The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Signs reading “Turn Back: Hazard Zone” should have been posted every quarter mile along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Where there had been a neighborhood neatly filled with houses, there was attendent despair, only empty space, stripped even of greenery, telephone poles, and crooked water tanks. Salt-tolerant plants, however, were strewn all over, looking like wet spinach. A number of old-growth oaks—trees that had dangled moss for four hundred years, predating the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock—had been toppled. Their cable-thick roots, as pointy as a witch’s fingers, stuck up into the air. Everything smelled like rot, and a gritty film coated every surface exposed to the storm. Locals rubbed their eyes in disbelief. They were ill equipped to digest the unfathomable scope of the catastrophe. They felt deserted on some sort of twisted Gilligan’s Island, unable to communicate with the outside world. On the west side of Gulfport, more than forty tons of chicken lay exposed, rotting in the dogged heat.60 Nearby, hundreds of Mazola corn oil jugs had exploded, turning the street yellow.61 Survivors swapped information (or misinformation) about whether their local McDonald’s or Sav-a-Center or Kentucky Fried Chicken was still standing. Some, though, were too exhausted, too battered, or too stunned to see anything clearly.

  Those on the scene at dusk on Monday had trouble describing the damage in terms of a hurricane. Reporters all coughed up essentially the same statement: Katrina’s magnitude had surpassed anything they knew or could imagine. No Gulf Coast Cassandras or Nostradamuses had anticipated the magnitude of the destruction. It hardly seemed possible. Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham wrote that the barren Gulf Coast beach-fronts were pure “Book of Revelation,” a dismal eighty-mile-long junkyard of block-by-block torments.62 “Right now,” said the director of the Harrison County Emergency Management Agency, Colonel Joe Spraggins, speaking of Gulfport, “downtown is Nagasaki.”63 Another man, Blake Beckham, in D’Iberville, north of Biloxi, used essentially the same metaphor: “It looks like Hiroshima,” he said.64 Governor Haley Barbour also made reference to Hiroshima, after he flew over the coast on Monday evening. A few days later, novelist Richard Ford, a native of Mississippi, wrote a New York Times op-ed piece, refuting the Fat Man and Little Boy comparisons. “‘It’s like Hiroshima,’ a public official said,” Ford wrote. “But no. It’s not like anything. It’s what it is. That’s the hard part. He, with all of us, lacked the words.”65

  But people still looked for words. Some insisted that America had been hit with a tsunami, for no hurricane could have done so much damage. “Katrina wasn’t a hurricane,” Greg Iverson, owner of the Fire Dog Saloon, said. “It was a hungry Cyclops settling scores.”66 Most of the analogies were over the top. The number of Mississippi casualties—approximately 220 Katrina-related deaths—though high by any standard, was not comparable to the number wrought by the atomic attack or other natural disasters. In 1931, nearly four million Chinese died in a flood of the Yellow River. In December 2004, close to 300,000 perished in the South Asian tsunami. But the landscape painted a picture as grim as any disaster in history. Along the Gulf Coast, it looked like a product of the scorched-earth policy initiated by William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War. Not since Atlanta had been burned to the ground had a swath of Dixie looked so wretchedly barren.

  Part of the eeriness of the immediate aftermath of Katrina was the incongruously clear weather along the battered coast. On Biloxi Bay, after the storm, the water was smooth and placid, under what one meteorologist with the National Weather Service called “the prettiest blue skies you’ve ever seen.”67 Jim Butler, a reporter for the Biloxi Sun-Herald, did not have to look the following morning, but just listened in order to hear the difference. “Most noticeable,” he wrote, “for those living through the day before was the seemingly muffled sound. Gulls, mockingbirds, cardinals, passing vehicles—anything making noise seemed muted following the hours and hours of the storm’s roar.”68 Perhaps the hardest chore along the Mississippi Gulf Coast was retrieving the bodies. Calmly walking the streets, men were picking up the dead and carrying them on stretchers, looking for a funeral home or a compound that would take the bodies. Bay St. Louis Police Chief Frank Griffith, for example, had to retrieve a body from the beach; it had just washed ashore. He was a former NOPD homicide detective, so death was nothing new. But bagging hurricane bodies was a different experience. When he saw those blank faces, he thought that but for the grace of God, it could have been him. “One of the hardest moments for me was seeing a mother that drowned,” he recalled. “She was under a mattress with her three dogs lying next to her. They had all died together.”69

