Waveland, Miss. – Walking along the main street, it’s hard to see the town in resident Orville Ferrell’s mind. Just over there, he says, pointing insistently, was Ricky’s, which packed in seafood lovers from miles around. Over there was a real-estate office. Just past city hall was a little place that sold antiques.
Ferrell is emphatic, giving details he believes will help conjure up the place. A story here. Some history there.
But after Hurricane Katrina, all of that is gone. In its place is a nest of uprooted trees, shorn lumber and a few fragments of people’s lives: A gate without a house. A rope swing wrapped around a fallen oak. Children’s toys.
In a town that prided itself on surviving the worst that the Gulf Coast could dish up, Katrina may be the storm that Waveland couldn’t ride out.
The hurricane leveled a quarter-mile swath from the beach to the railroad tracks. The post office, city hall and almost all of the main street are gone. Many houses farther inland are so badly damaged that they will have to be condemned, officials say.
It is the worst damage sustained by any community from the worst storm ever to hit this coast.
And though some vow to rebuild, many residents say the town of 7,000 they are leaving behind is dead.
Clayton Stieffel’s family has lived here for three generations. Now, his mother is going to Natchez, Miss.; his brother to Birmingham, Ala.; and he and his family will be leaving soon for Clearwater, Fla.
“I hate to say it, but I don’t think it’s going to recover,” the 44-year-old Stieffel said. “This storm just took (Waveland) right off the map.”
One of the locals’ most common responses to the scale of destruction here is utter surprise. And the most common reason for it is the fact that the town survived Camille, the devastating 1969 hurricane that until now had set the standard for the worst storm residents were ever likely to face.
Preparing for Katrina, locals took cars across the railroad tracks that bisect the town because water from the Gulf of Mexico had never made it that far, and many decided it was safe to stay in their houses if they were still standing after Camille passed.
Often, the decision was a mistake.
Though a total death count for the area hasn’t been released, at least 40 deaths have been tallied in surrounding Hancock County.
Search-and-rescue officials say the toll will certainly go much higher.
For Pauline Conaway, there had been so many previous storms and so many false alarms that when the warning about Katrina came, she and her husband thought about riding it out. When they finally did leave, all she took was dirty laundry – something she could do while waiting out the storm in Jackson, Miss., farther inland.
Sitting on an empty lot Saturday, her head in her hands, Conaway was amazed at the capriciousness of a storm that could slice her house right off its foundation. Her attic was on the railroad tracks a quarter-mile away, Christmas decorations still inside. A plastic pool slide survived. So did a whiskey bottle.
“It just doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
Conaway, though she’d been here 16 years, was a relative newcomer. She remembers Fourth of July fireworks on the beach, one of the many places where people were building luxurious homes and paying high prices for gorgeous seaside views.
Daniel Bowens, 55, had lived in Waveland all his life, across the tracks in a neighborhood of low-slung houses and minimum-wage paychecks.
When Katrina came, he escaped out a back window just as the storm surge flooded the front room. He survived by climbing on the roof, then wading to safety. Along the way, he found two dead neighbors, a mother and a son.
With no money and no way to communicate with relatives outside southern Mississippi, Bowens has been living with a half- dozen other residents in the drive-through lane of a deserted bank.
They sleep on mattresses that Bowens says they looted from a nearby furniture store, like his new white sneakers. They’re the only clothes he owns that aren’t ruined.
If he can raise the money, Bowens said he’ll go to his sister’s place in Louisiana. He won’t come back to Waveland.
“I’ve learned my lesson,” Bowens said.
Many residents say that even if Waveland does rise from the rubble, it won’t be the same town. Developers have been pushing for more large-scale developments here: high-rise condos and luxury boat marinas.
With most of the town’s historic landmarks gone, residents say, there is nothing to stand in their way.
The ones who have been through it or who know the history – Betsy, Camille and the famous hurricane of ’47 – shake their heads at the idea that a voracious appetite for beachfront property may start the whole cycle over again.
At least one long-timer plans to stay – but under one condition.
Brian Mollere’s family goes back generations here. His 80- year-old mother drowned in the storm. Just days after Mollere’s house was destroyed, he was back at the same spot, camping under a mud-splattered canopy, with a cooler of cold beer at his side.
“This is home. I know everybody who passes. I could go to some air-conditioned building, but it wouldn’t be as comfortable.”
And his plan now?
“I’ll put a nice camping trailer out here with a nice truck. And if they say ‘storm,’ I’m gone.”
230,000
Number of evacuees taken to Texas, where Gov. Rick Perry ordered preparations for airlifting some to other states because Texas is running out of room
90,000
Square miles of devastation, potentially an area larger than terrorists could affect with anything but the most lethal of weapons, homeland security officials say
$404 MILLION
Private donations to Katrina relief, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy
POST WIRE SERVICES
DEVELOPMENTS
New Orleans begins collecting and counting the dead. Louisiana’s death toll stands at 59, but officials expect it to rise into the thousands.
Police shoot and kill at least four people after gunmen open fire on a group of contractors.
Stress has overwhelmed some police officers in New Orleans. The city is offering vacations to emergency workers and their families.
Government officials escalate their criticism and debate over who was to blame for the problems plaguing the initial response. Perhaps the only consensus: The system failed.
