A Most Unnatural Disaster - A Katrina Retrospective
Article and Photos : Therra Cathryn Gwyn
When the reporter from Time magazine wandered onto our storm-battered Biloxi street and started talking to my neighbors I thought he was an insurance adjuster. I didn’t connect him to the barrage of press that followed in Hurricane Katrina’s wake. Indeed, at that point, we didn’t even realize we had so much outside company reflecting our pain and confusion to the rest of the world. It simply was about time to start seeing the insurance adjusters, that’s all. They are part of a post-hurricane ritual in South Mississippi and elsewhere on the Gulf Coast, where in a hurricane season, much like in football, it might or might be a winning year. A winning hurricane season would be: no storms, few threats and long, lazy hot summer days and nights that didn’t have to be spent glued to the Weather Channel. I once heard Jay Leno describe the Weather Channel as “MTV for old people”. I chuckled at the time, but if you live anywhere on the Gulf of Mexico, it’s required viewing.
Before a storm, for residents, it’s about preparations. Afterwards it’s all about out cleaning up the yards, cussing any damage to the cars and sharing shelter, stay-at-home or we-got-the-hell-out stories with the other people in the neighborhood. We would sit around and chat and fan ourselves in the heat with old magazines until the electricity finally came on, phone service was restored and roads cleared so life could get back to normal. Sometimes it leaped back to normal, sometimes it limped back to normal, but it always got back to normal. Life went back to regular after Frederick (1979), after Elena (1985) and after Georges (1998). This time, with Katrina, it was different, but I didn’t know it yet. So it made sense that the young man in the nice car with out-of-state plates, looking around and jotting things down in a small notebook would be an insurance representative. I was hot and uncomfortable that day but still at least a little blissfully ignorant. We had no services that would allow us to communicate with or see images from the outside world. Even radio transmissions were almost completely down. Both my ignorance and bliss were about to end. I knew things were pretty beat up, of course. All I had to do was look around or walk down the street. But I was about to find out everyone else in America already knew: all hell had broken loose on the Gulf Coast and we were fighting for our very existence from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Mobile, Alabama. Katrina had come to call and she took almost everything we had with her.
When the storm hit, my mother was 74. Her family is from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. My New-York-born father served in two wars and is buried in the National Cemetery in Biloxi after living on the Mississippi coast for more than 20 years. I lived there in my late teens, went to community college in Gulfport before moving to New Orleans and northward to pursue my life and education. In August 2005 with a heavy heart I signed divorce papers in Atlanta and headed back to the place I had always thought of as my “sanctuary”, my haven – the beautiful, friendly, serene and predictable Gulf Coast. Ten days later Hurricane Katrina hit. The haven blew away.
Glad to see a new face I asked the neatly dressed stranger if he was from State Farm, hoping he might have come to see those of us with that coverage. “No,” he replied, “I’m from Time magazine.” That stopped me. Uh-oh, I thought with alarm, this can’t be good. If Time is here in Biloxi, we must be worse off than I figured. I tried to calculate how much ice I had left in my cooler, thinking it might be a few extra days until electricity would be restored. Little did I know it would be weeks. Little did I know I couldn’t have gotten more ice that day or the next day or the next week even if I’d been the Queen of England and written a blank check. There was no ice available in Biloxi. No water, no ice, no food, no electricity, no plumbing, no cable, no telephone service of any kind, no gasoline to even get out if the roads were passable.
The reporter, whose name I have forgotten, asked me, “Where is the help for you guys? When I covered all hurricanes in Florida last year, they had trucks coming in the same day, trucks full of supplies.”
I answered his question with a question, but I was dreaded his answer even as I spoke: “How bad is this?”
He looked at me with what I took to be a combination of pity and curiosity, “It’s worse than anything I saw in Nicaragua during the mud slides and earthquakes. I saw bodies and hands sticking out the ground in South America. This is worse. Terrible.”
He shook his head and looked angry. It may have been 95 degrees outside but I felt cold all over. I finally got it. The Big One had hit us, and by the looks and sound of things, had hit us almost directly. We always joked in a wary way along the Coast about “the Big One” wondering if it would hit in our lifetime. We always knew it wasn’t a matter of if, but when. I wondered if people in California make the same cautious jokes about earthquakes.
