Katrina, 20 years on: Who can you turn to when everything falls apart?
On Aug. 29, 2005, Tricia Bliler came out the front door of her apartment building in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi to see a police car washed up like driftwood against the building across the street. It was the first of many ominous signs.
By then, the winds and surge of Hurricane Katrina had passed. Now Bliler and thousands of others along the Mississippi Gulf Coast had to learn how to survive amid the wreckage of their former world.
Bay St. Louis was at the epicenter of Katrina’s 145 mph winds and almost 28-foot storm surge – the highest in recorded U.S. history, to date, inundating areas as far as 12 miles inland. As the wind howled and the Gulf of Mexico flooded into Bliler’s apartment, she had perched on her kitchen counter, watching the clock. The water rose for half an hour, remained for an hour or so, then fell for the next half hour. Once the flood tide receded, she set off walking the ruined streets to see how bad things were and to figure out what to do. The first thing she saw was the disabled police car.
Initially, Bliler saw no other people, only wrecked houses, fallen trees, overturned boats and downed power lines. Eventually, she passed the police car a second time and noticed that someone had since removed one of its wheels. The next time she came upon it, another wheel was missing, then another. By the time she got back to her apartment all four had disappeared. She had no idea who took the wheels or why, nor how long she had wandered the streets. She wasn’t sure why, after nightfall, she felt compelled to hide behind a tree from the probing beam of a helicopter. Everything was confusing and surreal. At one point she saw a man wandering alone in a tuxedo; she assumed he had lost everything and salvaged some dry clothes from the wrecked formalwear store nearby.
This much was painfully clear: The storm had taken away everything that people routinely relied upon – secure shelter, electricity, running water, food, medical supplies, transportation, police protection and every other government service. Faced with this, Bliler would soon undergo a post-Katrina transformation, from a waitress at the now-vanished Good Life bar to the leader of the closest anyone in contemporary America is likely to get to a post-apocalyptic tribe.
Bliler had not evacuated before the storm because her closest friends did not want to leave. As she would tell me a decade later, around the 10th anniversary of the storm, “George wanted to stay and Wanda didn’t want to leave him and Loretta wanted to stay because Wanda was staying,” and so on. The group spent the first night after the storm passed in Bliler’s sodden apartment, but the surge water was contaminated by chemicals, sewage and other pathogens, and if they remained they would almost certainly have gotten sick. Within days, giant, fantastically colored fungi would be sprouting from the interior walls of houses. So, Bliler and her friends set off in search of a dry place and eventually climbed through a broken window into the 2nd Street Elementary School, which was situated on slightly higher ground and had only flooded a few inches deep. “I looked at it like the biggest camping trip ever,” she recalled. “It was in for a penny, in for a pound.”
As she and her friends deliberated what to do next, the local fire chief showed up at the school on foot. The city’s fire stations and emergency-response vehicles had been destroyed or rendered inoperable by the storm, and he asked the group who was in charge. “No one answered,” Bliler said. “They’re all looking at me. I said, ‘Okay,’ and I stepped forward and said, ‘I am.’”
Though she did not know it at the time, a similar scenario was playing out across the Bay of St. Louis, beyond the collapsed highway and railroad bridges, in the community of DeLisle. There, Martha Murphy, who was from a very different background, was embarking upon her own unplanned role as leader of a dystopian tribe. As Murphy later put it, “I felt like people were being assigned roles in a play, and I wasn’t there when they were doing that. And I just got this role.”
Global media attention was largely focused on nearby New Orleans, where the levees had been breached, flooding much of the city and drowning more than a thousand people. Most Americans were only peripherally aware of the cataclysm that had occurred—and was still occurring—along the low-lying Mississippi coast, where the majority of the buildings along the beachfront were obliterated by wind and waves. Survivors went for days without even rudimentary services or supplies, unable to communicate with the outside world as they searched for loved ones and possessions and slept fitfully at night on porches, atop sodden mattresses in yards, in ruined cars, on the beach. The smell of death and decay permeated the humid air. I spent my first night in Bay St. Louis on a damp mattress on a friend’s dank, slippery patio.
