Surviving the storm came with recriminations. Others would be less forgiving of the delay in state and federal help. Katrina fixed itself permanently in the thoughts of survivors, pushing some into deep neurosis. A woman in Bay St. Louis named Terry Lucas, who lived next door to her parents, Gloria and Luke Berigno, was speaking to her mother at eight in the morning. Suddenly the storm surge flooded over the houses on their street—not in a creeping way, but as a swirling, insistent torrent. “This is worse than Camille,” were the last words that Lucas heard her mother say. Both of her parents drowned inside their house.40
Seventy-five-year-old Pete Fountain, the legendary clarinetist, tried to stay positive. He was safe, but his $1.5-million Bay St. Louis house was gutted, and his most treasured possessions, which documented his illustrious jazz career, were lost forever: correspondence with Frank Sinatra, gold albums, signed pictures of himself with presidents, Louis Armstrong memorabilia. Losing the gold record of his signature song—“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—was a truly personal blow. Fountain’s vintage gun collection was also gone. After Katrina, it all came under the heading of one word: debris. Fortunately, Fountain had evacuated with his family to Hammond, Louisiana, seventy-five miles west. Katrina “really got me,” he told the Associated Press. “But I have two of my best clarinets, so I’m okay.”41
That’s what Fountain told the press after Katrina. He had that Mississippi Gulf Coast male mentality that no matter what your age, you don’t complain. His post-Katrina sadness, however, was acute. For forty-six years, Fountain had participated in New Orleans’s Mardi Gras parades. His krewe was called Half Fast Marching Club and was a huge tourist draw, parading down St. Charles Avenue while Fountain played his clarinet, a modern-day Pied Piper. When February 2006 rolled around, however, Fountain stayed at his rented home in Hammond, Louisiana, refusing to participate in Mardi Gras. His heart wasn’t in it. “I think maybe it was just depression about all the stuff that happened,” he said. “All the things we lost. All the disruption. And then you look around and see all the stuff messed up. It just sort of grinds you down.”42
VII
During the long hours when Katrina passed over the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the doctors, nurses, and patients at Hancock Medical Center had watched in utter disbelief as whitecapped water kept rising through the parking lot and up to the hospital doors. Then, like an artillery barrage, in rapid succession they saw ambulance mirrors blow off and the Sun-Herald and Sea Coast Echo vending boxes tossed skyward in a mean gale. Water was slowly starting to creep into the first floor. The parking lot was badly flooded. Frantically, staff members pushed sandbags against the doors and jammed towels into the cracks hoping to stem the flood tide. CEO Hal Leftwich, staying with his team, realized that his home in the Cedar Point neighborhood, virtually facing the bay, was already washed away.43
By 10:30 A.M. on August 29 the water was up to the windowsills. The staff started moving the thirty-three sick patients to the unflooded second floor via the elevator. There were five ICU patients, but luckily nobody was on a ventilator. Outside, the hospital looked like it was an island surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico. Because the hospital was designed with lots of big picture windows on the first floor, those inside must have felt they were in the Aquarium of the Americas looking at the floor of the Gulf. The second floor was the only safe refuge because the third-floor roof was blowing off. The stress of the harrowing situation took a toll on everyone. A quivering woman who had given birth forty-eight hours earlier worried that her baby was going to die. There was a guy who had just had abdominal surgery, a woman with cancer, and a few emphysema patients. Patient Crockett West, who was nonambulatory because he weighed 500 pounds, was the last person transported in the hospital’s elevator before the generators went out. “I swear they just got him out of the elevator and then everything went dark,” Saucier recalled. “We were forced to carry the remaining patients on our backs up the stairwell. We had some patients in the ER. Unfortunately, the wind-driven rain prohibited use of several patient rooms on the second floor, forcing patients to be cared for in the hallway.”44