As it turned out, we were one of the lucky streets in the neighborhood. Our street was covered in tree parts and debris. Some roofs, windows and some people were missing, but we thought and hoped (and later found out) that our neighbors had gone to friends or family homes to wait out the weather. Some of them lost those friends and some of them lost those family homes, but our entire block eventually returned, a few of them in bare feet, a young mother and her cousin carrying unusually somber children. It’s a mixed block, racially and age-wise, in an old and before-the-storm-lovely neighborhood, just one block from the beach. Keesler Air Force Base, located to the rear of our houses, sustained 90 million dollars in damage we were told. We were told so many things. Many turned out to be shockingly true. The shelter down the street where my elderly mother and Vietnam Vet brother had taken refuge in during the hurricane was shut down about a week after the storm because of water-borne disease. They sent 300 people, suddenly homeless, many elderly and a few in wheelchairs, to other already overburdened shelters. We were told not to drink the city water if we had any. We were told a woman washed her face in it and some of her skin peeled off. We heard a lady in Gulfport found a shark in her back yard. We heard the water had risen an unheard-of 32 feet in some areas. We heard that a man killed his sister in Hattiesburg in a dispute over a bag of ice. We heard there were bodies lying in the street, in the water, in the trees. We heard New Orleans was in ruins. After a while we didn’t want to hear any more. When I could get a signal on my cell phone, sporadically, I would get the same message from all my friends and even my ex-husband, “Get the hell out of there.”
Once I found out, courtesy of Time magazine, that the situation was bad in a way previously unknown to us, I ventured out to see for myself what could be seen. It was almost unbearable. Bridges were missing. The main highway, Hwy 90, which passed along the shoreline on the Gulf, had chunks missing. Entire casinos had floated down the street only to land on their sides in parking lots in front of no-longer-there hotels. There were dogs, pets, running around everywhere, nosing through debris for food. I saw bathtubs on the beach, a car in a swimming pool, railroad cars in the shallows of the bay, boats on golf courses. There were yards and yards of clothes and linens wrapped around old oak trees, looking, as my friend Sherri noted, like a bizarre take on a Christo art installation.
My big regret was going to Point Cadet, the neighborhood on the eastern bay that separates Biloxi from Ocean Springs. I wish I hadn’t gone. The nightmares I had months after the storm always center on the day I went to “The Point” as it is called locally. My old friend Sherri grew up there and I’d spent plenty of time at her house as a teenager. Going there on that day left me speechless. It was, quite simply, the worse thing I’d ever seen. My jaw dropped as I wandered the once-familiar streets. I don’t know when I’d have occasion to see such total and complete annihilation again and I hope I never do. I have heard people use the phrase, “It looks like a bomb hit” to describe the wake of various natural disasters and now I truly understood what they meant. Entire blocks were leveled. Without the frame of a photograph or a TV set to contain it, the landscape looked so much worse than images could convey. It was 360 degrees of some of the worse destruction on the Coast. I felt faint. This couldn’t be true. The photographs I took that day look like postcards from the Apocalypse. Belongings were strewn everywhere. Roofs were on the ground. Automobiles were crumpled like used tissue paper. Everything was where it shouldn’t be and everywhere there were people with a sick mix of despair and determination in their eyes. I saw people living in what was left of their houses, people who once had a home now forcibly homeless and moving their coolers and children in shopping carts. Biloxians were emotionally devastated, that was easy to see, but in the areas I explored they were also calm and kind to each other, extra gentle, it seemed, to contrast to the brutality of the storm and the complete, almost ludicrous and unrecognizable landscape we found ourselves wading through. I realize now that we were, as a population, completely in shock.
