“I looked down to Highway 90 and there was nothing there,” she said. “And it was just so surreal. When you knew all the businesses — and you knew, ‘OK, that was Ruby Tuesday’s, that was the Shell station, that was that.’
“Where’s all the hotels? Where did all that stuff inside of all those buildings go? … Where are the signs? … Where did it go?”
Kelvin Schulz and three of his children were among the desperate that day. But he was in Bay St. Louis, not Biloxi. Katrina’s hurricane-force winds extended 115 miles from the center when it made landfall Aug. 29, 2005, on the Mississippi-Louisiana line.
The Schulzes were on the second floor of a two-story brick building that 36 years earlier had survived what everyone considered the worst hurricane imaginable, Camille.
Hurricane Katrina, they and thousands of others discovered, was even worse. The family swam out of the building as it fell apart, but Schulz’s mother-in-law, Jane Mollere, refused to budge. Water lapping at her calves, the 80-year-old looked at him and simply said, “Kelvin, I’m too old for this.”
A survivor of Camille, the frail woman knew what lay ahead. She was one of 167 South Mississippians who lost their lives to Katrina.
Ten years out, the empty lots stretching from Waveland to Pascagoula, including the one where Mollere perished, attest to Katrina’s strength. She was a hurricane like no other, but should not serve as a barometer of the next storm. And there always will be a next hurricane.
The Gulf Coast has prepared by building a stronger backbone: hardened harbors and public buildings, homes constructed or remodeled to stronger codes, and emergency response communications designed to work through disaster.
“We got flattened,” Haley Barbour, the governor who presided over Katrina recovery, told the Sun Herald. “We actually bore the brunt of the worst natural disaster in American history and after awhile, the American people realized that. And they watched Mississippians, the courage and character of these strong, resilient, self-reliant people. And there’s no doubt in my mind that, when all was said and done in the wake of Katrina, the way our Mississippians responded did more to improve the image of our state than anything that’s happened in my lifetime.”
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The night before Katrina hit, Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove and emergency responders were on Henderson Point, monitoring the water level, which was already rising.
“When I got out of the truck,” Hargrove said, “I took a flashlight and shined it on the ground. And I knew we were going to be in trouble at that point because there were insects moving to the north, towards high ground. And I’ve always been taught by my parents and my grandparents — old folklore — that if the animals and birds and insects start moving and flying away, something bad’s fixing to happen, because they have a second sense about them.
“ … That just reinforced the information we were getting about how bad this was going to be.”
Before Katrina, the Saffir-Simpson scale was the national barometer for hurricanes. Katrina demonstrated the big hole in that scale, which measures only the wind’s strength. Camille was a Category 5, the highest and strongest on the scale. Katrina had been a 5 in the Gulf, but weakened to a Category 3 by landfall.
“In terms of a pure hurricane, it really sets the standard for what’s possible, especially in the Gulf of Mexico,” said Mark Powell, an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on tropical cyclones, and who studied Hurricane Katrina in depth while with the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It showed us that we have to focus on the size of the wind field and not just look at the intensity of the storm.”
“ … Once that water starts piling up inside, that kind of wedge between the Mississippi (River) Delta and Mobile Bay, there’s really no place for it to go, so it will keep piling higher and higher.
“ … The storm you have to worry about in Mississippi is the large storm, the storm that may be moving slowly that can allow water to pile up. You can have a large Category 1 or Category 2 storm that could still pile a lot of water up there, depending on how it’s moving and where it ultimately goes.
“So it’s not necessarily the Category 5 storm that may be the worst. A strong, compact Category 5 storm could do a lot of damage over a small area, but in terms of devastating a whole region, it’s these large storms you really have to look out for, I think.”
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In Bay St. Louis, Charles Harry Gray returned after evacuating to find Katrina had leveled the new home he had fashioned from a 1911 Ford assembly plant. The silk brocade walls and marble floors were demolished, as were his fine antiques.
The Greek Revival home where he previously lived on the beach was gone, too. The donated building downtown, where he had nurtured the Hancock County Historical Society, also was heavily damaged.
“I was standing out front just about to have a stroke,” the 81-year-old Gray said in his patrician Southern accent. He didn’t, of course.
He and his friends combed his scoured lot as if on an archaeological dig, uncovering sterling silver miniatures, china from the 1800s and other treasures. Similar scenes played out across the coast, with residents combing through the rubble for lost possessions.
In those early days after Katrina, more than one person noted, residents had shell-shocked looks on their faces, as if they had been to war.