West was growing increasingly uncomfortable after the electricity went out. His chronic obesity caused health problems galore. Unable to walk around because of back surgery, a bad heart, and painful knees, West was essentially a hostage in his oversize bed. He lived by himself on Longfellow Road in Bay St. Louis, not far from the Jordan River, with a regular home-care aide and housekeeper named Jo Ann Garcia visiting daily. Part of Garcia’s job was to help him diet. “He was starting to show results,” she recalled.45
As Katrina came around, no shelter would admit West because of his weight. No regular ambulance could fit him in back, so Garcia had to persuade the Red Cross to find a special ambulance, which took West to Hancock Medical Center. She was going to ride out Katrina with him, and whomever else she could help. The obese patient’s worst fear was perspiring to death. He simply couldn’t take the heat. As Hancock Medical Center turned into a sweatbox, and doctors and nurses peeled off clothes to stay cool, West was left in his own layers of fat. “It was miserable for Mr. West because it was so hot,” Garcia said. “And I had other people to look after. But he survived.”46
The staff waited and prayed for the hurricane’s eye wall to pass. As the barometric pressure rose and the winds slowed, the seawater would roll back. Wouldn’t it? With flashlights, nurses retrieved undamaged medical supplies, linen, and food from the first floor. A bucket brigade was formed to obtain water to flush toilets as water pumps failed.47 “I was stunned at how the floodwater ruined everything,” Angie Gambino recalled. “I never knew a refrigerator could float. We lost most of the stuff on the first floor. We thought if you put valuable stuff on top of the desk, it’d be safe. Boy, were we wrong. We had fish in the hospital swimming around the first floor. We felt sorry for one so we put it in a coffeepot. Kind of an orange-looking thing and we called it Katrina for days.”48
Over the next few hours other animals emerged looking for safety in the hospital or just blown inside by the surge. The Gulf Coast was abundant with wildlife, and suddenly the staff at Hancock Medical Center saw catfish, crabs, and snakes in their corridors. A large snapping turtle even made it into the emergency room, and an armadillo raced about, clearly panic-stricken, desperately looking for an exit. “The armadillo became our mascot,” Leftwich recalled. “Our engineer ad-libbed that we’d eat him if we had to. Fortunately, we didn’t get that desperate.”49
But Fredro Knight was starting to fear the worst. What if the water rose to the second floor, where all the patients were? “There would have been nowhere for them to go,” he recalled. “All these patients in post-op had just come out of surgery with open wounds. With all that water and sewage, they could have died from massive sepsis. We had a lot of people panicking, employees panicking and passing out. We had one girl who worked in the lab. She had a bad valve, and heart palpitations started. She passed out.”50
Fortunately just as things were starting to crack, the water started receding. It was only calf-deep in the streets when a black Chevy pickup won the distinction of bringing the first of many maimed survivors to the emergency entrance. The driver jumped out, opened the tailgate, and starting pulling a woman in her mideighties out of the truck bed. She was strapped down to a house door functioning as a makeshift stretcher, and she was shivering uncontrollably. The hospital was still in lockdown (no patients in or out). No generator was working, and the staff was in no shape to start admitting patients. Registered nurse Sean Graham told the people in the truck “No”—but that stubborn stance lasted just three or four seconds. Graham traded glances with Facilities Service Director Hank Wheeler; they both knew that lockdown was, in post-Katrina Mississippi, officially over. “Screw it,” Graham said, waving them in. He helped carry the woman inside. She had a badly broken arm. “We all knew from that moment on, it was no sleep for us,” Gambino recalled. Before long David Stepro’s school bus, bringing in the Wavelan
d police officers and the others he’d picked up, arrived. “Adrenaline, compassion and desire to heal fueled the next forty-eight hours,” Janet McQueen, Hancock’s PR person, wrote in her diary, “that is until the first disaster military assistance arrived”51—days later.
