CAMERON, La. (AP) -- Cameron Parish offices closed Friday to commemorate the 46th anniversary of Hurricane Audrey's devastation along southwest Louisiana's Gulf Coast. "Great Hurricane Audrey" claimed more than 400 lives in Louisiana when it hit in 1957. It brought tides of 13.9 feet and wind gusts up to 180 mph. Flooding from the surge stretched about 25 miles inland, and homes and offshore oil installations were destroyed.

The Brimstone Museum in Cameron has a new Audrey exhibit set to open July 7. Practically every Audrey survivor had a tale of watching a loved one who could not hold on slip away forever beneath swirling winds and waters.

Judge H. Ward Fontenot, an LSU student in Baton Rouge at the time, said he heard about the destruction from one of his professors, who announced in class that Cameron had been wiped out. Fontenot left immediately and began to hitchhike home. He got rides as far south as Hackberry, near the Cameron-Calcasieu parish line, but below that point the single road into Cameron was either awash or washed out.

"I walked into a store and announced that I was trying to get home to Cameron," Fontenot said. "You should have seen people scurry to try to find a way for me to get there -- they knew about the devastation by then. I got on a boat with a Methodist preacher who was bringing medical supplies to Cameron and had room for one passenger."

Fontenot said he'd worked on the waterfront at Cameron since he was a young boy and knew it intimately, but when the boat hit shore he thought the preacher was lost. The only building intact in Cameron was the courthouse. "The whole earthscape was changed," Fontenot said.

A memorial Mass has been held every year since Audrey at Our Lady Star of the Sea Church. Monsignor Louis Melancon said "we pray for protection each day from the beginning to the end of hurricane season."

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)