“It’s certainly the most devastating thing that had ever happened,” Gray said. “When something like that happens — I have seen it many times — you rise to the occasion and worry about it later.
“World War II, women who had never done a thing in their life went to work in the factories. Here, people went out and pulled debris out of the street and hauled it to trash cans and did things they never thought they would do.”
Or, as Haley Barbour put it, “We hitched up our britches and went to work.”
In the weeks after the storm, sunflowers bloomed in the ruins as if to demonstrate rebirth had begun. Volunteers from all parts of the country arrived in waves, returning again and again to help rebuild.
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A crucial early step in recovery was convincing the state Legislature to allow casinos to rebuild on land. Once legislation was approved, the coast appeared to be on a roll. Casinos rebuilt and Hard Rock Biloxi opened two years past its scheduled opening date, which coincided with the hurricane.
Harrah’s Entertainment and Jimmy Buffett partnered on a planned $1 billion investment in Margaritaville Casino Biloxi on the beach. But the recession hit. Construction at Margaritaville slowed in 2008, then stopped altogether.
Availability and affordability of wind insurance was a growing problem, with major insurance carriers moving off the beach. The Federal Emergency Management Agency also expanded special flood-hazard areas, requiring higher elevations for structures that had to be rebuilt.
Then the BP oil catastrophe erupted in the spring of 2010 and lingered through tourist season. The Mississippi Coast and its barrier islands were awash in tar balls, but were spared from most of the oil that gushed from the broken Macondo well in the Gulf.
“What’s not done yet is the economic recovery,” said community leader Gerald Blessey, who directed housing recovery. “Despite some yeoman efforts, here we are 10 years later and, for instance, Harrison County is not back to pre-Katrina jobs, we’re not back to pre-Katrina hotel rooms.
“On the other hand, you can’t blame it all on Katrina because we were doing pretty good in economic recovery until the recession, and then on top of that, we get hit with the BP oil spill, so it had this sort of triple whammy economically, especially in the tourism industry, but also with other businesses.”
Blessey said creative thinking will be needed to get the economy moving again. He thinks the focus should be on what he refers to as four legs of the stool: education, economic development, environmental sustainability and quality of life.
“I think you have to look at a community as an ecosystem,” he said. “It’s not just one thing.
“We have a beautiful area here and the quality of life, traditionally, has been great. If you have that kind of stool and any one of those legs is weaker than the other and begins to collapse, the whole thing collapses.”
Mississippi will receive $2.17 billion in compensation for the BP catastrophe, with about $1.5 billion still to be spent.
Blessey, a Biloxi native and former mayor, said, “We need to see that as a holistic thing and really go for liftoff.”
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Katrina altered the landscape and lives. Families that lost homes near the waterfront had to decide, would they rebuild there, or move north? Couples were sometimes torn, with one wanting to leave the waterfront and the other longing to stay.
The population has shifted north, according to the U.S. Census. In Harrison County, the population has finally surpassed pre-Katrina levels, but four cities along its coastline have fewer residents than they did before the storm. Hancock County’s population is still below pre-Katrina levels, while Jackson County’s population has rebounded.
Coast residents delight in seeing each new house or business filling gaps along the beach highway. Familiar landmarks have returned with new looks. There’s the trademark Pepto-Bismol pink Sharkheads in Biloxi, a block long with its gaping shark’s mouth at the entrance.
More recently, Fun Time USA, a Gulfport theme park, announced plans to rebuild.
Biloxi has a new minor league baseball stadium, subsidized with BP cleanup funds.
Residents whose homes were lost or damaged are finally feeling like they have resettled to a new normal.
Michael Kovacevich, who lives on East Biloxi’s peninsula, rebuilt his mother’s house next door and his own home.
When the storm started, he had nine people in his house. By the time it ended, there were closer to 30.
“People say, ‘You’re a hero,’” he said. “No. You’re sitting on a porch and you’re looking at little kids across the street going underwater, you go get them, you know? That’s the thing to do. The water’s not over your head yet, you can go get them early.
“It’s when we got to the point where everybody was here, we were in uncharted waters. We had no clue what to do next. We were as high as we could go. There’s no more higher.”
Kovacevich’s neighborhood is mostly vacant lots, but he’s happy to be there nonetheless. The storm has changed his outlook.
“It was rough and it changed a lot of lives,” he said. “A lot of difference in the way you live, too. Before the storm, I had a lot of antiques and I would go to auctions.
“That don’t mean nothing anymore, all that. You can forget all those antiques and all the fancy stuff and just live comfortable. Enjoy life.”
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©2015 The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)
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