I arrived a few days after the storm, slowly navigating my four-wheel-drive pickup along streets partially blocked by wrecked sailboats and overturned cars intertwined with downed power lines. Dislodged buildings straddled violently twisted railroad tracks. Bodies were still being recovered from the wreckage and the beach. Among the few old beachfront mansions that were still standing, one groaned in slow collapse as its timbers gave way, accompanied by the occasional shattering of dishes and glass inside. Dogs wandered the beaches and streets in search of missing owners.
I had been advised to bring my own gasoline in five-gallon containers and as many cases of water as I could find, and to hide it all under a tarp in the back of my truck. By then a National Guard staging area had been set up in the parking lot of a wrecked shopping center. FEMA and the Red Cross workers also congregated there, in spic-and-span uniforms. When I asked who was in charge, more than one person directed me to Tricia Bliler at the 2nd Street School. I sensed an undercurrent, a reluctance to endorse her role, yet she was the closest anyone had to a point of contact. That was how we met.
In the days after Bliler and her friends broke into the school, she found herself assuming more and more authority and was now running a full-scale shelter and clearinghouse for supplies that were daily arriving from across the country. Who cared if it was unauthorized? Apparently the authorities would, once they arrived. The federal response to the disaster was racked with failures, but its representatives took a guarded and eventually an antagonistic approach to Bliler and her relief operation. It was the same for Murphy across the bay.
In the before times, Bliler had eked out a living waiting tables, rarely venturing beyond four or five square blocks of the Old Town neighborhood of Bay St. Louis, a town of about 8,000 an hour’s drive east of New Orleans. On the second day, she and her friends had found a barbecue grill and started cooking food from her refrigerator that would otherwise have spoiled. As other survivors emerged from their houses, they had seen her cooking outside the school, realized that they, too, had food that was going to spoil, and added theirs to the mix. Then the fire chief showed up. He asked if she had heard about the chaos in New Orleans. She told him she had, on her battery-powered radio. He said the situation was likely to get worse for everyone and advised her to make use of the stockpiles of food in the school cafeteria—which was then still locked up—for her rapidly expanding group of refugees.
So, Bliler’s group broke into the cafeteria and she cooked on the wood-fired grill well into the night. “People kept coming. It was like the fishes and the loaves,” she recalled. “A boy came who hadn’t had any food, and when I gave him something he cried. And it just went from there. It just kept getting bigger.” She went through a lone bus parked outside the school and retrieved the first aid kits that she knew were kept under the seats, which was a good thing because afterward someone hot-wired and stole the bus. “The next day, ambulances started dropping people off at the school,” she said. “It just started happening on its own. I remember one day, around dark-thirty, I had this feeling like I was outside my body, watching everything. I had the feeling that everything that’s ever happened to me, all the jobs that didn’t work out, all the triples and doubles and hard work and the babysitting drunks, all the failed relationships, was preparing me for this. It was building up to this.”
A week later, she was overseeing the cooking of 300 meals a day for a growing tribe of storm victims who had lost everything. At one point, Bliler noticed a girl signing in to a register that she had set up and recognized her as the daughter of the cook at the Good Life bar. “I said, ‘Tell him to get his ass down here,’ and she did, and he came and brought another cook and Bonnie, another waitress there.”
By the time I arrived at the 2nd Street School, the shelter’s frenzied volunteers were scrambling to cook and serve meals and to unload truckloads of donated items from across the United States. A recently-arrived Red Cross worker hovering nearby with a notepad asked Bliler somewhat officiously how many meals she was serving. Bliler had no time to talk with her and responded, “I’ve got three cooks. Talk to Andy. He’s the one with the less stress.” Then she was on to something else. Behind her, stacked in the school cafeteria, were cases of Germ-X disinfectant soap, disposable diapers, bottled water and canned food, all free for the taking. The day was suffocatingly hot and humid, indoors and out. The only source of electricity was one small generator, and everyone was soaked with sweat.
I watched as a volunteer spoke to Bliler and she immediately sat down at a police radio that she had somehow acquired and sent out a call for an ambulance. “I’ve got a diabetic who hasn’t had insulin since the hurricane and he needs to go to the hospital,” she said into the mouthpiece. There was no response. She repeated the request. Still no reply. She looked up at the group standing nearby: a sunburned National Guardsman, two Red Cross workers and a FEMA representative in spotless agency logo shirts, and me, standing beside them with my pen and pad. “Does anybody have a vehicle?” she asked. “We’ve got to get this guy to the hospital.”