The survivors came wandering in from every direction, out of every alleyway and dirt road in the coastal county. As the Houston Chronicle noted, even though the “hospital’s floors were slick with mud and an oatmeal-like mush had fallen from ceiling tiles…the emergency room was in business.”52 The medical facility suffered $20 million in damages, but it kept running on the heroics of its staff members.53
Many of the people who were admitted to Hancock were in shock. Some just wanted to come into the facility for reassurance, to touch a cheek, to look for somebody. Others came seeking sustenance: water or juice, cheese and crackers, an apple or an orange. They were mired in grime, soaked in bilgewater. Some asked the hospital for shoes, gowns, or T-shirts. They offered to buy flashlights and wanted to pay rent for a spot on the hospital floor to rest on. One dazed family showed up with a shopping cart, children jammed in the basket, bedraggled beyond words. Many of the arrivals were, of course, in serious need of medical or hygienic attention. To handle them all, the hospital implemented a triage system. “We had to assess the ones who needed immediate attention,” Sydney Saucier said. “You prioritized them. The ones that need immediate attention, you try to get them lying down. The ones who are partially hurt, you sit them in chairs. And the ones that are basically okay, we left them standing.”
Fredro Knight became known as Mr. Stitch. “It went from three to four stitches to eighty-five stitches [each],” Knight recalled. “I had to repair thighs, legs, deep chest wounds, you name it. These people had horrible, horrible lacerations.” Usually an ER doctor would x-ray a wound or make sure there was no foreign body in it to cause infection. Now, with the generators out and supplies rationed, it was prehistoric medicine—no painkillers or Novocain. The nurses were setting up suture trays in assembly-line fashion. “We were seeing eight to ten patients at a time,” Knight said. “I stitched over ninety people in just a couple days.”
The hospital treated about 800 people during the course of the first two or three days after the storm. Only one person died—a man in his late seventies who had a chronic upper respiratory problem. He had hoped to weather the storm in his son’s house. When it filled up with eight feet of water, and everyone else headed for the attic, the old man kept saying, “I’m too old! I’m too tired! I’m not going to die here!” The son got his dad into the attic and kept poking him with a stick when his head drooped into the floodwater. “No! No! No!” the son pleaded. “Wake up!”
All members of the family survived the storm and then they rushed the father to Hancock at three that afternoon. “At 4:15 he basically died,” Saucier recalled. “But we resuscitated him in the dark, with no electricity. He came back to life.” In fact, the old man even cracked a joke. “Why’d you bring me back?” he asked Saucier. “I’m tired. I’m ready to go.” Saucier had a ready answer: “Because it would ruin my day and it would ruin yours. I’ve already had a bad enough day.” They continued to joke about it over the course of the next day: he had to stay alive for her. “Then at seven at night I went to bed,” Saucier recalled. “We had got him stable, he was fine. I couldn’t sleep so at around eleven I went over and I checked on him. He was fine. But then at 12:05 he had died. I was like, ‘That little stinker, he waited until the next day to die!’ Because he kept on saying, ‘I’m ready’ and I would say, ‘Well, not today. You better wait until tomorrow.’”
A good way to describe Hancock Medical Center was as a MASH unit stuck in a flood zone. Out in the parking lot all of the vehicles—including Saucier’s Durango and Knight’s Land Rover—had become fishbowls. Inside, maintenance staff hung glow sticks in the stairwells and hallways to provide some illumination. By Monday night, supplies were running low. There was no food, oxygen bottles, baby formula, linen—basically nothing but these medical responders’ own wits and determination. Everybody was practically naked, trying not to sweat to death. Clothes were taken off and washed. “Scrubs, jeans, shorts, whatever, off they went,” Saucier later laughed. “It looked like Petticoat Junction. We had our bras hanging out of the third-floor windows. We were dealing with patients and had to be sanitary. We suddenly smelled good and it raised morale.”
One of the most common injuries surprised the doctors and nurses. All over the Gulf Coast, in hospitals like Hancock Medical Center, patients wandered in with the skin ripped off their hands, the flesh lacerated almost to the bone. During the storm, those who were strong enough survived by hanging onto treetops for dear life. The result was that many people had hands swollen and raw like slabs of red meat.
