Twenty years ago today life was grand on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and in New Orleans. Then a storm named Katrina swept though and everything changed forever.
I was wondering Monday what we were doing and how we felt the week before the storm. Looking back in the archives I read in my column that the temperature a week before the storm reached 101 degrees as measured by the thermometer in our backyard.
On that Saturday, two days before landfall, we had a pool full of young girls enjoying a back-to-school swim party. The sky was clear and blue and the girls splashed and laughed without a worry in the world.
That night we met up with some dear friends and laughed as we talked that there was yet another hurricane on the way. Everyone was joking, which had become the norm following so many near miss hurricanes that year, about all the milk and bread being gone, along with the bottled water. We laughed some more. We didn’t know that one of those friend’s sister would die in the storm.
By Sunday I think our focus had changed a bit. There was a good line of people in the grocery store stocking up on last minute supplies...just in case. We were there too.
We bought ice and water and those kinds of things and then filled up the cars with gas...just in case.
That afternoon we let down the pool umbrellas and took the hanging baskets of flowers down from their hooks. The weather forecasters were calling for some pretty hefty gusts even this far inland.
It seems to me that even up here we were concerned, but much like our neighbors to the south had heard Mother Nature cry wolf too many times already. We were being conservatively cautious and keeping an eye on the television... just in case.
By Monday morning things were not looking so good any more. “Just in case” became “this is the case” as Katrina blew ashore with her tidal wave of a storm surge and destroyed pretty much everything in her path.
She was indeed headed our way.
At the newspaper office we struggled to complete that week’s edition just in case we were to lose power. We frantically laid out pages, and typed and wrote, but we didn’t make it. We ended up having to move our computers north to Greenwood when the power went off for good.
I used to have a little black and white television in my office that was seldom turned on. Sometimes I would punch the green button on the remote when the sirens sounded during thunderstorms, but not always. I was editor and publisher of the Flowood newspaper in Rankin County back then and I’m pretty certain that in the 10 years since I had started that newspaper — 10 years “before” the storm — that television had only been used about three times during major events. All three were gargantuan.
The first was the story of Luke Woodham and the Pearl High School shootings on October 1, 1997. The second came four years later as I watched airplanes crash into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. And the last came on August 29, 2005, just before hurricane force winds swept through central Mississippi and left us all grappling for ice, and gas, and flashlights, and everything else we’d taken for granted on a beautiful Saturday afternoon just two days prior. The very things we had laughed about with our friends.
“One of the last sounds that came from that television before the power went out for good that day,” I wrote in my column the week after the storm, “was Wilson Stribling’s voice on the WLBT Channel 3 news. These may not be his exact words but it was something like ‘Oh my God, the levees have broken in New Orleans.’”
A day later we were able to pick up the fuzzy scenes of Mississippi and New Orleans on a little portable television plugged into a power outlet in the back of my Expedition. They confirmed that the urgency in his voice was precise. They also revealed much more.
Near our home, way up here in central Mississippi, hundreds of people were lined up to get gasoline at a nearby convenience store. National Guardsmen were out there helping direct traffic and the noon news reported that two tanker trucks filled with gasoline were hijacked on Interstate 20. I never found out if that really happened or not, but it was a terrifying thought.
An observer on the evening news commented that the city of New Orleans “looks like Baghdad except Baghdad has food and water.”
A nine-year-old evacuee said, “It’s all pitiful and shame...what are we gonna do when the hurricane comes again?”
Then Governor Haley Barbour, speaking to then President George W. Bush, said, “We’re gonna be fine at the end of the day, but the end of the day is a long way away.”
“We’re coming back,” I wrote. “Things will be different, but we’re coming back. Now we’ve got an opportunity to eliminate the pitifulness and shame before another hurricane comes roaring our way. We’ve simply got to take advantage of that opportunity.”
That is exactly what we did.
Now, here we are 20 years later. Things are different. Some things are better, some gone forever, and others, maybe still struggling a bit. Take a trip to the Gulf Coast or New Orleans and even today, even 20 years later, there are signs of the storm.
I suppose it is safe to say that in the overall realm of things, 20 years later we are back. Like the governor said, we are fine. The end of the day did eventually come and we are fine.
My concern now is — and will always be — whether or not we’ve become complacent again. Whether or not folks might once again think they can ride out a storm. Let’s hope not. Let’s hope we learned a valuable lesson 20 years ago. I’m hoping that we learned that all those warnings were/are no laughing matter, and, just perhaps, that doing something “just in case” may just not be good enough.
