent.

“Every racial demonstration, anti-war demonstration, I went to,” he said.

“But of all of that, Camille was the greatest, most prominent occurrence of anything in my 48 years.”