In Biloxi, Mabel Walker spent more than seven hours in a tree with her eighty-year-old uncle, hoping they would avoid what poet Robinson Jeffers called “the seamouth of mortality.” Her hands were cut but not badly. At one point, she spotted a man without legs floating past. The swirling current was too strong for her uncle to manage by himself. Helpless, all she could do was watch in stark horror as the stranger floated off, probably to a watery grave.54
VIII
At twilight on Monday, many coast survivors came outside for a look around. What they saw was like a scene from The Night of the Living Dead, as shocking Katrina stories started coming to light. More than fifty people had been “riding out the storm” in the Quiet Water Apartments in Biloxi when the three-story brick building was inundated by the angry waters of the storm surge. Fifty-five-year-old Joy Schovest barely escaped. “We grabbed a lady and pulled her out the window,” she said, “and then we swam with the current. It was terrifying. You should have seen the cars floating around us. We had to push them away when we were trying to swim.”55 Landon Williams had also been able to dive clear of the Quiet Water Apartments, in company with his grandmother and uncle. Williams had the chance to look back, like a sailor forced to abandon his sinking ship. The walls collapsed and then the contents, including the frantic people, were sucked under the water. “We watched the building disintegrate,” Williams said. As it crumbled, he knew that his neighbors inside were doomed. Thirty of them perished. All he could mutter was “God bless.”56 In the aftermath, neighbors who walked to the site of the Quiet Water Apartments—a complex that used to live up to its name—saw nothing more than a concrete foundation.
Death was everywhere along the Gulf Coast that Monday; it was difficult to avoid encountering floating or crushed corpses. Tonya Walker, a forty-one-year-old maid on one of the oil platforms in the Gulf, had recently moved into a house in Long Beach, Mississippi. She told her story to Renee Montaigne of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition:
Well, I had a bathroom collapse around me. I rode rooftops in a little dinghy and mowed over trees and telephone poles and wires like it was nothing…. I was on the eastern eye wall. My house was indirect—I only live, like right across [Route] 90 from the beach. And I never realized how furious Mother Nature can be and how unforgiving and—I mean, I watched cars and big screen TVs and buildings and everything just flying around me like it was a kid taking toys out of a toy box. Fin[ally]—and we were in the storm for eleven hours before it calmed down enough.
We amazingly seen this little dog. We knew the water was gonna be going back out, and we had to find shelter or we would end up back out into the ocean with it going back out. And there was this little dog that was barking, and we made our way to where this little dog was. And the water had already started receding, and we stood behind a brick wall while the rest of the wind and everything was going on.
And I don’t know if the dog was real or not.
I really don’t because when it was all over with, I couldn’t find the dog anymore. But I think there were a lot of miracles that happened that day. And I will say this, I’ve always heard, you know, that before you die, you see your life pass before your eyes. I believ
e that, because I’d seen it. And I didn’t think I was gonna make it.57
But many did make it. After Mabel Walker climbed down from the oak tree, her legs were bruised ivory and purple. The stagnant water that remained late on Monday changed from muddy to oily, and from no odor to a pungent, vomitlike stench. Walker saw a stray dog approach the fetid water to drink, but it backed away apprehensively, as if it knew the water was undrinkable. Instinct was all that man and animal had left in Katrina’s distorted wake.
The Veglia gang and the family they rescued eventually made it to the Knock-Knock Lounge, which suffered only minor structural damage. As night fell that Monday, they were exhausted. Dumbfounded, they watched as looters broke into the Hancock Bank ATM machine across the street and raided the liquor store next door. They wanted to attack the thieves but decided instead to remain undetected in the darkness. “There was nothing we could do,” Veglia recalled. “We just stayed silent, glad we were safe.”58
A distraught Hardy Jackson, still calling for his dead wife, was saved by a Biloxi neighbor he barely knew. “That man came to my rescue,” Jackson later told the Citizen News. “He waded over to me in the water and yelled, ‘Hardy, hold on, I’m coming.’ He got to me and put his arm around me. Then he took me to his house and gave me dry clothes and tennis shoes and something to drink. That was a little after four o’clock in the afternoon.” Eventually Jackson was evacuated to Palmetto, Georgia, where he was reunited with his children.59
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