The Great Deluge

by Douglas Brinkley

  Chapter Five

  WHAT WAS THE MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST

  High noon I can’t believe my eyes

  Wind is ragin’ there’s a fire in the sky

  Ground shakin’ everything comin’ loose

  Run like a coward but it ain’t no use

  Edge of the river just an ugly scene

  People getting pushed, and people gettin’ mean

  A change is comin

  and it’s gettin’ kind of late

  There ain’t no survivin’, there ain’t no escape.

  —John Fogerty, “Change in the Weather”

  I

  MAYOR EDDIE FAVRE HAD continued patrolling the streets of Bay St. Louis until about thirty minutes before Katrina made landfall. When the raging winds became too much for him, he made his way to the police station on the Old Spanish Trail. Begun in 1915, this trail was part of the “Good Roads” movement, a 2,743-mile route that ran the length of America, all the way from San Diego, California, to St. Augustine, Florida. It was the oldest automobile road along the Gulf Coast, the first blacktop link between New Orleans and Mobile. The police station was located along the trail on the highest knoll in Bay St. Louis, just across the street from the railroad tracks. Virtually all of its policemen, a total of twenty-seven, stayed on duty, ready to start rescuing people when the weather permitted. ‘We received emergency calls from about sixty residents before communication broke down,” Favre recalled. “We took note of them all and were determined to check up on them the second the storm passed.”1

  The Mississippi Gulf Coast was getting hammered even harder than had Louisiana—if that was possible. At 10 A.M. Monday, when the worst of the storm was through with New Orleans, the easternmost towns of Mississippi came into the grip of Katrina’s second landfall. By then Katrina was a Category 3 storm, bringing winds of 125 mph, along with a 20-foot storm surge and 10 inches of rainfall.2 Edwina Craft was visiting her mother, a patient at the Biloxi Regional Medical Center, when Katrina reached the Mississippi Coast. The only illumination came from a couple of generator light systems that kept going Zzz! Zzz! “The room was shaking,” she recalled, “the windows were shaking. They moved us from the sixth floor to the bottom floor, but that was not much better. It flooded down there, and then the lights went off.”3

  In Gulfport, to the west of Biloxi, the fire chief reported that buildings downtown were “imploding” from the force of the storm. Sand from the beach whipped around in squalls. The high branches of ancient oaks suddenly defined the waterlines. Electrical wires dangled downward in every direction, snapping back and forth on poles. Sparks jumped from wet wires along the Gulfport boat harbor.4 Leslie Williams, a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was at her brother’s sturdy house in nearby Bay St. Louis. She and several other family members gathered there, looking out the window at the glade of pines in his backyard. “The trees snap like twigs in a child’s hand,” she wrote. “One breaks several feet from its base, then another, then dozens.”5 Finally, her brother suggested that they get away from the windows and take shelter in an interior hall.

  “This hurricane was like God and the Devil fighting it out here with Godzilla as the referee,” said a soldier at Keesler Air Force Base.6

  Soon after the winds came the water. As an officer at Keesler put it, “The base looked like an ocean.”7

  “A boat floated up my runway,” marveled the commanding officer of another military installation, on the grounds of Gulfport-Biloxi Airport.8 Water covered the land for at least a half mile inland. Along Mississippi’s coast, that half mile included charming old towns, new gambling districts, and thousands of stilted houses built to take advantage of beach living. Six feet of water swept in with the hurricane’s initial surge and more kept coming. The water would pull backward like a slingshot and then let loose with a punishing force, with waves capable of literally punching down brick walls. Fifty-year-old Huong Tran and her fisherman fiancé ran out of their house when the storm surge suddenly threatened to sweep it, and them, away. The Vietnamese couple helped each other climb to the top of a tree, a vertical refuge of last resort. Before the storm was through, they would spend six hours there, clinging to the branches and hoping the trunk wouldn’t break. “I thought I was going to die,” Tran said. “The water was over the house.” She prayed to a Buddhist goddess. “I called to her, ‘Help me, help me. I think I’ll die.’”9

