The Great Deluge
Page 20
The wind pounded Jackson’s head, causing severe damage to his eardrums. “It felt like somebody had stuck a screwdriver in my ears,” he recalled. “It was awful, awful pain.” Desperately, he tried to keep the flood from dragging his wife out of his grasp. They had been an inseparable team for twenty-eight years, raising four children together. His “full glass,” he used to call her. Life without her would be empty. “She told me, ‘You can’t hold me. Just take care of the kids and the grandkids,’” he said. Those were her last words. “I was going to save my wife. She came up out of the water and I grabbed her by the wrist.” The water rose over her eyes and then swept her away like debris; her outstretched arms shot up convulsively, waving stiff-fingered hands in the air as if to say good-bye.23
Hardy started hollering. All he could think was that somehow, for some reason, this was part of some divine plan. As he watched his wife float away, all he could scream was “Oh Lord, please no!” Then like an incantation that never ended, he kept hollering, “Oh Lord, why? Why? Why?”24
Tonette Jackson’s waterlogged body was found days later.
For most victims of Katrina, the wind was horrifying, but it was the storm surge that struck with cobralike suddenness. At Ralph and Joan Dagnell’s house in Bay St. Louis, the water rose 15 feet in just a half hour. When Ralph Dagnell, an electrical engineer, designed this house in 1969, he specifically built it to be hurricane-proof, specifying among other things reinforced concrete for the walls. Ralph and Joan lived at the house, gardening and taking care of their thirty-four-year-old pony. In anticipation of Hurricane Katrina, the Dagnells’ daughter and her husband joined them in the house, believing it to be safe from the storm. An hour after Katrina struck Bay St. Louis, however, the water ripped the house apart. Slashing waves instantly separated the four family members. The daughter and her husband were each caught in the high branches of trees. Somehow, the pony survived too. Ralph and Joan Dagnell drowned along the coastline they loved, on the worst day it has ever known.25
Flooding had biblical antecedents. Children learn the story of Noah’s ark from Genesis: a kindly Old Testament bearded man with a curved cane brought two of every animal species on his wooden vessel and floated away in Dr. Dolittle fashion. Then there was Moses parting the Red Sea, made memorable by Charlton Heston, or the passing over the River Jordan. Great floods sent by God as a divine act of retribution were part of the human mythology worldwide. There was Matsya in the Puranas of Hinduism, and Utnapishtim survives such a deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh. In Greek mythology, Zeus sent a flood to end the Bronze Age, and in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf there is also a flood. The Incas had Hurracan, who caused a great flood, while in ancient Chinese mythology a goddess, Nuwa, “fixed” a “broken” sky after widespread flooding. But there was nothing storybook or mythological about the flooded streets of Bay St. Louis and Waveland. These were rivers of death, the pale rider or the grinning skull of the Styx ferryman, translated into a mortuary roll where victims were slowly tortured by incremental rising water, gasping for air—like Tonette Jackson or the Dagnells. No Noah’s ark or River Jordan or parting of the Red Sea.
Eventually the lungs of the drowning victims filled up like water balloons and then burst, which started the quick course of decomposition. What the mythic flood stories don’t convey is the reality of decomposing flesh, a process that is accelerated when a body is waterlogged. Decomposing tissue emits a gas that causes the skin to blister and turn greenish-blue. The abdomen swells, the tongue protrudes, and blood from the lungs comes flushing out of the mouth, nostrils, and eyes. A hideous, repugnant, rotten-egg stench, caused by the release of the methanelike gas, permeates the dead skin, making it especially awful for those who found the corpses after Katrina.
