Putting the Focus on Southern Mississippi After Katrina

In 2005 I was living in Gulfport, a city right in the middle of coastal Mississippi. I maintained a full time job in our neighbor coastal city that had a pretty decent income, and shared a pretty decent home with my fiancee. On August 28th, 2005 our center closed half a day early so that we could prepare for the approaching storm. At the time it was still unclear as to where it was going to hit, so to be safe, we were given a few extra hours to do what we needed to so that we could be a least a little prepared if the worst happened.

The storm moved in late that night, and the wind and rain began within the next morning. We stayed up pretty late, and headed to bed not too long before it got bad. When we awoke, the power was off and all we could see were swaying trees behind the privacy fence that surrounded the back of our apartment. The wind was whistling and the rain was pouring. Throughout the day we would head to the front of our building, barely making it down the breezeway through the wind that was pushing us back, and we would look across the parking lot and court yard at the damage.

Before the storm, I had parked my car between two others. The parking lot was bare, almost completely empty besides the 3 cars in front of our apartment. On either side of me, debris had knocked out their windows, but luckily mine were still intact. We witnessed the water get to the top steps of our home, and the metal of the carports ripping off like banana peels. Once everything had calmed down and the water went away, everything seemed alright. The storm could not have been so bad if we lived blocks in between the Gulf of Mexico and an inlet of water called Back Bay and stayed dry.

Being the end of August and in South, MS, the humidity added to the temperature. Point blank - it was STEAMING. We decided to drive to my mothers to see how she and my pregnant sister had fared. We turn off our road and everything is completely pitch black. I go slow, but even at such a crawling speed, I had to swerve to miss the gas station that was then in the middle of the road. We drove down the interstate on one lane all the way to my mothers, an hour drive.