Katrina’s vexing legacy
Storm was "a wakeup call — one we’ve repeatedly put on snooze," author writes
On a sweltering July afternoon at the Ground Zero Hurricane Katrina Museum in Waveland, Mississippi, a blue line marks how high the storm surge rose inside the building: 11.5 feet.
Twenty years after the hurricane, the museum’s mission — “not a memorial to a disaster, but a tribute to the strength and beauty of the human spirit” — feels both defiant and fragile. Like the quilts hanging in its halls, stitched from salvaged fabric, the Gulf Coast’s hurricane history is one of fragments: shattered homes, fractured lives and a collective memory that is today at risk of unraveling.
When Tropical Depression #12 swirled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, I evacuated from my family’s home in Pass Christian, just west of Waveland. I was on sabbatical from teaching at the University of Evansville in Indiana and planned to work on a novel at my parents’ house. My husband, son and I were visiting them and we all cut the vacation short to head north.
Few imagined that the storm would become the “biggest, baddest mama of all,” as one local calls Katrina. Brian “Hooty” Adam, Hancock County’s emergency management director, had spent two years on the job when the storm made landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. His experience with firefighting prepared him for chaos, but nothing could brace him for the tidal surge — the highest in U.S. recorded history, to date — that turned his county into a war zone.
“We wrote numbers on our arms in permanent marker, to identify us if we didn’t make it,” he recalls in his office in the inland town of Kiln, which locals call “the Kill,” and begins to choke up.
Katrina was a Category 3 hurricane with a Category 5 surge, a monster hybrid that exposed the flaws in even the best-laid plans. Local emergency crews operated out of an old bowling alley and had to move six times to higher ground. The world mostly remembers New Orleans’ Katrina, not ours along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which was its own catastrophe.
Throughout the storm, volunteers answered calls from residents trapped in attics, urging them to “find an axe and chop your way out.” When the eye passed, cars floated past like toys, and Hooty’s team rescued police officers stranded on rooftops. “They were there to protect people,” he says, “but they’d become victims.”
Debris piled into surreal monuments: boats on top of houses, statues of Mary standing sentinel over ruins. Hooty remembers seeing a Bible splayed open to the story of the flood and Noah’s Ark. For many, survival meant numbness. “You cut off emotions,” he says.
Survivors waded through warm, brown water, some using Tupperware as floatation devices. Hospitals were ruined and shut down. One physician, William “Bill” Bradford, rode a bicycle through the devastated landscape to administer tetanus shots.
Volunteers poured in — Mennonites, ham radio operators, teams with rescue dogs. Many of the responders ended up falling in love with the place and moved to the Gulf Coast to live. Solveig Wells, a local artist, returned with her husband, who went around with a wheelbarrow, gathering the remnants of fabrics amid the debris. Wells stitched the quilts from these storm-tossed swatches that are now displayed in the Waveland museum.
“Our citizens are resilient,” Hooty insists. “When we were out there rescuing people, they offered us emergency workers water, even when they’d lost everything.”
One thing we all learned in the aftermath: Everybody has a little hero in them. Even FEMA, often smeared for bureaucratic failures, delivered trailers and tents. Who knows what to expect now that the agency’s head revealed, to the dismay of residents of hurricane zones, that he didn’t know there was such a thing as a hurricane season.
Katrina’s legacy is as much about erasure as endurance — and about the question of whether to rebuild or retreat when the climate tells you that you’re out of bounds. Katrina was unimaginable, yet climate scientists warn the worst is yet to come. A federal court recently extended an order to block a ban on teaching the Civil War, civil rights, racism, and the Holocaust in schools, yet Mississippi lawmakers remain determined to scrub references to “uncomfortable” histories. Will Katrina’s revelations and warnings about climate change be relegated as just another uncomfortable subject?
Katrina was a climate wakeup call—one we’ve repeatedly put on snooze. As sea levels in the Gulf of Mexico rise at one the fastest rates in the world, FEMA remains underfunded, its leadership shaky. “Nothing has changed,” Hooty says. “If FEMA doesn’t help us, our state has to.” Yet the potential cost would be a heavy burden in the nation’s poorest state.
The coast’s rapid rebuild after the storm, which many see as evidence of its resilience, also suggests a dangerous amnesia. New hotels and stilted houses dot the shoreline and empty lots that were once buried in debris now host vacation rentals. Some worry that the relentless coastal redevelopment illustrates a lack of foresight about climate change and the inevitability of the normally calm Gulf waters to come charging back.
The past reminds us of what might come next. At the Ground Zero museum, those lap quilts sewn from found fabrics hang near photos of a car swallowed by floodwaters. In Pass Christian, our own home’s salvaged chandelier still bears a hole from the storm. Our house just barely survived. It took two years to rebuild.
My friends Julie Smith, Ellis Anderson and Jesmyn Ward all wrote books about the storm, warning of disasters that will cost more lives. Others moved away, never to return. Two friends moved to Jackson because they couldn’t handle the anxiety that each hurricane season brings. For me, Hurricane Katrina birthed Aftermath Lounge, a novel-in-stories in which the Gulf Coast itself is a character, its wounds and resilience mirroring those of the people who call it home. My husband and I now live in the family home once wrecked by wind and waves.
After 41 years, Hooty will retire in December. The 200-page prep plan he helped draft for the emergency center has grown to 600 pages, and Hooty says there’s surely a flaw in there somewhere because his job cannot be scripted.
Meanwhile, many locals tally the risks for every storm. “Everyone’s got a number,” says Ken Rayer, 64, a local realtor. “They’ll stay for a 3, leave for a 4 or 5.”
Those of us who have experience with Katrina and other hurricanes tend to be acutely aware of every hurricane season. We clean out closets. We keep trees trimmed. We have a plan to leave, even if our exit numbers aren’t all the same. Hooty says he won’t evacuate for a Category 2, 3, 4 or even a 5.
“We’re staying,” he declares, without hesitating. “We have a strong house on a hill.”
The Roman poet Virgil asked, “What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?”
Americans tend to tell redemption stories: I was rising, I faltered, I came back better. My wise friend Kat Fitzpatrick once told me that aside from being a mother, Katrina was the best thing to happen to her. It wiped away everything, forcing her to start all over again – her life and her art. And it’s true that her paintings have a new depth and vibrancy (her latest work hangs in the “Silver Linings” exhibit at Studio Waveland).
Perhaps some Gulf Coast residents think they have loss beat—through having endured lost homes, lost personal possessions and even lost loved ones, some of whom died in the storm, others of whom succumbed to illness or despair that followed. A survivor featured in the Ground Zero museum’s documentary “When Wind and Water Speak” later committed suicide.
Katrina revealed what we choose to salvage: stories, community and stubborn love for a tempestuous place.
Image: The front yard of the author’s family home after the storm (courtesy Pat O’Connor)
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