Everyone waited for someone else to respond.
“I need a vehicle to take this guy to the hospital,” she repeated.
Finally, there was nothing to do but volunteer. A minute later the diabetic and I were driving in my truck to a MASH unit on the grounds of the ruined hospital. A representative of a bureaucratic government agency would have needed clearance before transporting a sick or injured person to a hospital. With Bliler, things worked differently. As one volunteer later said, “All you have to do is watch Tricia for five minutes, and if she asks you to do something, by God, you do it.”
Across the bay, Martha Murphy was operating a similar ad hoc operation. Murphy’s background and lifestyle were far different from Bliler’s – she was a wealthy, well-connected heiress to an El Dorado, Arkansas oil business whose family had maintained summer homes in the Henderson Point community of Pass Christian, just south of DeLisle. Yet, when we later met, and I began telling her about Bliler finding the barbecue grill, she interrupted to finish the sentence: “And then she was cooking for everyone.” She knew because the same thing had happened to her.
Murphy had evacuated before the storm and returned late the night after bearing donated supplies. Her family’s long-time homes in Henderson Point had been reduced to concrete slabs, and in the darkness of a wrecked church fellowship hall she found a group of frightened, soaked survivors, most of whom had been compelled to swim out of inundated buildings the day before. The church itself was destroyed.
“Everyone was hot, wet,” Murphy recalled. “They had only dim lights because the batteries were running out. I had brought batteries and water. There was a man who was having to ration his oxygen. I had oxygen in the car.” Because no one was in charge in DeLisle and there was no official disaster center, she found herself taking control. “You want to think there’s somebody behind the curtain, making sure everything works,” she said. “We all need help. But in this case, I’m elected, because my clothes are dry.”
Murphy and her friends likewise broke into the cafeteria of a local school — the only structure still standing — and set up a temporary relief base. Like Bliler, she found a grill and started cooking. Also like Bliler, she soon found herself marshaling resources and taking unilateral action. At one point, she felled a tree with her chainsaw to make space for a relief helicopter to land, then watched in disbelief as aid workers tossed out supplies while a guard held a gun on the storm victims to keep them at bay.
On one of the rare occasions when she was able to get cell service, Murphy recalled, she enlisted the help of friends and family to send equipment to set up water wells. They sent 17 trucks and set up three wells. Murphy was living out of her car, and when she was able to communicate with volunteers who were headed her way, she told them, “You need to think of going on a hunting trip with no lodge. We have nothing. Bring everything. We’ve got to step forward to reach the Stone Age. We’re primitive people hoping for fire. We’re not even hunter-gatherers yet.”
Murphy helped funnel supplies and financial assistance to the storm victims who showed up at the DeLisle school, including contributions from author John Grisham and his wife, Renee, who arrived within days of the storm. By the second weekend, donated medical supplies began to arrive, and a stranger from Michigan asked how he could help. Murphy asked, “What do you do in the other world?” and he told her he was a surgeon. “He said, ‘You’ve got $5 million worth of medical supplies here. I can help.’” Soon injured victims were undergoing surgery on the cafeteria table.
“One guy left me with an ice chest of full of tetanus syringes,” Murphy said. “There was no agency there, so he just gave them to us. I said, ‘I’ve never given anyone a tetanus shot,’ and he said, ‘You’ll figure it out.’” Though she found a nurse to help, Murphy also ended up administering the shots. “Basically, we operated a medical clinic without liability,” she recalled a decade after the storm. At one point she walked to the wrecked county health-department building and left a note in a baggy, duct taped to a door, explaining that she was operating a clinic without a license and needed help. They got word to her to keep at it. Eventually, the University of Alabama Medical School sent people to assist her.
“The administrative structures no long existed,” Murphy said. “You had to have the ability to adjust. One day you’ve got this fully developed millennial life, and the next day, nothing. You had to rethink everything about your existence. Our lives were ordered before. Then it was utter chaos. Trying to make sense of the chaos was comforting. Organizing things. A sense of order and dignity was important.”
