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Harrowing
Katrina's wrath a harrowing ordeal for residents of Mississippi town
By DREW JUBERA
Cox News Service
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
PASS CHRISTIAN, Miss. — This pretty little beachside town of antebellum homes and ancient live oaks was the tragic postcard in 1969 for Hurricane Camille, when 13 members of the same family drowned inside the Trinity Episcopal Church.
That same church, rebuilt, was destroyed Monday by Katrina. So was almost all of Pass Christian, which took the hurricane's full fury, just as it did 36 years ago when Camille's eye passed through.
On Tuesday, several people walked the town's blown-apart streets — a hollowed-out bank, a house squatting in the middle of the railroad tracks, a business district reduced to a hillock of splinters and bent steel — with crosses they saved from the church's rubble.
With the devastation here so thorough, and two people so far confirmed dead, the rebuilding of Pass Christian (pronounced Crist-ee-ANN), a town of 6,600 about 10 miles west of Gulfport, is an open question.
"My poor little street is wiped off the map," said Arthur Morgan, 56, a semi-retired carpenter. "I wanna cry. I really do. I'm trying to hold up."
People here, hardened to hurricanes, are shook. A circa-1860 bed and breakfast, which withstood Camille, was washed clean away, the body of one of four people who stayed inside during the storm covered Tuesday afternoon with a thin white sheet in what was the back yard.
"This is worse than Camille," said Elizabeth Kowalski, 82, who has lived here all her life and whose home was leveled by Katrina. "We had a house left after Camille. I never thought I'd come home and not have anything left but the clothes on my back."
Every street in Pass Christian told a different story, each as harrowing as the tales passed down about Camille.
Craig Nicaise, 21, a Pass Christian police officer, waited out the storm inside the public library with 12 other town cops. They noticed about a dozen of their police cars circling the building on a current of water. Then one crashed through the front door, made of glass able to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.
Water poured in and rose quickly. When the back glass door wouldn't open, the officers pulled their guns and fired at least 50 rounds into it, before it shattered. They each then grabbed a cable line and climbed onto the roof, where they spent the next three hours in 130 mile-an-hour winds.
"We lost every patrol car," said Nicaise. "We still haven't found some. They're probably in the Gulf somewhere."
Asked more about the experience in the library, Nicaise choked up, his eyes tearing, and walked away.
Later, fellow officer Rebecca Ruspoli, 51, said of the ordeal, "It was very frightening. It puts things in perspective. I lost my personal vehicle, the department vehicle, my home. But I'm alive. I didn't drown, I thought I was going to. What can you say?"
A hundred yards from where the police were on the library roof, three other people were clinging to vines wrapped around a tall live oak. They'd been staying at the Harbor Oaks Inn, a stunning three-story hotel with six white columns built 30 feet above the beach in 1860
"I was on the second floor when I saw the house coming down from the front, and when it got to where I couldn't go anymore, a wall pinned me against a tool chest," said Mark Noller, one of four people, including the husband-and-wife owners, inside during the storm.
Noller's wife, Darlene, kicked the tool chest away from her husband, and the two of them, along with one of the owners, climbed out a window and hugged the live oak. The three of them stayed like that for over three hours, unaware that most of the town's police force was trapped on a nearby roof.
"We all knew we were going to die," said Mark, who worked at the inn with his wife, and came there not trusting the doublewide they live in about 20 miles north.
The two were picking the hotel's silver service out of rubble Tuesday.
"Holding that tree for 3¸ hours, all I could think is, 'Is this ever going to end?' "
When the storm surge dropped, the three rode a debris pile down to what they hoped was the ground. The last time they saw the fourth person in the house was as he went out a window. His body was found Tuesday about 50 feet away.
In a subdivision less than a half-mile from the beach, whole houses were missing, as if picked up by a tidy hand and stored away. Front stairs still stood, leading up to nothing. A car sat parked under what was a carport and now was nothing. No roof, no house, no walls, nothing. The houses later were spotted more than 100 yards away.
"I don't know where these came from," said Felicia Wiley, tilting her head toward her back yard, where three houses bunched together.
Wiley and Russell George sat on the the front porch of their damaged house. They'd run to their attic with their three-legged dog in the middle of the storm as water rose from floor to ceiling in less than an hour. When it started rushing into the attic, George pulled out a pocket knife and started cutting through the roof.
"She said, 'What the hell are you doing?' " recalled George, who just hacked away until he had a hole they could crawl through. "If I'd known better, I would keep an ax up there."
The water stopped rising before they had to evacuate. But Wiley poked her head through the hole and looked around.
"I couldn't see anything but roofs," she said of the water that submerged everything for as far as she could see.
Asked about the night, George, 60, shook his head.
"Want to know what it was like? She proposed to me in the middle of it."
"We'd always said, 'We don't need to do that,' added Wiley, 35, who is George's longtime companion. "But we do need to do that. When this kind of thing hits, you realize what's valuable in life."
Some here doubt that the town can ever rebuild; it took almost 20 years for some businesses to recover from Camille, and this looks more daunting to them.
Yet others say surviving this kind of disaster is in Pass Christian's DNA.
"I think this town is resilient, industrious and intent on rebuilding," said Robert Padilla, 35, whose financial planning office downtown was destroyed.
Padilla was born in Pass Christian four months before Camille hit. He's not leaving.
"It's what you get for living in paradise," he said.
Drew Jubera writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution