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Katrina Is Born
On August 23, a storm named Katrina formed in the Bahamas and grew to a Category 1 hurricane before crossing the South Florida peninsula. Katrina crossed into the Gulf and entered perfect conditions for growing into a monster storm. At first, forecasters were confident that this hurricane would turn to the northeast after tracking west into the middle Gulf and strike Florida, probably around the Apalachicola area.
But Katrina did not turn. It kept moving slowly to the west-northwest, growing in size and power until by early in the morning of Sunday, August 28, it had reached Category-5 status, the highest level on the Saffer-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity. Katrina was packing sustained winds of 175 mph and heading straight for Mississippi. Although Katrina weakened to Category 4 before making landfall, the powerful storm surge it developed in the mid-Gulf was now an unstoppable force. What happened as Katrina crossed the Louisiana marshes and the Mississippi coast made headlines around the world.
A First Look at the Damage
Two days after Katrina made landfall, my brother Jeff and I loaded tools, emergency food and water supplies, camping gear and three jerry cans of gasoline into my pickup truck and set out to make our way south. Jeff and his family lived near the beach in Gulfport. They had left ahead of the storm and drove the 180 miles inland to stay with the rest of our family.
Most of Jackson and the entire state were without electrical power. Downed trees were everywhere, many houses were destroyed, and roads were rendered impassable even this far from the coast. The news we got from the Gulf Coast was not encouraging. The destruction was said to be widespread, beyond anything ever seen in this region, and we heard that 90 percent of all structures south of a railroad track that parallels the beach had been leveled by a tremendous storm surge.
Jeff’s house was two blocks south of the railway line, so he was understandably anxious to find out if he still had a home. I held out little hope that my 26-foot cruising sailboat, Intensity, would still be where I had secured it in Discovery Bay, a little backwater marina tucked in a bayou adjoining St. Louis Bay, where it would have been safe in lesser hurricanes.
We were among the few in the area who had any gasoline with which to travel. I had taken the jerry cans off the boat when I left it and topped them off when I filled my truck tank as I left the coast less than 24 hours before Katrina arrived. Now there were long lines at every service station in the state, and most of the stations that still had electricity to run their pumps had run out of gasoline. People were panicking and fights were breaking out over a perceived need for gas. We carefully concealed the fuel cans under an old tarp to avoid inviting trouble and headed south despite the official notice on public radio that all routes to the coast were closed.
Driving to the coast was like being cast into some post-apocalyptic movie setting. It reminded me of Mad Max, with everyone fighting over fuel and desperate people stranded on the side of the road in now-useless vehicles. Jeff and I passed convoys of armed soldiers in full battle gear, spread out along the highway and congregated in roadside staging areas as they organized to move equipment to the coast. The four-lane highway became a winding two-lane path through piles of hastily cut trees that had fallen across it in hundreds of places. Entire forests were leveled in some areas. Roofs were ripped off most of the buildings we passed, and highway signs and billboards were twisted and shredded.
We drove through Gulfport unchallenged by police or National Guard and crossed the railroad tracks into Jeff’s neighborhood. The northernmost row of houses was still standing, but beyond that point, the streets were impassable with debris. Where there had once been hundreds of houses and dense trees and shrubbery, we could see through to the waters of the Mississippi Sound. We parked and walked through piles of rubble until we reached Jeff’s street. It was as if a bomb had leveled the entire area. Not a single house was standing. Foundations were swept clean.
Around the foundation of Jeff’s house, we found the bricks from the walls, but everything else was gone: rafters, wall framing, appliances and all personal belongings. Two days earlier, the water had been almost 20 feet deep here, and now the entire area smelled of rotting fish and decaying seaweed.
My brother’s neighborhood was miles to the east of where the eye of Hurricane Katrina crossed the Mississippi Coast near the Louisiana state line. Unfortunately, I had moved Intensity to St. Louis Bay several weeks before, when Hurricane Dennis threatened, because at that time it appeared that going west was the best plan. It’s always best to be on the west side of these tropical cyclones, because the northeast quadrant is the area of strongest wind and greatest storm surge.
When Katrina came ashore, St. Louis Bay was directly in this zone of maximum impact. The hurricane pushed an unbelievable storm surge as high as 34 feet across these beachfront towns and far up into the adjoining estuaries many miles inland.
 


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