  First, the hurricane winds chopped everything in their path into pieces, and then the storm surge, twenty-five feet at its worst, swept it away. Julie Goodman, a reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, described what it was like to realize that your house was disintegrating around you. “You see it tear through your walls, forming bubbles as it bolts between the paint and your family room sheetrock,” she explained. “You hear the nails pop, one by one, off your shingles. You see water come through your light switches and drop down toward your bathroom sink.”10

  Hurricane survivors claim that sustained winds of over 140 mph create a ghastly howl similar in timbre to a freight train crashing through the room. This is too dramatic a metaphor. Think instead of the grating pitch a dentist’s suction tube makes after it’s extracted the last molecule of spittle from your mouth. It’s a dry vacuum drone that over a two- or three-hour period starts chiseling away at morale. The wind makes a white noise, really, except that it’s punctuated by startling thuds and explosions from blocks away. Your nerve-racked mind imagines that each distant crash represents a collapsing bridge or a crumbling building or a falling oak. All you can do is pray that each blast or blare doesn’t signify human death.

  A family named Taylor, terrified by the noise, panicked and tried to evacuate from Bay St. Louis on Monday morning. By then it was too late. Their white SUV was trapped on Highway 90 as the road turned into a raging river. Afraid of drowning, the Taylors climbed on top of the vehicle’s roof. Volunteers from the Bay St. Louis Emergency Management Agency, including two police officers, suddenly appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, to rescue the family, quickly strapping life preservers on each of them and shepherding the four terrified people to safe ground.11 An Associated Press photograph of the daring rescue became one of the most memorable images of Katrina. “Volunteer rescue teams all over the region saved more families like the Taylors than history will ever properly count,” Bay St. Louis Police Chief Frank Griffith recalled. “Two of my officers, Tom Burleson and Jennifer Favalora, helped rescue the Taylors by holding the vehicle down so it wouldn’t get swept away.”12

  II

  Chief Frank Griffith had once been a homicide detective for the NOPD but decided he preferred the down-home friendliness of the Mississippi Gulf Coast to crime-plagued New Orleans. He opened a combination seafood restaurant and deli in Waveland for a while, but in 1991 he went back to law enforcement, becoming head of the Bay St. Louis Police Department (BSLPD). Griffith was proud to have his police force ready if a Camille-like hurricane ever again reared its ugly head. When Katrina hit, his BSLPD officers huddled together, drinking coffee, lying on cots, and peering out across the street at the Senior Citizens Center, which was starting to flood. “Thank God the storm happened during daylight,” he said. “At night the death toll would have been higher.”

  With Chief Griffith throughout the brawl was fifty-four-year-old David Stepro. A stickler for detail and a computer whiz, Stepro understood that three-quarters of being a police officer was paperwork. But he didn’t like being deskbound. Unlike most of the twenty-six other BSLPD officers holed up on the Old Spanish Trail, Stepro didn’t hail from the Gulf South. His father had been with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Detachment, so Stepro grew up in such disparate locales as Ohio, Okinawa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Thailand, Indiana, and Kentucky. He worked for the corrections department in Louisville, Kentucky, for twelve years, but he fell in love with a Mississippi woman and moved to Hancock County.

  That marriage didn’t work out, but Stepro rebounded quickly. He de
veloped a crush on Laura Lachin, a Waveland cop thirteen years younger than he. With her shoulder-length brown hair and green eyes, Lachin was tough and unassuming. After graduating from the University of South Florida with a degree in criminology-sociology, she joined the Waveland Police Department. Everybody in the county knew, liked, and respected her. Eventually David proposed. They got married at a Louisiana plantation and moved to a cottage house on Leopold Street in Bay St. Louis. You couldn’t have found a happier couple. “We were both police and that helped our marriage,” she recalled. “We’ve both worked Narcotics, understood what late nights meant. We were on the same wavelength.”13

  As Katrina took aim, both David and Laura Stepro determined that they were going to stay on duty. First, they had to drop their Great Dane off at the Arcadian Grill on Highway 90, where a friend would take care of him. Laura bought a blue heavy-duty raincoat at Wal-Mart. The couple would be separated during the storm, David at the BSLPD headquarters on the Old Spanish Trail and Laura at the Waveland headquarters on Highway 90. But they had cell phones, and if those went out, they could stay in touch by radio dispatch. It was a sensible game plan. The only problem was that Katrina wasn’t a sensible storm.