Murphy found that she was oddly prepared to assume a leadership role. What she was unprepared for was the official reaction. She recalled seeing a relief helicopter hovering and shining its lights on the primitive DeLisle encampment, then, “They came to arrest me the next day.”
When the Homeland Security agents arrived, Murphy was standing outside the school, dressed in dirty, sweat-stained clothes. By then, her group had accumulated so many supplies, “the theory was that either we were profiteering or looting.” The agents had heard that she was storing gasoline, which was scarce. Her family had sent more than 1,500 gallons in 50-gallon drums, which she had stashed down long driveways on properties owned by trusted friends, disguised with the words “nonpotable water” painted on the sides. When the agents demanded to know the location of her gas stash, Murphy refused to say, so they bound her hands in snap-tie cuffs and prepared to take her away. Then the local police chief intervened. His headquarters and vehicles had been destroyed by the storm and Murphy had been sharing her fuel supply with him. So, she was released, but said she lost count of the number of times the agents returned, threatening to arrest her. “I learned so much about the mechanics of prejudice,” she said. “The people who had the least were the most sharing, but they [the authorities] thought we were savages because we didn’t have clean clothes.”
When Murphy and I talked again recently, as the 20th anniversary of the storm neared, she reiterated that view. “We, as humans, jump to conclusions about other humans, based on their circumstances,” she said. “And we use that to attribute motives. Society immediately stigmatizes people with less access to resources. I had grown up in the lap of privilege and was not used to being treated like that. It was so stark to me.” Still, she was prepared for that challenge, too. She had grown up being taught that “having access to resources was a circumstance, not an attribute,” she said. No one was better than anyone else because they had money. In the aftermath of Katrina, “What was of value shifted immediately,” she said. “The most valuable things were water, fuel and food. Currency meant nothing.”
Across the Mississippi coast, thousands of others faced the same deprivation and uncertainty, and not all of them had a Tricia Bliler or Martha Murphy to help. Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,400 people across the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, caused $125 billion in damages, and destroyed or severely damaged more than 65,000 homes in Mississippi alone, including hundreds of structures listed in the National Register of Historic Places that had survived countless previous storms, some for as long as two centuries. In Mississippi, 238 people died and 67 were listed as missing. The storm also challenged long-held assumptions about the federal government coming to the aid of a besieged public – a revelation of even greater gravity today, as the president proposes dismantling FEMA and as climate change promises more and worse storms. “Katrina” was retired from the roster of hurricane names due to its devastating impact, yet it will inevitably be supplanted as the benchmark storm by an even worse one in the future.
With so much loss all around, with bodies being pulled from the wreckage up and down the war zone that the Gulf Coast had become, it took a while for people to recognize other profound losses, including art collections valued at tens of millions of dollars, discharged upon the surge and in most cases never found, and historic streetscapes that had set the Mississippi coast apart from beachfront communities elsewhere defined by t-shirt shops and fake-stucco condos. One survivor recalled watching from his flooded house as rafts of debris streamed past, including balustrades from historic Grasslawn, which told him the antebellum home was in the process of being destroyed, which was true, though an exact replica has since been rebuilt on the site. The man’s home remained standing but was filled with surging water and he eventually swam out and climbed into a tree. When I asked why, he said, “I got tired of getting beat up by my furniture.”
The surge of Katrina was not, as might be imagined, a giant tidal wave that struck the coast, then carried the resulting wreckage out to sea. It mounted steadily, bounding higher until it overtook the sea wall that lines much of the beachfront, advancing further with each crashing wave to slosh across streets and highways before roaring in a whitewater torrent over embankments, into buildings, back out, and in again. The tide reached the third floor of some structures, crowned by breaking, wind-driven waves, the force of which grew exponentially when coupled with the increasing weight of the water. Foundations were undermined, walls yielded to the stress, and rafts of wreckage, vehicles, and boats collected and acted as battering rams. Once the eye passed, the water began to fall and the flow reversed, but not uniformly, because the winds shifted and the obstacles moved. Debris was scattered everywhere.