  The decision made by Charlie West, the Bay St. Louis vet, to stay at the Ramada Inn in Diamondhead proved wise. The motel was one of the few places in Hancock County not destroyed, suffering only roof damage from a tornado that spun off the hurricane. But Pethaven, Dr. West’s hospital, didn’t fare well—not at all. Water rose to six feet and drowned all the cats, including Dr. West’s beloved gray tabby. Some of the dogs, including his springer spaniel, also drowned, trapped in their pens as water filled their lungs. “I felt so stupid,” Dr. West recalled. “All my life I’ve tried to help animals and now I failed. I lost both Puss and Brandy. It was just awful finding them dead.” One of his pets, however, the bloodhound named Flash, survived; apparently it dog-paddled for hours until the waters receded.70 Tragically, the animal shelter in Hancock County, which was built in a flood zone, didn’t evacuate, and the dogs and cats in its care all drowned.

  The Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport was also demolished, but an adult sea lion survived. He sat in the rubble barking for buckets of slimy water to be dumped on his back. “You can’t just walk away from him,” his fifty-one-year-old savior, Jeanne Robinson, said. “Here’s something trying to live.”71 The all-encompassing fear at the aquarium was that its eight bottlenose dolphins had been killed. Their saltwater holding tanks had been destroyed and none of the dolphins were inside. The dolphins’ owner, Moby Solangi, launched a search for the star attractions, although he assumed they were dead. Solangi was pleasantly surprised when his helicopter mission succeeded. The dolphins were in Mississippi Sound, huddled together around Gulfport’s main pier. “They were really glad to see their trainers,” Solangi recalled. “They recognized the whistles [that were] used to train them. They were jumping out of the water when they heard the whistles.”72

  The fringe of Gulfport Bay was littered with the remnants of casinos that had once been moored there. Scattered slot machines had the surreal look of Dalí’s melted clocks. Bar stools popped out of the mire like mushrooms. Some structures were ripped open and left hollow as caves. Harrah’s Grand Casino was sitting in the middle of Route 90. The President Casino had smashed into a Holiday Inn on the highway.

  Buses were in the water. Boats were on land. Some oil platforms in the Gulf had crumbled like Legolands, although the Navy immediately protected the ones still standing. This was considered a Homeland Security measure—at all costs, the oil supply had to be saved. In Gulfport, a fleet of eighteen-wheelers bearing the yellow-and-blue color scheme of the Dole company had rolled over like fallen dominoes, fruit spilling everywhere.

  In a typical tropical storm or hurricane, buildings located between the beach and Highway 90 might expect some flooding. Katrina pulled ocean water far past 90—for instance, past the Hancock Medical Center—and in some places, water even washed all the way to Interstate 10. Buildings as far as 100 miles north from the Gulf—in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for example—were ravaged by Katrina. Coyt Bailey, a helicopter pilot for WLBT-TV, an NBC affiliate in Jackson, reporting on the Mississippi Gulf Coast region, radioed a numbing message that “everything that was within a quarter mile of the beach has just either been leveled or destroyed or just consumed with water.”73 Houses that were built before the Civil War were severely damaged, many of them reduced to rubble. All the beachside dunes had vanished, along with the tall summer grasses, as if by an eraser wiping a blackboard clean. They had withstood strong winds before, but
never a storm surge like Katrina. From the sky, as WLBT reported, it was obvious that town after town had been largely expunged from the map by some evil magic wand. That evening, all over America, aerial views of the devastation dominated the news broadcasts of every station. Local politicians were among the first to talk to the nation at large on radio and television. “Highway 90 is destroyed,” said A.J. Holloway, the mayor of Biloxi. Sand and stones buried the road up to several feet deep in places.74