  On Monday morning, things had turned topsy-turvy at the Waveland police station. Because the brick headquarters was nearly two miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, Laura and the other Waveland officers felt immune from Katrina’s ravages. They had patrolled Waveland until 4 A.M., when the winds increased threefold. They then holed up at the station, ready to emerge again to help rescue folks when the storm passed. At least that was Chief Jim Varnell’s plan. But as Laura told David on the radio around seven that morning, the station was flooding. They were going to evacuate to the Coast Inn and Suites farther up on Highway 90. The Waveland police had real doubts whether they would all survive the ordeal. “We thought the roof might blow off,” twenty-five-year-old officer Michael Prendergast recalled, “but the building survived Camille and we didn’t expect flooding. But the water started pouring in like mad. We were just flushed out of the building.”14

  Often the Waveland police, both on and off duty, would meet for po’-boys at Beningo’s in Bay St. Louis, which was almost a mini-museum to Hurricane Camille. On the restaurant’s brick wall, in fact, was a crevice with a sign posted next to it that read, “Camille Crack, August 17th 1969.” Surrounding it were newspaper articles from the New Orleans States-Item and a poster that read, “This Property Is Condemned.” But many of the Waveland police had been born after Camille, and they tended to admire the harpoon and redfish taxidermy at Beningo’s more than the hurricane memorabilia. So they were all the more astonished on August 29 when the water kept rising, filling the police station in only an hour. All the buildings near them, like Daddy O’s Café and Grill across the highway and the Cycle Barn Harley-Davidson dealership, were collapsing. When the Pepsi machine at the station started floating, the officers feared the tall blue water tower near the station might come tumbling down on them. By the time Chief Varnell decided to evacuate headquarters, all twenty-nine members of the Waveland police were in the ice-cold water of the fierce storm surge, struggling not to drown. Everybody scrambled for their lives.

  Washed out of the headquarters, Laura Stepro, along with fourteen other Waveland officers, looked for something to anchor onto. Yards away from Highway 90 was an ugly, flimsy tree, a tall bush really, that looked like the leftover orphan shrub at a Kmart garden center—Officer Prendergast later referred to it as that “butt-ugly bush.” Desperate not to be swept away with the current, the fifteen officers clung to the branches of this bush for three or four hours. “We wanted to make it across Highway 90, which had become a river,” fifty-six-year-old Glen Volkman recalled. “But we settled for the tree.”15

  Keeping her cool, even though she thought she was about to drown, Laura put a foot in a crook of the bush, and then, after a few failed attempts, stuck her other foot in another. She clung on for dear life. What an odd sight it must have been: police officers clinging to a bush in the middle of a river, only one snap of a branch away from death. In Katrina lore these washed-out officers became known as “the Tree Cops of Waveland.” Other police officers and staff climbed atop an elevated generator on the southeastern side of the building and made it to the roof. “The combination of the wind and water left us freezing,” thirty-three-year-old Israel Neff recalled. “Many of us developed hypothermia.”16 When the winds died down, they noticed that both the water tower and the flagpole were still standing. Their headquarters, however, was gone, all the radios and computers and file cabinets washed away. “I didn’t have time to worry too much about my husband,” Stepro said. “We were trying to stay alive.”17

  III

  Along the coast, twenty-nine-year-old Michael Veglia and four buddies—Alex Coomer, Ronnie Williams, Chris Stephens, and Joey Lee—were trapped in a prefabricated house on Edna Street, midway between the waterfront and Highway 90. The aluminum-sided ranch house was owned by Stephens; everything inside was both cheap and new. A gully ran in front and sometimes in the spring, when the rains came, it would fill up, perfect for catching frogs and crawfish. Veglia had spent Sunday at his father’s popular bar, the Knock-Knock Lounge on Highway 90, moving equipment like pool tables, beer kegs, and the jukebox out of harm’s way. As water filled the Edna Street house on Monday morning, Veglia and the other young men dove into the ten-foot-high floodwater. They started swimming down the 1400 block of Waveland Avenue, hoping to find dry land. Eventually, they came upon a small house where the porch was not yet flooded. They clambered onto it, even if it offered only temporary safety. All around them pine trees and TV antennas were snapping, causing what Veglia called “the scariest damn noises I ever heard in my life.”18