Among the destroyed architectural landmarks were the Pleasant Reed House, built by a freed slave, which was being converted to an African American museum, and stately Tullis-Toledano Manor, considered by many to have been the best example of Gulf Coast vernacular architecture, which was flattened by an unmoored casino barge. Among the lost art were works by Rembrandt and Picasso and other renowned artists, including most of the original paintings of the late Ocean Springs artist Walter Anderson, which were kept in a concrete vault elevated above the surge height of Hurricane Camille, the previous benchmark storm, that was inundated after wave-driven debris breached its steel door. A Bay St. Louis man who lost his home and most of his personal art collection said it was a major tragedy for him, but noted that it paled in comparison with the drowning of a woman who was trying to reach his roof with her husband and children, only to see the structure collapse before their eyes.
Two decades after the storm, Bay St. Louis is booming and most of the Mississippi coast has been rebuilt, though insurance costs are astronomical and, after Katrina, many insurers rejected homeowners’ claims, saying the losses were the result of flooding, which was not covered, though the buildings were not in designated flood zones. Meanwhile, sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico are rising at one of the fastest rates in the world -- three times the global average. Redevelopment is in many ways both the good and the bad news.
As anyone who endured Katrina knows, it is possible to survive without electricity or other infrastructure, and with limited food and medicine, but not without drinking water, particularly with temperatures in the nineties in the days after Katrina. To overcome that, Bliler, like Murphy, relied on outsiders. In Bliler’s case, that meant setting up a water purification system brought by a volunteer group from Oxford, Mississippi. She also set up a sign-in area where survivors logged their names and indicated where they had been during the storm and where they were going. “I was thinking people would be trying to find people,” she said. “I was also thinking the Red Cross will be here soon and I’ll be out of here. It didn’t work out that way.”
When trucks began arriving with supplies donated by church groups, businesses and other volunteers, the drivers inevitably found their way to the 2nd Street School. Bliler said National Guardsmen helped her clean out the building but the Red Cross declined to assist because the shelter was unauthorized. At one point, she said, she needed a break and handed the keys to the school to a Red Cross representative, but the representative immediately threw them back at her. When FEMA personnel showed up, she recalled, they were using poorly detailed tourist maps to organize their response. “So, I said, ‘You can get better maps in the back of a phone book,’ and I found some and tore the maps out and gave them to them.”
Bliler didn’t blame the government agents. “They were in just as much shock as we were,” she said. Still, she was dismayed when the FEMA and Red Cross workers suddenly departed without warning or explanation, after which she continued on her own.
For the next two months, Bliler provided cots for people who had lost their homes and adopted stray pets whose owners had vanished. She stockpiled and distributed clothes, medicine and other staples, gave whatever guidance she could to families looking for help getting their kids back in school, somewhere, and offered every kind of aid and comfort she could muster. But eventually, school officials asked her to leave and put a church group in charge.
Bliler had been spending her nights at the improvised shelter, and when she returned to her apartment she found all her possessions piled on the curb. The landlord was preparing to renovate the building and evicted all the tenants without notice, she said. A local policeman stood guard and refused to let Bliler retrieve anything. After she told him she needed important papers, he told her that he got off work at 2 a.m. and if she came back after that, she could get them. “So, at 2 a.m., I drove up and he drove away, and I got what was left.” Remarkably, after the shelter closed down, Bliler was deemed ineligible for disaster aid. She managed to get a waitressing job in another city, but when people asked what she had done during the storm she lied and said she had evacuated. She didn’t want to go over it all. A soldier who had been helping at the school had warned her that there could be negative repercussions for her actions. “He said once the money started coming in, people would be saying money got stolen, there’d be name-calling. ‘I don’t want you to be here anymore.’” After that, she said, “I kind of went underground.”
In the long aftermath of the storm, two of Bliler’s friends who helped at the 2nd Street School died, and she watched a lot of people fall apart. “The police were run ragged,” she said. “So many drugs, divorces, suicides.” When we talked for an article on the 10th anniversary of the storm, she was back waiting tables in Bay St. Louis and staying with a friend, looking for a place of her own. After the passage of another decade my attempts to reach her failed, though she appeared to be still living in the vicinity of Bay St. Louis.
Murphy, for her part, voluntarily shut down her DeLisle relief center after three months. By then, she said, the official response was well underway. “There were enough cans of corn. It was time to rebuild.” She began working with a nonprofit, Hope Enterprise Corporation, to build houses for lower-income storm victims.
