BILOXI, Miss. (ABP) — Hurricane Katrina punished the sacred and profane alike as it came ashore on the Mississippi Coast Aug. 29, gutting sturdy brick churches and glittering casinos, historic oceanside homes and modest tin-roofed bungalows.
From New Orleans to Mobile, Ala., Katrina was indiscriminate in its destruction. Much of the Mississippi coastline was dotted Sept. 1 with nondescript mounds of debris — wood, concrete, household items.
Bibles and casino manuals, library books and bottled cooking oil — all pilfered by the churning sea — shared a square yard of sand where they came to rest.
Over and over, storm victims voiced shock — they didn't believe a hurricane could be this bad. Even hurricane-savvy, lifelong residents of the Gulf Coast were stunned by the storm's power and scope. Old-timers who previously measured hurricanes against 1969's Camille conceded Katrina set a new standard.
“There's no comparison between the storms,” said Maureen Hudachek, 76, whose Ocean Springs, Miss., house survived Camille but not Katrina. She and her husband, Ray, 79, stayed in the house for both hurricanes — and smaller ones in between — but they barely escaped with their lives this time.
Unlike refugees trapped in New Orleans, most hurricane survivors on the Mississippi coast were bewildered but not despairing. Many residents in Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Gulfport and other towns rode out the Category-4 storm in their homes, only to find them virtually gutted and uninhabitable.
“You could hear people screaming in the dark, 'Help me!' It was terrible,” said Donna Springer, longtime resident of Ocean Springs, across the bay from Biloxi. “We never thought it would be over. It kept going and going and going.”
Springer's home, a few blocks inland, was heavily damaged but not destroyed. But only a slab of concrete remains of Verna Margroff's Biloxi home. Margroff was one of 14 people taking refuge in Springer's house. Three days after the hurricane, Margroff still had no idea what she would do next. “I don't know. I'm just in a daze.”
For Bob Storie, a Baptist chaplain from Ocean Springs, this was the second time a hurricane flooded him out of his home.
“Our home east of Pascagoula was a total loss [to Hurricane Georges], so we moved here to this home, where we were told that there was no chance of a flood,” said Storie, who remained in his house on Fort Bayou with his wife, Maude, and his 91-year-old mother-in-law. Although the house is 19 feet above sea level, and somewhat sheltered from ocean winds, it was swamped by the 22-foot storm surge, destroying much of the contents.
“Just last year we dropped flood insurance because there was no evidence that we would ever have a 100-year [record] flood,” said Storie, 71, a chaplain at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula. “That is what this was, a 100-year flood.”
On the Mississippi coast, the worst damage was in a quarter-mile-wide strip along the oceanfront. Almost all homes and businesses were splintered by 130-mph winds or obliterated by the 20-to-30-foot storm surges. A few blocks inland, most structures remain standing, but many will be too damaged to repair. Several wood-framed houses were lifted and dropped into the middle of city streets. Residents wandered the streets looking for food and water.
Three days after the storm, only scattered locations on the Mississippi coast had received any food from the outside.
First Baptist Church of Gulfport was totally destroyed by Katrina, but pastor Chuck Register pleaded for more immediate help for the city's residents. “Please tell Southern Baptists…,” he said, choking back tears, “we need some feeding work. These people need to eat.”
Some residents whose homes survived have essential supplies, such as food and water — though none have electricity and likely won't for weeks. As news of chaos in New Orleans trickled in, some Mississippians wondered aloud what would happen when the food in their homes ran out in a few days.
Mike Barnett, pastor of First Baptist Church in Ocean Springs, offered his church's parking lot if a Baptist feeding operation could bring in help. His brick church survived Katrina well. More importantly, Barnett said, none of the church members were killed or injured, though several dozen families lost homes. “We want to honor the Lord and give thanks,” he said as he readied the activity building to house out-of-town police officers who were on their way to help.
Many churches of all denominations met the same destruction as homes and businesses. First Baptist Church of Biloxi, however, which moved away from the waterfront when the casinos moved in, fared better than most.
Along Biloxi's waterfront, where other churches stand in uneasy co-existence with gambling facilities, both were suddenly thrown together by Katrina. Massive casino barges — the size of football fields and three stories high — were tossed 200 yards inland by the 30-foot storm surge, wiping out houses, shops and cars in their paths and coming to rest on strange angles in strange places. One casino barge tossed by the storm surge came to rest across the boulevard beside the shell of St. Michael's Catholic Church.
Stories of survival seemed to mock Katrina's awesome power.
Matthew and Jean Meissner were in the third floor of their Biloxi apartment — a converted 130-year-old mansion across the road from the ocean — as the 30-foot storm surge carved out the bottom two floors of the sturdy structure. Afterward, they escaped through a rear staircase, and they've remained in the shell of the house for three days. “This is what we've got,” Matthew Meissner said with resignation.
“If the Red Cross would give us a place to stay, we would take it,” he said as he carried his first hot meal, delivered by a Red Cross vehicle. “If we can get a hot meal twice a day, that's a godsend.”
Matthew is a maintenance manager at the McDonald's restaurant on the casino strip. Jean was a maid at a hotel that no longer exists. A day earlier, a body was recovered from the demolished hotel apartment building next door. Today the couple sat in lawn chairs, not facing the now-calm Gulf but staring back into the remains of their home.
Half a block away, as the rescue workers and TV crews trickled out, nightfall brought an eerie quiet to the seaside neighborhood. Half a dozen friends gathered on the steps of one heavily damaged house and toasted their survival with a salvaged bottle of liquor.
The Hudacheks “were fresh from Iowa” when Camille struck Ocean Springs in 1969. “We didn't know [better],” Maureen recalled.
This time they hid in their house until the winds and waves started destroying it, piece by piece, from the west. Maureen and Roy, who are members of nearby St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, escaped by going outside into the storm and huddling behind the home's eastern wall as the storm devoured the western half. A detached garage was totally destroyed, throwing their two antique cars — a 1950 MG and 1970 Cadillac Eldorado — into a ravine behind the house.
“I was never afraid during the storm,” Maureen said. “I never thought I would perish. I prayed a lot…. I had my rosary in my pocket and I prayed. The wind was howling. It seemed like that loud, piercing, howling sound would never stop.”
“We will rebuild right here,” Maureen said as Roy, who has Parkinson's, picked through possessions in the living room, which is now exposed to the outside. “We can't afford to build back what was here. But we will re-build. This is our home. This is where we want to be.”
— Tim Norton contributed to this story.