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Feature—June 2006
Life After Katrina
Text and Photos by Scott B. Williams

Last year in Sea Kayaker, I wrote about Mississippi’s Pascagoula River (“The Last ‘Wild’ River,” Oct. ’05), a free-flowing river system that offers more than 750 miles of fine paddling and empties into the Gulf of Mexico a short distance from the Gulf Islands National Seashore, another prime area for sea kayaking.
By the time the October issue hit newsstands, Hurricane Katrina had made landfall on the northern Gulf Coast with catastrophic effect. Anyone visiting the lower reaches of the Pascagoula River today will find almost total devastation in communities such as Gautier and the city of Pascagoula itself. All of the marsh grasses upriver from the coast were submerged in the saltwater storm surge and turned brown. Hurricane-force winds reached inland hundreds of miles from the coast, and anyone trying to descend any of the upper tributaries of the river that I described in that previous article is sure to encounter almost impassable obstacles in the form of fallen trees.
Much has changed in South Mississippi since August 29, 2005, when Katrina’s massive storm surge swept over barrier islands and coastal towns and pushed far inland into estuaries like the Pascagoula River. Sustained winds of 140 mph leveled entire forests in some places and scattered tons of debris that will take years to clean up. Some parts of this coast have changed forever, especially man-made structures. Some of the wilder areas are surprisingly intact, demonstrating nature’s resiliency to storms that have always been part of the weather of this region. One thing is certain—all of us who call South Mississippi home were affected by this event, and many will never be the same again.
A History of Hurricanes
The northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico suffers more than its fair share of devastating hurricanes. Although some storms originate within the Gulf itself, most of the hurricanes arrive from the Caribbean through the Yucatan Channel, from the Atlantic through the Straits of Florida, or across the Florida peninsula. Once in the Gulf, the hurricanes have over 500 nautical miles of open, warm waters to become intensified before landfall. Those that strike this coast are often near maximum size and strength.
Although periods of hurricane inactivity can last for several years, leading to complacency among the inhabitants of the area and an illusion of security, no area of the northern Gulf Coast is immune to the threat of destruction by a major hurricane. As a resident of Mississippi for most of my life, I’ve been familiar with hurricanes since I was five years old, when a storm named Camille killed more than 200 Gulf Coast residents and retained wind speeds of 100 miles per hour even when it passed over my parents’ house more than 120 miles inland.
Hurricane Camille was unprecedented in the destruction it left behind. After Camille passed through the Mississippi coastal town of Pass Christian in 1969, Gulf Coast residents assumed such fury could never be matched, much less exceeded. It was considered a 100-year event, and no one who lived through it expected to have to face such an experience again. The people of Mississippi rebuilt their homes and businesses. When legalized gambling came to the Mississippi coast in the early 1990s, the population grew exponentially. Conflicts raged between environmentalists and developers who sought to build more hotels and condos on the beaches.
Conservationists prevailed on the offshore islands, five of which were included in the Gulf Islands National Seashore. This chain of islands lies approximately 10 miles offshore and protects the mainland from the open waters of the Gulf and the Mississippi Sound. The islands create an ideal playground for boaters of all description. Sea kayaking has been slower to catch on along this coast than in other popular paddling areas, but in recent years, there have been increased numbers of sea kayakers camping on the barrier islands or exploring the bayous and marshes of the mainland.
For years I made countless crossings to the islands by kayak and explored the area in a variety of small sailboats. I too became complacent about hurricanes, as we had no significant threats and no direct hits from anything larger than a tropical storm. This changed in October 2002, when two major hurricanes came bearing down on the northern Gulf Coast barely a week apart. The coast was spared major damage, as both storms weakened before coming ashore. The next major threat was in 2004, a year when four hurricanes made landfall in Florida. The last of these was tracking north across the Gulf on a path toward Biloxi, but at the last minute, it changed course and struck the Alabama and the North Florida coast.
Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center predicted that we were entering a 10- to 30-year cycle of increased hurricane activity and warned early in 2005 that conditions were just right for generating strong hurricanes. Early season storms are rare, but the first weekend in July, Tropical Storm Cindy made a direct hit in Biloxi with a five- to six-foot storm surge and sustained winds of about 70 mph. A week later Hurricane Dennis was heading our way but turned and struck Florida with less impact than predicted.
 


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