After living in a tent for three months and a FEMA trailer for a little more than a year, Murphy said she was surprised by how easy it was to get over losing material things, and that despite her difficulties with some of the authorities, she came away with an overriding belief that most people are good. Two decades later, that belief endured.
As an example, Murphy recounted how, on the day after Katrina, she had rented an SUV and stopped at a Walmart in Baton Rouge to load up two vehicles with supplies. She had a good idea of what would be needed after having observed the response to the previous benchmark storm, Camille, when she was a teenager in 1969. As she hurried through the Walmart loading bulk supplies, a pediatric nurse, a stranger, asked what she was doing, then offered to take on the task of selecting items for children. “She said, ‘I’ve got this.’ Then someone else stepped up and said I’ll do this part. Everyone around us stopped shopping to help.” When it came time to check out, “No one would let us pay,” Murphy said. “Everyone around us in the store was holding up their credit cards, and the Walmart employees said, ‘No, this is on us.’ I felt like I’d entered a magic bubble.”
Later in the week, donated supplies began to arrive at the DeLisle encampment from all over the world. “We got an 18-wheeler load of clothes from Pakistan — Pakistan!” Murphy recalled. “The clothes were weird but they were fresh and clean.”
In some cases, 18-wheeler loads of donated clothes were carelessly offloaded on the side of the road, in which case Murphy and company, though initially disheartened, found solace in carefully sorting and folding them.
Despite the obliteration of her family’s homes in Henderson Point, Murphy is, after 20 years, finally preparing to rebuild. “It took a minute,” she said. “I was spent.” After the year in her FEMA trailer, she had rented a house on the beach, then renovated a storm-damaged home along a nearby bayou. Then she married and created a new life, dividing her time between New Orleans and California’s Sonoma Valley. Through it all, she never lost sight of the Mississippi coast.
Today, as she works with an architect to design her new Henderson Point home, Murphy said she is equivocal about some of the changes Katrina wrought. Before, she said, people tolerated the ephemeral world of hurricane zones the best they could, but it is now impossible to get a mortgage without expensive flood insurance or to get electrical service without meeting rigorous building codes, which has the effect of excluding people of limited means. She and her husband had planned to build without a mortgage or insurance, and to set up their own electrical grid, until they were told that if they did not abide by the strictures their neighbors would also lose their coverage.
Thinking back, Murphy said, “The choreography of the aftermath of a disaster in America — it was such an interesting experience for me.” She said it was “deeply painful but digestible to lose my house. What I couldn’t tolerate was the loss of community.” At the DeLisle encampment, she said, “We all put our energy into coalescing as a community. A community is not its buildings. Nothing was left standing. But you need to define yourself as a community. Place means everything. We met under a collapsed awning at a Shell station because it was the only shade. We set up church basement tables in the park and that was the town hall.” Ultimately, many people were dispersed, but Murphy was determined to hold her ground, which required further adaptation. Due to current requirements that homes be constructed above the highest designated surge level, “I have to build my house a zillion feet in the air — the base level is 25 feet in the air,” she said.
She recalled that on the first day after the storm, she was devastated by the scenes of utter destruction. “I walked to the beach and it was so apocalyptic. Everywhere, cars overturned. Nothing built by man left standing. The trees stripped of their leaves, everything brown and scoured by salt water. There were no birds. It was deadly quiet. I walked through the rubble and it was the closest I’ve ever come to a panic attack. I got down and started digging in the ground, trying to find something alive. I was trying to psychologically catch my breath.
“Then I saw where the tideline had dropped, by the debris left behind, and realized the earth was still turning on its mythical axis — everything was doing its universe thing, it was just my world that was wrecked. The earth had put this amount of energy into my world and it was a disaster for me, but it was natural on some level I couldn’t understand. I felt like an ant, tiny and insignificant. But I realized everything was exactly as it was supposed to be. I was inconsequential on the level of the universe.”
That idea, she said, was oddly reassuring. “I thought, the birds are going to rebuild their nests, and I’ll rebuild mine. If I valued it, it was valuable. We’ll probably get wiped out again, but we’ll just figure it out.”
Parts of this article were included in an Aug. 30, 2015, report for The Atlantic.
Image: Living in the ruins, Bay St. Louis (Alan Huffman)