Ten years ago today ...

Then you never saw Pass Christian, Mississippi.

pass christian katrina - Google Search

 

And the former mayor gets to celebrate the anniversary with his cellmates.

 

I drove down to Venice and back about 11 months after Katrina and the devastation in south Plaquemines was still complete without even a sniff of rebuilding. I took a bunch of photos and I'll post them.

 

There are still huge swaths of undeveloped beachfront property on the west side of Gulfport. The owners have either decided they don't want to rebuild or the homeowners insurance is now so expensive they cannot afford to do so.

 

No doubt. I remember watching CNN after I got home from work, and Anderson Cooper was talking live via phone to a nurse in NO when she told him the levee had breached and they were evacuating patients. I'll never forget the look on his face like he didn't really believe what she had just told him. And he asked her to repeat it. It was definitely a holy shit moment.

 

The run up to the storm felt ominous. The only other time I can remember them evacuating New Orleans was for Georges in 1998 (a storm that took a similar track as this one, veering toward Mississippi at the last minute), so for them to call for an evacuation and institute the doomsday plans that they'd put in place after Georges was unsettling to say the least.
The word "contraflow" got introduced to the Gulf Coast lexicon. At first it was a punchline, then it was a four-letter word once people actually hit the road. There were reports of it taking 12 hours to get to Jackson, Mississippi, which is normally about a 3 1/2-hour trip. The radio station WWL was giving directions on where to get on and off the interstates.

I lived about 200 miles inland and spent the day of the storm in my apartment watching shingles get blown off the roof and through the courtyard. It was still a hurricane when it came through here. The power went out around 2 p.m., but I was lucky enough to live near a substation and fire station so it was back on the next day. Across town, we put the paper out by generator for about three days. My then-fianceé (now wife) lived about 50 miles away and was without power for five days.
I'd gotten gas that morning, which turned out to be an incredibly shrewd move. After the storm, with power out and infrastructure destroyed almost as far inland as we were, there was a run on gas -- for the stations that had power. Most didn't for a week or two afterward. People were coming up from South Mississippi and Louisiana and filling 200-gallon tanks on trailers to take back home. If you needed gas, you had to wait in lines up to six hours long and hope there was still some in the tanks (yours and the gas station's) when you got there. There were fistfights, people fighting over spots in line, people following tankers, you name it.
I kept my tank filled as much as I could so I could jump on the short lines. I lived across the street from a gas station and, that Friday night, heard a tanker pull up around 1 a.m. The station was closed, so it was sitting there waiting for it to open in the morning. Even though I still had about three-quarters of a tank, I stayed up all night and drove across the street at 5 a.m. to fill up. Had to bargain with the owner, who wasn't going to sell me any when I off-handedly remarked that I was just topping off and probably didn't need more than $20 he was limiting people to.
I'll always remember that gas was $2.53 a gallon the day of the storm, because it stayed there the rest of the year. While prices spiked everywhere else, I guess the price gouging laws kept it where it was when the state of emergency was declared.
Driving to my fianceé's house was also weird. It's normally a pretty well-lit interstate, but with so many places without power it was just dark and calm. You could see one area that had power from about 20 miles away because the lights lit up the sky.
There were also the gypsies -- cars with Louisiana and South Mississippi tags just wandering the highways of central and North Mississippi looking for a place to rest. Hotels had filled up, they had no place to go, so they just ... drove. You'd see them heading west or north and know there was nowhere for them to go, and just hoped they found something before the gas ran out.

After the storm was, of course, chaos. Listening to WWL was like listening to dispatches from the apocalypse. Reports of people looting, other reports of where people had supplies and were giving them away, just the general chaos of an information vacuum. Parish presidents were calling in or coming to the station to ask for things or just to vent. The outrage over nothing being done was intense. It was a day or two before the power and TV situation got back to normal where I was, so I'm not sure what happened in the first 24 to 36 hours afterward. It felt like it was three or four days, though, before there was any sense of order being restored.
People have compared and contrasted the Mississippi and Louisiana responses, and there's always one thing that gets overlooked that I think was incredibly important. While New Orleans and Louisiana slipped into relative anarchy for a few days, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour did a tremendous job of tamping down the type of wild rumors that often spread in that environment. For a week or two after the storm he had a 5 p.m. press conference every day in which he put out necessary information, but also addressed whatever the crazy rumor of the day was -- that martial law was about to be declared, that the state was out of gas, whatever. It was a tremendous display of honesty from our state's leader and I think it went a long way toward people tackling the problems instead of panicking.

After about two weeks things, at least in our area, started to get back to normal. The lights came back on, the fuel supply became more plentiful, the general uncertainty of everything receded. Obviously it wasn't like that everywhere.

 

The only thing like that I've ever witnessed, in person, was the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew when I spent a day helping unload supplies in the Homestead-Florida City area. That was 100 percent wind damage instead of flooding, and all you could see on the horizon was flattened homes.

 

I remember driving through that too, both about four months after and some years afterward. There were still many trees that were permanently bent over by the wind and simply growing to that pattern. When I went through New Orleans I think it was how few electric lights were lit in a modern American city that really made it hit home for me. The city was still about 3/4 blacked out, perhaps more.

 

Fixed it for you

We went to the Mississippi Coast about a year after Katrina for a work thing, most of which entailed driving very slowly around Bay St. Louis. I still remember seeing the dead trees several blocks inland (the salt water from the storm surge had killed them) and huge piles of debris on random lots.
It was a long time before we visited New Orleans again, maybe four or five years. We'd gone about six weeks before Katrina and almost had to cancel that trip because of another approaching hurricane. Going back, even once the city became functional again, was like seeing a sick family member.