  IX

  In Pascagoula, at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Coast, Beach Boulevard had been the crowning glory of a pristine neighborhood that sat on a jut of land between Highway 90 and the sea. Pascagoula was the industrial heart of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, home to the state’s largest employer, Ingalls Shipbuilding. Ever since explorer Hernando de Soto established a relationship with the Pascagoula tribe in the 1540s, the community prided itself on its nickname, Singing River City. The town had a literary history too, with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow penning “The Building of a Ship” during a visit and William Faulkner writing Mosquitos by the beautiful homes along the beach one summer during the 1940s. One of those homes belonged to a favorite son of Mississippi, Republican Senator Trent Lott, the Senate Majority Leader from 1996 to 2002. “It wasn’t a fancy house,” he lamented after the storm. “Just a Creole cottage, but it was built in 1854.”75 In the wake of Katrina, the Lott homestead was nothing but a yard strewn with water-soaked wreckage. “Absolutely nothing was left of our house,” Lott explained. “It was built a good eleven feet above sea level and survived dozens of hurricanes. But Katrina wiped out everything, even the foundation.”76

  It had been a tough couple of years for Lott. When he made racially insensitive remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond’s one-hundredth birthday party in 2002, he was forced to resign as Senate Majority Leader. What really hurt wasn’t that John Kerry and Ted Kennedy attacked his comment—he expected that from his Democratic opposition—but that President Bush hadn’t come to his defense. Even as the painful political misfortune lingered, Lott’s ninety-one-year-old mother died in July 2005, and he was still in mourning as Katrina struck. He had been in Birmingham, promoting his book, Herding Cats: A Life in Politics, when the hurricane made landfall. He wanted desperately to be with his wife, Tricia, who had evacuated to Jackson. As soon as the winds subsided, Lott went to the Mississippi state capital, which—located 192 miles from the coast—suffered only minor damage. Lott had been dealing with the policy ramifications of hurricanes for thirty-seven years, and he immediately launched into action. The main lesson he had learned from Camille, in fact, was “not to panic or yell at people.” With Tricia, he drove to Pascagoula to survey the damage, and then rolled up his shirtsleeves and started helping his friends and neighbors dig out. Pascagoula was one of the Jackson County towns that was decimated. Ocean Springs was yet another. In all, one-third of county residents lost their homes. In Pascagoula, from the beach to the railroad track, everything had been submerged under twenty feet of water: you could see the waterline.

  When the Lotts arrived at their Beach Boulevard house, they were surprised to see their favorite old oak tree, plucked bare of Spanish moss, its thick trunk boldly standing; but everything else gone. Together they walked over to the tree, touched it, and sobbed. For a while they felt sorry for themselves. But their daughter, Tyler Armstrong, calmed them down. “Oh, Dad,” she said, “it’s just things.”77

  Like many along the Mississippi Coast, Lott quite naturally believed that his insurance policy would cover his Pascagoula home—after all, he had hurricane coverage. But his insurance company would not cover the damage from Katrina. State Farm contended that it shouldn’t have to pay for the water damage caused by Katrina. Lott and other residents thought that State Farm was trying to weasel out of its obligation to home owners in order to save billions, splitting the difference between wind damage and storm surge and saying hurricane insurance didn’t include the latter. “I have joined in a lawsuit against my longtime insurance company because it will not honor my policy,” Lott said, “nor those of thousands of other South Mississippians, for coverage against wind damage due to Hurricane Katrina.”78

  But in Harrison County, in the center of the Mississippi coastline, the damage to the coast was even worse. For the week after Katrina, around 13,000 Mississippians remained stranded at 101 Red Cross shelters. Thousands more were gathered at makeshift shelters in schools and churches. The biggest city on the coast was Gulfport, just to the west of Biloxi. In Gulfport, as the fire chief explained, most downtown buildings seemed to have “imploded.”79

  A 40-foot fishing boat in Gulfport was carried hundreds of yards over a marsh to rest between a pair of trees. What was remarkable was that the trees were not scarred; this meant that the boat had been carried inland on a storm surge at least 35 feet high, to be dropped down between the two trees.80 Another boat, a 22-footer, was neatly parked in the drive-through window at a Burger King restaurant in Bay St. Louis. But, perhaps because the citizens of the Mississippi Gulf Coast live with the Gulf as their front yard, there was little panic in the post-Katrina air. Just a lot of blank stares. With determination, some unfazed survivors went looking for boats that worked, knowing it would be days before FEMA or the National Guard would arrive in full force. Mississippians started rescuing victims themselves in fishing skiffs, motorboats, canoes, and even Jet Skis.