V
At 5:30 A.M. on August 29, electrical power went out in the Fire Dog Saloon in Bay St. Louis. Nick Breazeale’s cell phone, amazingly, was still operable. Then it, too, went silent. The bar manager was all alone. He couldn’t sleep in the all-pervasive darkness. He knew from the sound of the wind that this hurricane was no Camille or Ivan. It was even more violent. Looking out he saw automobiles lifting up on two wheels with every major gust. The thought of flying cars was too much to handle. His spirits sank. No more machismo. “I suddenly knew I had bitten off more than I could chew,” he told a Dallas reporter. “That’s when all the big plate-glass windows began blowing out of the bar front. Now the wind started whipping through the place and ripping crap apart. The roof also started disappearing in sections. It wasn’t very long, maybe fifteen minutes, when water started coming up.”26
Determined not to panic, to stay optimistic in this increasingly frightening atmosphere, Breazeale pretended that the foot of water in the Fire Dog was the result of drainage problems. He headed to the rear of the bar, but there was no escaping the water, which had blown out the bottom part of the back metal door. “Suddenly the water washed me clear across the room and back, on a quick in-and-out surge,” he went on. “The storm surge was now chest deep. Somehow I had to escape the building. I didn’t want to drown in there. The door was now completely gone. So when the out-surge came, I went out with it.”
Breazeale’s chances of survival weren’t much better outside. The entire town was swimming in seven or eight feet of water. He eyed his car floating down Main Street, spinning like a toy top. He himself floated and dog-paddled, surrounded by crushing debris. He kept pushing it away, worried that some heavy object would knock him out and cause him to drown. Light bits of flotsam must have already rammed his head, since whenever he wiped water off his face, there was blood on his hands. Debris had also smashed into his sides, breaking his ribs. “Then I watched the building next door just sort of fall,” he recalled. “It was Big Daddy’s, a popular bar. It just collapsed. This wall that was standing just fell over in one big piece. That’s probably what saved my ass, because it captured lots of debris. That kept more debris from coming in on me, and it also kept the debris that I was in from washing out when the water went down.”27
According to the National Hurricane Center, the eye of Katrina slammed its way through southeastern Mississippi between 8 and 10 A.M. Late in the morning, the winds finally died down and the floodwater was starting to recede into the Gulf of Mexico. There had been hours of misery for everyone in the region, but especially for those hunkered down, like the Waveland police and the Veglia gang. Nick Breazeale was caught under a pile of uprooted trees, shattered glass, mountains of mushy wood, and the orthopedic shoes of an old disabled man who lived across from the saloon. Miraculously a Disney-like Dalmatian roof ornament remained poised on top of the Fire Dog, oddly unscathed by the maelstrom. “I don’t know whether I was unconscious or not, but all of a sudden I heard the voices of two old ladies that live behind the Fire Dog,” Breazeale recalled. “I started yelling that I needed help. At first I didn’t get any response. But pretty soon these guys came over and pried and pulled and everything else and got me out of the debris. They put me on a stretcher thing and carried me back to City Hall. From there I went to Hancock Medical Center. I was in real bad shape.”28 (As for Henderson Point, home to Breazeale’s bosses, Greg Iverson and Sue Belchner, the condo complex was washed away.29)
During that miserable time when Breazeale was adrift, the Gulf Coast, according to the NHC, had been battered by a furious storm surge that reached as high as 30 feet. The winds had blown steadily at 125 mph, gusting to over 160. More than 8 inches of horizontal rain pelted down in twelve hours, sounding like a heavy Wyoming hailstorm. Nine out of Biloxi’s ten floating casinos were totally destroyed (the tenth was only partially intact).30 As if the hurricane’s rage wasn’t enough, it created weaponry consisting of millions of pounds of airborne debris, cleaved from beachside buildings and out of unlucky houses. From garbage-can lids to Ford 150 truck doors to Maytag refrigerators to 120-foot yachts, Katrina made shrapnel of everything. Many people died from head injuries after being hit by flying or floating objects. “If they’re dead,
they’re dead,” Gary Hargrove, coroner of Harrison County, Mississippi, stated bluntly in what was essentially the prevailing ethos of the week. “We’ve got the living to take care of.”31
The entire Gulf Coast region, from southeast Louisiana to Alabama, was declared a federal disaster area; an estimated 284,000 homes were destroyed.32 People in Mississippi who didn’t evacuate faced death or near-death experiences. From one disturbing instant to the next, over the course of eight or nine relentless hours, Katrina inflicted cruel punishment. No one could function at even half capacity after such an unnatural day, full of so many horrid ordeals. It was both exhausting and heartbreaking. Watching one’s own community drown and crumble caused disorienting passion fatigue. A collective numbness came over the surviving population as if they had been asked to inhale chloroform. A human mind can only stand so much grief before it cracks.
