Those in the audience of the Katrina +10 presentation at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art nodded as they remembered with the mayors how it was in the days after the storm and laughed at some of their stories.
Moderator Joe Spraggins had just retired as a brigadier general in the Air Force and said he asked the Lord, "I want to have a challenge in my next career."
His first day on the job as the head of emergency operations for Harrison County was Aug. 29, 2005 -- the day Katrina hit.
"I never dreamed it would be the way it was," said Spraggins, who will never forget the sight of downtown Gulfport after Katrina or people like Mike Matthews, who drove to Mobile and delivered fuel an hour before they would have run out at Gulfport Memorial Hospital "on a handshake that we would pay him back," Spraggins said. "That's an unsung hero."
Ocean Springs Mayor Connie Moran said, "It was the faith-based organizations that came first and they were the last to leave." Ocean Springs has the highest downtown on the coast and she said, "Our downtown wasn't devastated." the city became a center for deliveries from all over the country.
Pass Christian Mayor Chipper McDermott -- who took over after newly elected mayor Billy McDonald left the area -- said 75 percent of his town lived south of the railroad tracks and little remained when Katrina was done. It took a year to haul off 1.5 million cubic yards of debris. "That was a dark, dark time," he said.
Long Beach Mayor Billy Skellie said he felt the responsibility to take care of the citizens, but said if leaders focused on the devastation, they would not have been effective.
He climbed atop a huge debris pile and looked at everything flattened and gone.
"We had no more downtown," he said. He looked at the barren land and thought, "We'll build it back better than the first time."
Skellie said he can't imagine the recovery with the volunteers, church organizations and companies that helped and footed the bill.
"People from all over the country supported us. Thank God for Americans," he said.
Brent Warr, who was the new mayor of Gulfport, got to City Hall by driving through yards and managed to open the front door of the building, "100 years old that year," to find it full of mud.
On the list of things to get from Wal-Mart, even if they had to break in, were gloves, disinfectants and garbage bags with the idea of cleaning up the chicken that had washed ashore from the port and he soon learned was rotting all over town.
At the Emergency Operations Center staff had a choice of chicken or hamburgers, Spraggins said.
"After about the third day, chicken was totally out of the question," he said.
Contractors were hired to clean up the chicken that had been shrink wrapped for shipment and sprinkle lyme as a disinfectant.
"That's how we found the bacon," said Warr. "It was under the chicken and in trees, sewers and houses
"It took nearly a year before we got those two bio hazards out."
There were many other emergency situations, like looters that he said had overtaken everything south of the railroad tracks and drug addicts who circled the hospital, threatening to break in, and he said the intensity of the situation continued every day for the mayors for nearly three years.
———
©2015 The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)
Visit The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.) at www.sunherald.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
