Waveland, Miss. – When Beau Kring pulled into the Kmart parking lot in this devastated town two days after Hurricane Katrina had flooded his family’s home, it was because it seemed inviting. It was because it was flat and dry.
There was already another extended family camping there – a couple with three children, their parents, a brother and his family. Eleven more people. Three more destroyed homes.
A member of the Mississippi National Guard, Kring put up an American flag almost out of habit. He took a discarded piece of plywood and spray-painted a name that could be seen from the highway: Camp Katrina.
That was enough to start it all: a symbol of resilience and a sense of place.
“In the Army, that’s what you do. You go someplace, you hoist a flag,” said Kring, whose home is awash in mud.
The parking lot is within a mile of the Mississippi coast hardest hit by the hurricane, facing U.S. 90 and along a section of devastated communities that include Waveland, Bay Saint Louis and Clermont Harbor.
Shelters are bursting. People are doing whatever they can, including creating a place to start over in a parking lot full of shattered glass and abandoned cars.
Cutting across class and race, the camp’s residents all have something in common – they’ve lost everything. Whatever shape the rest of their lives will take, it will start now.
The flag brought some people in. As word spread, others came because they had no place else to go. Some started by laying a blanket out on the asphalt. Others stepped through the shattered doors of the Kmart and grabbed tents, blankets, even clotheslines.
After the first day or so, emergency personnel figured it was a good place to drop supplies, so Camp Katrina became an informal distribution center, which drew still more people.
A cardboard sign out front charts the camp’s population. Two days out, it had 40 residents. By Thursday, the number had grown to 65. Though it’s shrunk as some families have left the area, each day others arrive.
Some evacuees here are squatting in shattered apartment buildings or inside devastated strip malls. Others have turned abandoned hotels into makeshift shelters.
A doctor working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency called the conditions “a disgrace” and feared they could potentially lead to outbreaks of cholera, even typhoid.
The residents of Camp Katrina have had to squeeze the needs of day-to-day life out of a destroyed community. They take showers and wash clothes under a broken pipe in the Kmart’s garden department. A church group dropped off a few couches. They scavenge for basic necessities: Underwear. Detergent. A comb.
And they watch out for one another.
Patricia Jarrell had a mastectomy of her left breast so recently that she still needed daily bandage changes. Her husband, Floyd, has emphysema and heart troubles.
One man’s foot became so infected that it swelled up to the size of melon. To get him help, desperate camp residents managed to flag down an ambulance piloted by Kim Schmitt, who had driven 20 hours from Memphis to join the emergency effort.
Camp Katrina became her cause.
She and her partner, Jillian Corso, began making daily visits. They found that because the site wasn’t an official shelter, it was difficult to get prescription drugs for its residents, including desperately needed antibiotics.
Schmitt and Corso pressed hard and finally got county officials to designate the Kmart parking lot an official shelter, opening the way for a more consistent flow of medical care.
Slowly more resources have begun to trickle in. A church group set up a portable kitchen on one end of the parking lot by midweek. Thursday, the portable toilets arrived.
As the days pass, residents have tried to regain a sense of normalcy to their lives.
But there was a welling anger that FEMA hadn’t arrived to begin assessing damaged homes and arrange temporary housing beyond the tents, canopies and cars that made up the living quarters at Camp Katrina.
“FEMA wants you to call and make an appointment to look at our destroyed homes. I can’t call FEMA. There are no phones. There’s no communication. I’m in a parking lot,” said Vicky Strong, who has been sleeping in a tent with her three children in Camp Katrina since last Tuesday.
Her plea was answered almost as soon as she spoke. Monday morning, a week after the hurricane struck, several days after most people arrived here, FEMA unloaded a single, multiperson tent in the Kmart parking lot.
“At least it’s something,” Strong said.
Staff writer Michael Riley can be reached at 303-820-1614 or mriley@denverpost.com.