VI
With great determination, Bay St. Louis Mayor Eddie Favre sprang into action. His biggest concern was Hancock County’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) located in a county building downtown on Ulman Avenue. All sorts of local officials and volunteers had stayed there and he didn’t know how they had fared. The EOC building was less than a mile from the Old Spanish Trail police station, where Favre was stranded. He wondered whether the EOC was still standing. “Somehow I had to get to them,” he recalled.33
All the roads in Bay St. Louis looked as though somebody had dumped parts from a difficult home-assembly toy on the streets, bludgeoned them with a sledgehammer, and then opened the fire hydrants and the sewers. Police cars were of no use; they were flood-damaged anyway. Suddenly, Favre had a flash of inspiration. The only vehicle in Bay St. Louis that could plow through water was a county Public Works Department dump truck parked behind the police station. Favre asked Ron Vanney, the head of the town’s Public Works Department and a former Pascagoula shipyard foreman, to prepare the truck for action. The door on Favre’s passenger side wouldn’t close, but with Vanney at the wheel and the mayor riding shotgun, they rumbled toward downtown Bay St. Louis and the EOC. Vanney later called the gut-wrenching destruction he drove through as “shock and awe.” Usually when Bay St. Louis flooded from heavy rains the ditches would back up. That’s what happened during Camille. Katrina was, as he put it, “a whole different enchilada.”34 The Fire Dog was gone and so were all the rest of Favre’s and Vanney’s favorite haunts: Bookends Bookstore, Winn-Dixie, La Coffee Cafe, and KG’s Cajun Seafood and Poboys. The Bay-Waveland Yacht Club, where Favre sometimes held court, was in splinters. A quick glance indicated that his office on Court Street had been flooded out. According to a stranger they met on the roadside, Waveland, Bay St. Louis’s sister beachfront community, had been obliterated.
“We felt totally isolated,” Favre recalled. “No roads were open in or out of Bay St. Louis.” Bay St. Louis sits on the western side of St. Louis Bay, while historic Pass Christian was on the opposite, eastern shore. (Local lore pretends that during Camille the bay parted in biblical fashion.) The Highway 90 bridge across St. Louis Bay was toppled in the storm, as the water inside the bay became a drill, whittling out anything solid. Seeing that the bridge was gone made the full brutality of Katrina clear to Favre and Vanney. They just stared, slack-jawed, at the devastated bridge. Before long, people they encountered reported that three other nearby bridges were also destroyed. Even the NASA Stennis Space Center roads, usually offering a guaranteed and highly secure route out of harm’s way, were washed away. “Our dump truck reconnaissance mission told us that we better open up a shelter fast,” Favre recalled. “All those people who survived Katrina but lost a place were going to need a dry place to sleep. It was already noon. We had to think and act for ourselves. This was Bay St. Louis’s problem. I understood that FEMA and the federal government would eventually come to our aid, that President Bush would help us out in a couple days. But Katrina wasn’t his fault. Like in all natural disasters the first responders had to be the local and county officials. We went into action.”
Everywhere they looked, people were in trouble. To stay alive, they had hung on to anything that offered hope of survival. Because the railroad tracks were relatively high, many Bay St. Louisians, flooded out of their homes, clung to the track ties for dear life. While Favre and Vanney surveyed the damage from their truck and wrote down locations where people were stranded, Officer David Stepro was also taking action. Stepro had waited out the storm in the Old Spanish Trail station with his colleagues.
No sooner had the eye passed than Officer Stepro and his chief, Frank Griffith, hopped into a Jeep Cherokee and raced toward Waveland—or so they thought. Less than a quarter mile from the station the water was six to eight feet high. “You just couldn’t drive through the trees and power lines and water,” Griffith recalled. “It was impassable.” But Stepro wasn’t going to be thwarted. With the permission of his chief, he headed toward the EOC. Perhaps somebody there knew an open road to Waveland. It was a wise move, for suddenly in front of him like a mirage, there was an empty yellow school bus, the keys in the ignition. Officer Stepro commandeered the bus. He tried to start it, but it was coughing water. No luck. He tried to start it again. This time the motor took hold, spitting water out of the exhaust pipe, gradually emitting a throaty roar. He shifted the bus into gear and drove out of the parking lot. He headed straight for Highway 90 and the butt-ugly bush that was saving the Waveland cops. At the EOC he hooked up with Richard Fayard of American Medical Response. By the time they approached Waveland, the water was receding and, in front of them in the distance, they saw about fifteen people just standing on the road. They had on gray uniforms that looked torn and tattered like those of the defeated Confederate soldiers heading home in the movie Cold Mountain. Stepro cocked his head over the steering wheel, his nose almost touching the windshield, searching for his wife. And there she was in her blue rain gear.
