By morning, everything standing upright was broken, splintered and washed away, including all of the island's trees, its casinos, a hotel and the summer homes of wealthy New Orleans families. More than 200 people died. Many were crushed and others drowned after being struck by wreckage in the maelstrom.

LAST ISLAND'S WALTZ
As hotel guests waltzed away the night, gale winds began whipping outside. The next morning, the guests awoke to a hellish fury.
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Claire Rose Champagne's great-great-grandmother Amelie Voisin and a baby daughter were among those lost in the storm. Other family members survived and eventually abandoned Last Island — today the Isles Dernieres archipelago — for Dulac, a fishing village 30 miles inland up Bayou Grand Caillou. But there was no escape from the storms, which have followed the family inland over five generations.

In 1909, Champagne's fisherman grandfather was out at sea when another hurricane lashed the Louisiana coast with 110-mph winds that propelled a 10-foot wave of water through Dulac.

"My grandmother and (her) children were left at home and saved themselves by climbing into the attic of the house," she said. "Forty people tied ropes to the house and to two oak trees, then all stayed in the attic — women and children and some men. After the hurricane the government sent some tents for people to live in." Her grandfather made it back alive, but about 350 people along the coast died in the storm.

Hurricanes are a common heritage for Louisiana residents, who until the past few decades had little choice in facing a hurricane but to ride it out and pray.

Today, billions of dollars worth of levees, sea walls, pumping systems and satellite hurricane tracking provide a comforting safety margin that has saved thousands of lives.

But modern technology and engineering mask an alarming fact: In the generations since those storms menaced Champagne's ancestors, south Louisiana has been growing more vulnerable to hurricanes, not less.

Sinking land and chronic coastal erosion — in part the unintended byproducts of flood-protection efforts — have opened dangerous new avenues for even relatively weak hurricanes and tropical storms to assault areas well inland.

"There's no doubt about it," said Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District, who maintains a hurricane levee that encircles Bayou Lafourche from Larose to the southern tip of Golden Meadow. "The biggest factor in hurricane risk is land loss. The Gulf of Mexico is, in effect, probably 20 miles closer to us than it was in 1965 when Hurricane Betsy hit."

These trends are the source of a complex and growing threat to everyone living in south Louisiana and to the regional economy and culture:

'People here can't move'

Decades after her ancestors struggled to survive storms, Champagne finds herself reliving the past. For her and for many people, evacuations and hurricane floods have become regular events.

Three times in the past 17 years, she and her husband, Buddy, have endured storm surges that put water waist-deep or higher in their house across from Bayou Dularge in Theriot, more frequent flooding with higher water than had ever been seen in the area. Dispossessed for months at a time, they lost antique furniture and switched to plastic chairs. They abandoned carpets for linoleum. Photo albums, trophies, even a nativity scene they kept on display in the house were all swept away — except for the baby Jesus recovered from the back yard.

For a while, Champagne organized her neighbors and attended public meetings with government officials to try to get more hurricane protection — before finally deciding to rely on prayer.

"One time a man from New York or Washington asked me where I was from, and I told him. He said, 'Lady, move away from there,'" she said. "That made me furious. We can't move. People here can't move. Everything we worked for and our ancestors worked for is here. We want to pass it on to our children."

The Mississippi River delta's flat, buckling geography makes it uniquely vulnerable to hurricanes, which destroy with wind, rain, tornadoes and a tidal wave known as storm surge. High winds account for most hurricane damage elsewhere. Louisiana is vulnerable to both winds and floods. When a giant storm surge hits the shallows near the shoreline, the only direction the water can move is up. Like water sloshing against the wall of a bathtub, a storm surge running into a steep, solid coast rises suddenly, then dissipates. Along a gradual slope like the Mississippi River delta's, the surge doesn't rise as high but can penetrate dozens of miles inland.

There currently is no defense against a surge from a major storm, a Category 4 or Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale used by meteorologists. Such storms can generate surges of 20 to 30 feet above sea level — enough to top any levee in south Louisiana. Sustained winds from major storms — 131 mph to 155 mph for a Category 4, even more for a Category 5 — can shred homes and do damage to almost any structure.

Fortunately, such storms are relatively rare events. Hurricane Camille, which struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, and an unnamed 1935 storm that hit the Florida Keys were the only Category 5 storms to strike the U.S. coast in the past century. Fifteen Category 4 hurricanes made landfall on U.S. soil during that time.

For lesser, more common storms, natural and man-made defenses exist, such as levees to keep out storm waters, and barrier islands and marshes also block and dampen storm surges.