| "If all you had was one tree in your house and you lost your car, you felt like one of the chosen few." | |
| Joan Murphy, Mississippi Department of Marine Resources |
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The day before Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the Gulf Coast, Tina Shumate, director of the Comprehensive Resource Management Bureau of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, received a telephone call that her husband, David, was having a heart attack and had been rushed to the hospital.
During Katrina, the Shumates, doctors, nurses, and other patients and their families rode out the storm in the hospital hallways while windows blew out in the outer rooms. Hundreds of people filled the hospital during the height of the storm as storm surges washed buildings, bridges, and people away.
Joan Murphy, projects officer for the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources' Comprehensive Resource Management Bureau, rode out the storm at one of her sons' homes with eight other people, seven dogs, and many cats.
"It was a nightmare," Murphy recalls. "One tree fell through the roof, but we were fortunate that it fell through the garage and demolished a car."
LaDon Swann, director of the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, sent his wife, two boys, and family dog from their Dauphin Island, Alabama, home, but he chose to stay. While his home only lost five shingles, the western end of Dauphin Island was devastated by the storm.
"We're moving," Swann notes. "After Ivan and Katrina, we feel like it's in the best interest of our family to move off the island."
Katrina's destructive path impacted many coastal resource management staff members in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, damaging or destroying homes and belongings, and disrupting all their lives.
"It's indescribable," says Marcia Garcia, staff officer for the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources' Comprehensive Resource Management Bureau. "You can't begin to describe the destruction. The destruction is still everywhere you turn."
The Days After
Once Katrina passed, Tina Shumate's thoughts were on finding out the condition of her 16-year-old son, who was staying with her parents in Pascagoula, Mississippi—normally about a 45 minute drive from the hospital where her husband was receiving care.
But cell phones and landline telephones were down, and the entire region was without electricity, meaning that fax machines and computers were not an option. After two days with no news of how her family, friends, and colleagues had fared during the storm, Shumate was beginning to feel frantic. "I prayed, 'God, give me a sign that they're OK.'"
Shortly after, she began receiving text messages on her cell phone from her younger sister, but Shumate's phone was not equipped to respond. By reading the messages, she learned that her son, parents, and Garcia were OK.
"It kept me from losing my mind in the hospital," Shumate says. "To me that was huge."
A Change in Perspective
Shortly after Katrina ended, Joan Murphy was able to survey the damage to the surrounding subdivision where she was staying. "Everybody was walking around at first like zombies. We were in shock." But it wasn't too long before residents fired up chain saws to cut trees and limbs from roofs, cars, and roads.
Murphy was able to get to her home that evening and considers herself lucky that she had "only" a tree through her roof and a demolished car.
"Your perspective completely changed the day of Hurricane Katrina," Murphy explains. "If all you had was one tree in your house and you lost your car, you felt like one of the chosen few."
To illustrate, Murphy says the day after the storm, her oldest son ventured out to find that his home and data communications business were "nothing but a pile of debris."
Over in Alabama, LaDon Swann was able to survey the damage on the rest of Dauphin Island shortly after the storm ended. "The damage on the west end was as bad as I've ever seen. It might as well have been another planet."
The next day, he was able to leave the island, but all means of communication were down in that region, too, and Swann was having trouble locating his staff.
"As far as my staff, what bothered me the most," says Swann, "was that we had a very good hurricane preparation plan, and we followed it to the tee. But the reality is that it took me over a week before I finally tracked down all of my staff. Ultimately, in some cases, I had to drive to their homes in order to find them."
Assessing the Damage
When Swann did find his staff, he discovered that the homes of half his staff members had significant damage. "There were only two of us who didn't have damage," he says.
Garcia's home also was severely damaged, as were the homes of a number of Mississippi coastal program staff members, including Jan Boyd, director of Coastal Ecology in the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources.
"My yard was full of other people's stuff," says Boyd. "We got three feet of water in the house. We had a waterline on the wall in back of the couch, and the roof was gone. The neighbors said the water came in and left within 20 minutes, but saltwater ruins everything. My wife's car and my work vehicle were totaled. The water picked them up and floated them into the neighbor's yard."
He notes that several other Department of Marine Resources staff members "lost everything they had."
Grant Larsen, a geographic information system (GIS) specialist for the Comprehensive Resource Management Bureau, was a newlywed who had just bought and refurbished an 1898 house that he was scheduled to move into the weekend Katrina hit. Larsen lost both his apartment with all his belongings and his new home in the storm.
Similar Stories
Two days after the storm, Shumate's husband was released from the hospital. With no working vehicle, they set out walking home. "So much was blown away it was disorienting. All the landmarks were gone," she says. They walked for two hours in the August heat before realizing they were going in the wrong direction.
"It was hot—hotter than you can imagine," Shumate recalls.
But losing her car was the only property damage Shumate sustained. When they were finally able to reach her parents' home, it was to discover they'd had five feet of water in the house and a tree through the roof.
Similar stories abound among coastal resource managers working in the coastal areas of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. While Katrina may have been the most destructive hurricane, the blitz of storms in the Gulf region since the summer of 2004 has left coastal management staff members from the Caribbean to Texas storm weary, and in the worst cases has left people without homes and offices.
