On the morning of August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, arrived off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi, bringing with it winds of more than 150 mph, walls of waves, and 28-foot storm surges. Almost everything that it touched was destroyed.
But while the story of the decimation in Louisiana, primarily in New Orleans, was well documented by the media, particularly the failure of the city’s levees, the demolition on Mississippi’s coast, the actual ground zero for the storm, was largely overlooked.
Today, many do not know the names of the cities that were most impacted and continue to live in the shadow of the storm today. These cities are Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Gautier, and Pascagoula.
All photos are the property of Photos from Katrina
In Mississippi, hundreds were killed, 238 to be exact, tens of thousands were left homeless, and more than one million were impacted by the storm.
When we landed in Gulfport, Mississippi two weeks ago, the scar of the storm could still be seen. Driving alongside the 26 miles of man-made beach, the homes on the other side of the highway, the closest residential property to the water, were either brand new, under construction, or still sitting in ruin.
Many of the new homes are designed to resemble the Antebellum style mansions that once stood, while others are more pragmatically designed, perched high on stilts out of the reach of future floodwaters.
Massive angel oak trees are some of the sole coastal survivors. The ones that have been damaged, have been repurposed, their jagged trunks carved into playful dolphins by a wood carver whose only tool is a chainsaw.
The media has been harshly criticized for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its neglect of Mississippi. One criticism came from David Purdy in an editorial for the Sun Herald that was published several months after the storm.
“As Aug. 29 recedes into the conscious time of many Americans, the great storm that devastated 70 miles of Mississippi’s Coast, destroying the homes and lives of hundreds of thousands, fades into a black hole of media obscurity,” Purdy wrote.
Yet, by most accounts, Mississippi was relegated to media obscurity from the beginning.
“New Orleans is THE story—to the extent that if the Mississippi Coast is mentioned at all it is often in an add-on paragraph that mentions ‘and the Gulf Coast’ or ‘and Mississippi and Alabama…’ So, why does that matter? It matters first as it relates to journalism’s obligations to cover human beings whose conditions are as dire as those that exist here,” Purdy wrote.
What his editorial underscores is the idea of journalistic integrity and a commitment to telling the stories of all people.
While I was only ten-years-old when Hurricane Katrina hit, I remember watching the wreckage on television, most likely of New Orleans. I do not remember mention of Mississippi, and therefore until I visited the state, did not associate Mississippi with the storm at all.
The destruction from Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi alone, argues Purdy, represents the single greatest natural disaster in 229 years of American history. But, the way in which this story was initially covered almost entirely erases what happened in Mississippi.
Retrospectively, some reporters have returned to the decimation that occurred, including a Washington Post article that examines what was “lost and gained from Katrina’s fury” on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast ten years after the storm.
DeNeen Brown provides a necessary follow-up on the impact of Katrina, but the absence of journalism during the crisis and in the months afterward resulted in a devastating lack of public knowledge and therefore accountability between the federal and state government and the people of Mississippi.
In Mississippi, more than 234,000 homes were damaged or destroyed according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and more than a third of Mississippi’s population, which exceeds one million people, were impacted.
At the Gulfport airport, I met a taxi driver named Helen Stockstill. A native of Mississippi’s coast, her home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.
While Helen waited for money from the insurance company to allow her to rebuild, she camped in a tent in her front-yard for more than three months with no water or electricity. Helen was lucky, as many would go without new homes for years.
In 2007, Haley Barbour, then Mississippi’s governor, elicited public outrage when he requested that $600 million of federal disaster relief be directed toward renovating and expanding the Port of Gulfport, rather than go toward housing assistance for those displaced by the storm.
Following the storm, tensions arose over whether the government would also compensate homeowners whose homes had been damaged by wind in addition to those whose homes had been damaged by storm surge, or the abnormal rise of water generated by a storm.
Damage by wind was a far more likely cause of property and home damage further in-land, primarily in areas of Mississippi such as the Delta, where the majority of the state’s poorest residents reside.
Barbour’s administration insisted that housing needs had been overestimated and had already been fully met and rather than offer outstanding funds to cover homes damaged by hurricane winds, or to expand policies to assist renters as well as homeowners, Barbour advocated to direct the unused money to not just repair the port, but to expand it. He initially estimated that work done to the port would generate more than 2,500 new permanent maritime jobs. Ultimately, the number was far less.
Without the money necessary for repairs, many people continued to live in damaged homes that only further deteriorated with time. Some continue to live in damaged homes today.
In 2010, under the Obama administration, Barbour agreed to reallocate $132 million in aid to poor and uninsured Mississippians regardless of how their homes were damaged. With these funds, more than 5,200 homes, that were initially considered ineligible for assistance, were repaired or replaced.
The story of renters is more complicated. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, a shortage of affordable housing in Mississippi’s coastal communities already existed.
A third of the homes on Mississippi’s coast were occupied by renters, 40 percent of which spent more than a third of their income on rent or were living in public or subsidized housing.
After Katrina, which damaged 60 percent of the state’s housing supply, the number of affordable housing units, primarily multi-unit housing, significantly decreased. Repairs to these units were slower than those made to single-family homes as landlords argued that the insurance and redevelopment process included additional complications and restrictions.
Today, low-income housing is still in short supply. According to the National Low Incoming Housing Coalition, on average, a Mississippian needs to make $14.84 an hour, or more than double the minimum wage, in order to make rent.
While Hurricane Katrina created physical devastation, some have acknowledged the positive economic role it has played for some.
Women in Construction is an initiative born out of Katrina. The program’s founder, Julie Kuklinski, was living in Wisconsin when she volunteered to work on an all women demolition team in Mississippi.
Since then, she has trained hundreds of other women to work jobs in construction, a form of wage labor that is paid significantly better than service jobs that are traditionally ascribed to women.
WinC women learn the technical skills necessary to work jobs in construction during an eight-week training program. The program provides child care while the women are in class and after successful completion of the program, they are given an additional year.
Women entering into construction is something that Julie says may not have happened without Katrina. As the state struggled to rebuild, it was desperate for manual labor so much so that the gender of the laborer did not matter.
In this sense, for some women, Katrina has opened new job opportunities and new pathways to economic advancement. A small silver lining among the overwhelming wreckage.
Mississippi Semester 