August 29 was the 20th anniversary of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. A lot of people have heard stories about what happened in New Orleans after Katrina. This is another Katrina story. This is a story about what happened after a Category 5 storm passed over Mississippi.
The situation in Mississippi was desperate. Few people remember that the state of Florida sent over 6,000 state and local employees and spent $180 million in state funds on the Mississippi response to Katrina. Craig Fugate, the former FEMA Administrator under President Barack Obama, spoke about Florida’s contribution to Mississippi at the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans in April.
I was one of those 6,000 who worked at the direction of the Florida Area Command at the Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Miss. As a state employee, I worked with Fugate from 1999 through 2009, when he left the State of Florida to become the FEMA administrator. I learned a lot from Craig. We both learned a lot in 2004-2005, when Florida was hit by eight hurricanes in 16 months, with four coming in six weeks.
I arrived at Stennis on Sept. 2, 96 hours after Katrina’s impact. A quick survey revealed that the county south of Interstate 10 was covered with storm surge muck, a mixture of sewage, chemicals, and decaying sea life. Dazed survivors gathered at intact structures and struggled to cook meals, while children slept on the ground nearby. National Guard vehicles in a hotel parking lot worked in the stench to remove thousands of dead crabs. Amid such devastation I tried to find immediate solutions. The first thing that I could think of was to order cots so that the survivors would not have to sleep on the ground.
We requisitioned supplies through our State Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. These supplies were delivered to Stennis and distributed throughout the six southern counties of Mississippi. I coordinated with the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, who were distributing hot meals in southern Mississippi from Southern Baptists’ field kitchens. As the trucks of food arrived, loaded with canned meat, vegetables and fruits, I redirected them to the various field kitchen sites.
I met an elderly man in Hancock County crossing the street to one of our distribution sites. I asked him if that was his house across the street and he said, “Yes.”
“Were you here during the storm?” I asked him.
The man nodded his head and told his story of how he and his wife crawled to the roof of their house as the storm surge rose and clung there against the winds as the eye of Katrina passed over them.
“Why didn’t you evacuate?” I asked.
“The water never got this high during Camille,” he responded.
The water never got this high during Camille. I heard about the penalty of Camille many times during my stay. Camille made landfall in Hancock County on August 17, 1969, as a Category 5 hurricane. The inland extent of storm surge is based on many factors, some of which are unique to each storm and the geography of the impacted coastline. Many of the inhabitants of southern Mississippi based their actions on their past experiences with Camille and had to confront the new reality brought by Katrina.
At the National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans last April, we digested a new reality of future catastrophes, at a time and place to be named later, in which the federal government would play a reduced role. Fugate suggested that the future may be a world of states helping states, like Florida helped Mississippi.
I agree with Craig. We are moving back to the emergency management world as it was before Katrina. More disasters are coming, and in those disasters, the waters are going to get a lot higher than Camille’s. We need to be ready to work with each other, neighbor to neighbor, community to community, and state to state, with or without the federal government’s assistance.
Michael Whitehead, an Orlando native, is a planning integration manager at the American Red Cross national headquarters. Prior to joining the Red Cross, Michael was the state mass care coordinator in Florida for 15 years.
