PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. (ABP) — One of the clearest demonstrations of Hurricane Katrina's power as it decimated the Mississippi Gulf Coast Aug. 29, 2005, is the shell of a large three-story steel-reinforced concrete building in the once-charming town of Pass Christian.
A year after Katrina's passage, the “hurricane-proof” main hotel and cafeteria structure at the Gulfshore Baptist Assembly remains gutted up to its third floor — a height of more than 30 feet above sea level.
Now, the Mississippi Baptist Convention is studying what to do with that facility, given the utter devastation it suffered from Katrina.
Shortly after Katrina's passage, the convention's then-president appointed a committee to study the future of the facility and two other convention-owned camps in other parts of the state. They formed it “to look at all of our facilities and know what we're doing best, so we serve Mississippi Baptists and whatever we do will glorify the Lord,” said Larry Otis, the committee's chairman. Otis is a former mayor of Tupelo, Miss.
But considering the future of the assembly will be difficult, Otis admitted, because generations of Mississippi Baptists have fond memories tied to Gulfshore.
“It's very emotional — my family, for example, we probably have been down there 15 times for various conferences,” Otis said. “Plus, my children have been there and my grandchildren have been there. So, you get very emotionally attached to a facility like that.”
The retreat center is located on Point Henderson, where St. Louis Bay meets the Gulf of Mexico. It has the unfortunate distinction of serving as Ground Zero for the two hurricanes in United States history with the highest documented storm surges: Katrina and 1969's Camille.
A storm surge is a mound of wind-blown water that builds up under a hurricane — usually doing far more damage than the storm's winds. Storm surges have the ability to wipe houses from their foundations and destroy even large, well-constructed structures. The surge is usually worst under, and just to the east of, a hurricane's eye.
Katrina's eye passed west of Pass Christian and Gulfshore Baptist Assembly, as did Camille's. But while Camille remains the most intense hurricane to make landfall on the U.S. mainland in recorded history, Katrina's peak storm surge has been documented to have exceeded Camille's — perhaps by as much as 10 feet. At Henderson Point, Katrina's surge may have passed 30 feet above sea level.
Mississippi Baptists replaced the Gulfshore Assembly facilities destroyed by Camille with a steel-reinforced main building designed to be hurricane-resistant. Nonetheless, the surge completely washed through the building's first two floors and severely damaged its top floor. Essentially all that now stands is a concrete-and-steel superstructure.
In addition, the waves destroyed several outbuildings — including the assembly's Kelly Auditorium, whose twisted steel frame has been demolished. And the assembly's grounds, which Mississippi Baptist Convention Board spokesman William Perkins said had been “beautifully manicured” before the hurricane and now serves as a scrap yard. They contain the concrete and clumps of steel rebar left from the remains of the U.S. Highway 90 bridge, which crossed over Bay St. Louis. Katrina destroyed it as well.
Otis said an early estimate of the damage to the 25-acre facility was “somewhere around $19 million.” So far, he said, the convention has collected approximately $6.3 million in insurance claims on the facility.
Complicating any effort to rebuild is the cloud of uncertainty surrounding future zoning and building-code restrictions across the Mississippi Coast. Officials at the federal, county and municipal levels are still deciding how high off the ground they should require the first floors on new or substantially reconstructed buildings in vulnerable areas to begin.
“We've met with the local political bodies that will have to vote on the FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency's recommended] surge levels,” Otis said. “We have also met with the staff from the planning offices of Harrison County so that we will be able to know what the building code requirements will be if we rebuild that facility with the storm-surge levels that FEMA or the county adopts.”
Even if FEMA recommends one of the highest levels possible — an elevation of 24 feet — and county or Pass Christian municipal officials choose not to incorporate it into building codes, insurance carriers will likely still require new construction to be done according to the FEMA standards.
“The FEMA number will also have implications as to whether you're able to get insurance that's required for a facility located in that storm-surge area,” he said.
But the feds have yet to make a final recommendation, Otis noted. “Part of our report is up in the air because those have not been officially adopted by FEMA yet,” he said.
Another issue in rebuilding, Otis noted, is whether rebuilding on the coast itself will be prohibitively expensive. Because of the scarcity of contractors and the difficulty of the work, costs are higher on the coast than areas “slightly to the north there,” he said.
In addition, Otis said, it sometimes seems unjust to talk about spending millions to re-establish a beachside facility for retreats and vacations when many in the region are still in FEMA trailers. “We also have to remember that we still have thousands of people on the Gulf Coast who don't even have homes yet, and here we are discussing the possibility of rebuilding something when people don't even have a place to live,” he said.
Nonetheless, Otis added, respondents to a website that the convention set up for feedback on the future of Gulfshore and the two other facilities have confirmed the need for such places in Mississippi Baptist life.
“We've absolutely gotten the most phenomenal stories about they came to the Lord there, they met their wife there, they were called to the ministry there,” he said. “It has affirmed to us that Mississippi Baptists absolutely essentially need a facility in order to continue to equip Mississippi Baptists.”
Because of that, he said, the nine-member study panel has prayed about its work. “I think, scripturally, we're supposed to consider the costs before you build anything,” he said.
Otis said the committee hoped to have a recommendation to present to messengers at the convention's annual meeting, set for Oct. 30-Nov. 1 in Jackson, Miss.
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