David Stepro stopped the bus. Out the door he went, picking Laura up off the ground and swirling her around, a modern-day equivalent of the famous Alfred Eisenstadt photograph of a nurse and sailor kissing, taken in Times Square on a V-J Day in August 1945. They still had their lives together. The specter of death had vanished, and their hearts flooded over in joy. It was only then that Officer Stepro learned that the “Tree Cops of Waveland” were actually the “Shrub Cops of Highway 90.” It became a joke among them that the ugly shrub that they had intended to chop down as an eyesore just weeks earlier had become a sacred plant. “I am going to get a sampling from the bush’s roots,” Stepro said, “and plant one in our new front yard away from the Gulf of Mexico.”35
Quickly the Waveland officers boarded the bus. Many were bruised and cut. David Stepro drove the bus to the Hancock Medical Center about one mile down Highway 90. Along the way, he picked up dazed citizens who had abandoned their flooded homes and were looking for water and medical attention. Many had broken limbs, long gashes, or other injuries requiring serious care. The bus quickly filled. When it turned into the flooded parking lot of the Hancock hospital, nurses Sydney Saucier and Angie Gambino gazed at the filthy vehicle rolling toward them. “At first we thought, great, it’s a FEMA bus or something bringing us aid,” Gambino recalled. “But as it got closer to our emergency entrance door, we realized that wasn’t the case. People were longing for medical attention. That bus started a nonstop rush to our doors, as people walked toward us from all over, desperate for help.”36
Meanwhile, Favre and Vanney soon reached the EOC, or what was left of it. Half of the roof had blown off, and the ten-foot storm surge had filled the building up like a tub. “Many of the EOC folks thought they were going to die,” Favre recalled. “They wrote their names and Social Security numbers on their arms, so their bodies could be properly identified. I knew they were probably in bad shape.”37 Those inside eventually made their way through the water to safety in another building. Whatever destruction Katrina wrought on Mississippi Gulf Coast buildings, the psychological damage to the people was, from Mayor Favre’s
perspective, far greater. He saw many survivors wandering through the rubble unsure where to go or what to do. They were frayed zombies, Katrina survivors, in search of a hug.
On Monday afternoon, as Favre and Vanney drove about in the dump truck, thousands of Hancock County citizens were stranded on rooftops or in attics desperately screaming for help or sending out SOSs by waving sheets, homemade placards, towels, or pickaxes. They also lit fires and fired guns. The cell phone towers had all been knocked out, and the landlines were down, so communication was as primitive as a rag waved frantically by a person in trouble. The survivors whom Favre and Vanney picked up were the lucky ones. They had weathered Katrina and all of them had wild-eyed stories to tell. “My God,” thirty-four-year-old Dara Adano of Bay St. Louis exclaimed describing the sweeping damage. “Katrina obliterated the landscape. Roads were torn up like they were sheets of paper and buildings looked like a huge hammer had pounded them into rubble. It was a wasteland.”38 Throughout Mississippi Gulf Coast towns, in parking lots once jammed with fast-food drive-through traffic, only an occasional local emergency responder showed up. For four long post-Katrina days not a single federal first responder came to devastated Bay St. Louis. By Friday, September 2, federal police protection did finally arrive, followed by four law-enforcement groups from Orange County, Florida, who helped out for the next five weeks. The word was out that FEMA, the Red Cross, and other relief agencies were probably days from being able to turn cavalry. Mississippians—with the air help of the Coast Guard—were going to have to take care of themselves. “We knew we would have to pick ourselves up,” Favre recalled. “And guess what? We did. Or at least we’re trying to.”39