  As they were resting on the porch, shivering from the cold floodwater, fearful for their own lives, they noticed somebody peeking out behind the window shades inside the house. When Veglia and his friends turned to look, the shade dropped down. They heard a woman inside screaming, “What they doin’, what they doin’ out there?” Within minutes the waters flooded the porch, blowing the front door off its hinges. Inside the house, a terrified African-American family screamed for help. A rattled grandfather started pleading with the five white strangers, “Save my babies, save my babies.”19 Veglia and his buddies waded inside the sinking house, trying not to be knocked down as water continued to gush in. Besides the old man there were his wife (Grandma) and his daughter and her two children, around eight or nine. If somebody didn’t think quickly, they were all going to perish. Realizing that the porch would flood soon, they all climbed into a nearby tree. “We used this as our base until we could figure out what to do next,” Veglia recalled. “We looked after the family but were nervous.” That’s when twenty-seven-year-old Coomer spotted a boat, which had slammed into a trailer across Waveland Avenue. Perhaps, he thought, they could get it started, or, at the very least, use it to stay afloat. Coomer and Williams plunged back into the dark water and swam toward the crashed twenty-foot boat. Quickly, they rummaged around the marooned vessel and grabbed ten life jackets and float cushions. They made their way back to the tree, where Veglia, Stephens, and Lee were trying to protect the family. They fastened the life jackets onto the women and children, none of whom could swim, and all of whom were trembling. As the young men surveyed the flooded street, they would see neighbors pop out of rooftop attics like jack-in-the-boxes, crying for help. An entire family right behind the house with the porch did, in fact, drown that very afternoon in Katrina’s floodwaters. Waveland Avenue, a two-lane road the five men had known so well, was terra incognita.

  Luckily for Veglia and his group of nine castaways, a pine tree had fallen nearby between two ancient oaks. It formed the only potential safe haven on the block, a tree-house-like bench twelve feet above the flood. As they let the swift current take them to the horizontal pine, the wind was still treacherous, but eventually they all clambered onto the log. It offered their first re
spite.

  After a few hours, when the winds died down a little, they made their most daring move. Veglia and Coomer ventured across Waveland Avenue with ropes. They then carried the two children to the rope and instructed them to cling to it, pulling themselves along as if on a conveyor belt. In a similar manner, they all then advanced up Waveland Avenue using the rope for balance. They repeated this process a number of times, moving along telephone pole by telephone pole, before they finally came to a flooded apartment complex. The first floor was underwater, but there was a second-floor balcony, a patch of concrete above the raging waters. Slowly, but surely, they all made it safely to the outdoor stairs and then up to the balcony. There they huddled together for two hours, hoping to survive the storm’s end, praying this wasn’t the quietus.

  All five of these young Mississippians, a couple of them great-great-grandchildren of Confederate soldiers, were true citizen-heroes. Although Mississippi had earned a reputation for outdated Jim Crow racism toward blacks, here in 2005 were five white men risking their lives for a black family unknown to them. “I would have done that for anybody,” Williams later recalled. “I didn’t dream water could come that fast. The whole damn Gulf Coast was underwater.”20

  Veglia, when telling their story, was extremely concerned that he wasn’t portrayed as more heroic than the others. “Sure,” he said. “We acted fast. Just make it clear that we acted as a team.”21

  IV

  Like the Veglia gang, fifty-three-year-old Hardy Jackson of Biloxi suddenly found himself floating in the water along with fallen branches and refrigerators and garage doors. “Everything happened suddenly,” Jackson recalled. “We were drinking coffee, I was pacing about scared to death, and I grabbed a hammer, stuck it in my pants just in case we were forced to the attic.” Jackson and his wife, Tonette, had evacuated their two children who still lived at home, but had chosen to stay behind to defend their rented house. The powerful surge forced its way through the Herndenheim Street home, just a block from the Gulf, creating a thunderous roar. “It was a big house,” Jackson later explained. “And water just kept filling her up. Then a wave came and almost cut the house in two. First we headed into my daughter’s bedroom. Then we headed to the attic. I punched a hole in the roof. I looked out of an air vent and saw our house was flooding.”22