Usually when a big storm passes there is a palpable feeling of relief. It was so short-lived after Katrina, although a weary cheerfulness did try to survive that late August. We were still here, right? Yet, instead of worrying about traffic, taxes, or the start of school, people were focused on how to eat, drink and survive the days until “normal” came back. I was frightened about how we were going to manage the aftershocks of the storm. My mother was elderly and had been injured in the shelter during the storm when the Red Cross had to move people because of the building damage. She would never really walk again and would die on the second anniversary of the storm, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew is that it was hot and things were bad. My brother wasn’t handling the heat and third-world conditions very well. I was scared almost every minute of the day. The unrelenting late-summer heat was beating us down fast. It was stifling and there was no relief from it. I was sleeping in the front yard and the heat wouldn’t break until well after midnight. I would wake every morning drenched in sweat. And yet, we knew we were luckier than a lot of people and tried to hang on to that not insignificant fact as we battled heatstroke and exhaustion and constant, nagging, fear. Then my mother got so ill I had to break curfew and go to the local police station, such as it was, to get help. They send an ambulance (really a fire utility truck) to get her. Bless the good-natured emergency personal who took her to the reduced but gamely functioning Biloxi hospital. The health workers there probably hadn’t been able to leave for days. The hospital staff and police force had to use porta-lets set up in their parking lot. I sat in the dimly lit waiting room. A nurse finally gave her fluids and a shot and sent her home with me. There wasn’t much else they could do, even for a heart patient. There were no admissions. Dire emergencies were being taken to Mobile, Alabama, 65 miles away, in borrowed ambulances. I was in a thinly-disguised panic. I wanted them to keep my mother and take care of her. I felt inadequate to take care of my family or myself. Later, around two a.m., I sat up in the front yard and watched a different group of emergency workers come and get the elderly man next door who had collapsed from the heat.
Days dragged by. What was I going to do for a woman in her 70s who could barely walk and who now wasn’t eating? Did I have enough gasoline to get us all out? And where would we go? Housing and lodging was almost non-existent in any of 5 surrounding states due to the overflow of storm evacuees. That much I knew. Crews were taking people out of New Orleans to shelter as far as New York, Utah, New Mexico. If I ran out of gas along the highway and was unable to get more, it might be worse than sitting in the dark, fetid house all day. Should we wait it out? How long could we wait it out? With my boyfriend John I finally made the decision to flee and he piled the family and some clothes into his van. The first available gas we found was an hour away. After one luckily-short 45 minute wait in line to fill the van’s tank, we made it to Birmingham where twin kind souls, my friend Sherri and her friend Eugenia, conspired to house us and let us rest. We didn’t have to go to another shelter. So exhausted was I that when I went into the Western supermarket to get some dinner, I stared at the deli and salad bar and tears filled my eyes. As ridiculous as it sounds, this everyday part of commerce was a vision, a beautiful sight. Here was food, ice, anything we wanted. Air-conditioning was the norm again. My family was safe. After the rough conditions on the coast, this was the beauty of normal life, restored. Still, it wasn’t easy to sit with even the relief of escape with others just five hours away dealing with hardship that, as yet, wasn’t being fully addressed by the powers that be. Not even 24 hours after we fled the destruction, a still exhausted John and I loaded the van once again, this time with all the water, ice and food and gas we could afford and headed back down to the coast. We distributed it at churches and shelters in need, the places that were serving the community from within with whatever they had. And we weren’t the only ones. We passed many “regular” citizens on the re-routed highways, themselves packed up with relief goods bought by their own money at Costco, Wal-Mart, etc. We saw church groups and community helpers using their own transport and hauling gasoline in extra cans atop their cars trying to get basic needs met for their fellow citizens. We were met on the coast by grateful people, who said they’d not had any help at all. We were told by one Red Cross worker that no help had come for their particular shelter yet. She said it would come, eventually.
It was now 5 days after the storm. We went to an African- American church in a section of town I was told as a young woman to avoid. This Biloxi church was taking care of the entire community in brisk and cheerful manner that was a wonderful contrast to the glum circumstance. John and I met a man there who had nothing left, not even a pair of shoes. The church members found him some shoes (“They fit!” he said, looking pleased) and was now finding a way to feed the community with what they had left and with what people brought them. They received us with open arms and big smiles, exclaiming that God sent us to them. I felt humbled as they thanked us and could barely meet the eyes of the church director because I knew they were the ones doing the hard work, not me, and they deserved the thanks, not me. We had fled town, but tried to make a difference by coming back with a van full of granola bars and sports drinks, which they treated like we had brought them a full menu of items from the finest restaurant. It remains one of the most humbling experiences of my life.
If you’ve ever lived in the South you’ve heard the faithful utter the line “Don’t let the devil take your joy”. I later saw this same church group on CNN, standing together in the middle of their mostly destroyed neighborhood. They were holding hands and singing. They called us angels the day we showed up on their doorstep but we knew we were just doing what everyone else was doing: trying to make an unbearable situation bearable. Trying to help restore the beauty of normal life. Trying not to let the devil take our joy.
Copyright © 2009, The Daily Panic
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