  Recognizing the dearth of a FEMA presence by Monday evening, Eddie Favre and Ron Vanney drove their dump truck to Bay St. Louis High School. They were looking for a shelter for the many people made homeless by the storm. Favre had a key and went inside to inspect the hallways and corridors. To his surprise the high school not only hadn’t flooded but had experienced only minor wind damage. Although it didn’t have provisions, it did have a roof, and that was more than could be said about a lot of structures in Hancock County. Because all the bridges leading to Bay St. Louis and Waveland were down, isolating the two towns, the high school was their best bet. “We traveled everywhere we could,” Favre said. “We opened the high school gym as a shelter. It was all spur-of-the-moment. FEMA was essentially nowhere to be found. But we didn’t whine about that or complain. We acted. We commandeered what we could. Wal-Mart, for example, allowed us supplies. Needless to say, in my town there was no police looting. Eventually churches, like Calvary Independent Baptist Church, came in with food and water. Private sector help came pouring in in droves. The loss of human life was hard to take. We’ll never know the exact count. We lost about twenty folks in Bay St. Louis alone.”81

  Bay St. Louis and Waveland and their neighbor across the inlet, Pass Christian, were largely destroyed, the sections of each town closest to the water suffering damage listed officially as catastrophic. Overall, one-fifth of all housing in Hancock County was made uninhabitable by Katrina.82 “What really hurt,” Favre recalled “was seeing Our Lady of the Gulf Catholic Church and Christ Episcopal gutted by God.”83 The amount of debris strewn over the flat, bare, frightened-looking Gulf Coast landscape was estimated at 50 million cubic yards. The garbage that Katrina made of people’s homes, their businesses, their boats, their cars, and their lives would fill 400 football fields to a height of 50 feet.84 Throughout the Gulf Coast states, approximately one million people were without power. Clean running water was almost nonexistent. That was, however, not all that was lost in Mississippi. A way of life went, too. “Generations of Mississippi Coast dwellers enjoyed their piece of paradise with a certain enthusiastic embrace of the good life that is a part of our heritage,” wrote Stan Tiner, executive editor of the Biloxi Sun-Herald, within a day of the hurricane. “The good times have rolled through the decades with a party that never quite ends fueled in more recent times with the glitz of electric lit rows of casinos and a booming economy.” Since 1969, hanging over the “good life” of the coast had been dread of the next big hurricane—“the next Camille,” as Tiner put it. “Monday, August 29, 2005,” he wrote, “our worst fears were realized.”85
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  However terrific the good life of po’-boys and daiquiris and boiled shrimp had been along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, the destruction brought by Katrina made some people want to leave at once. They were ready to move away to Iowa, Wisconsin, or New Mexico—anywhere without a storm surge. They couldn’t go for a while, though, with all the major roads closed. Others lost no time in declaring that the coast would rise again, “better than ever.” They were stuck, too, in the wretched present that forestalled their hopeful future. Everyone along the coast was trapped as Monday night led gently into Tuesday, with nothing to do but to separate the living from the dead (and mend the injured). “We thought the shelters would be needed for a day, maybe two,” said Joe Spraggins, head of Harrison County’s relief effort. “No one knew the catastrophe we would be dealing with. It’s a big problem.”86

  Joe Scarborough of MSNBC was keenly attuned to the devastation along the Gulf Coast. A former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, Scarborough pulled no punches in describing the lack of federal aid reaching the region. Every evening of the coming week, with sledgehammer directness, he shamed FEMA and the Red Cross, among other relief agencies, for the snail’s pace of their rescue and relief process. His emotions were raw, and his diagnosis of the failures was right on the mark. “And here in Biloxi,” he erupted a few days after the storm, “a place where, when we traveled around, we couldn’t find enough federal agents, enough state agents, enough emergency personnel around to even begin to take care of those young children and elderly adults that are still without food, still without water, still without the most basic of necessities. Friends, I have got to tell you, I have been involved in a lot of hurricane relief before, and what I have been seeing these past few days is nothing short of a national disgrace.”87

  Chapter Six