Katrina From the Outside by Jared Williams

My experience with hurricane Katrina has been a little different than most. On August 29th, 2005, I was living in Southern California, attending graduate school. I watched Katrina as I had watched several hurricanes in the past couple of years, with a feeling of disconnectedness and mild concern. My mother had left our house in Pascagoula to stay in Tallahassee and wait the storm out, and as one might imagine, hurricanes do not dominate the local news of Los Angeles.
So I watched this one as I had the past few, catching what I could online or on the Weather Channel, but paying more attention to papers that had to be written and assignments that had to be completed. An odd thing happened, however, and I knew Katrina would not be like other hurricanes. In our age of computer graphics and Doppler Radar, the electronic representation of a hurricane coming in from the Atlantic, roaming around in the Gulf of Mexico and inevitably hitting shore was an all-too-familiar sight. The storms hit land and work their way up towards Tennessee or North Carolina, eventually petering out into smallish tornadoes along the way.
Katrina did not do this. She hit the coast and stopped. My family moved to Pascagoula in 1980, and I had seen enough hurricanes to know that this was a bad sign. How can I describe my feelings? To begin with, I don’t think I have ever felt so useless in my entire life. The pixilated green swirl would not leave the map. It sat and twisted incessantly on the screen in that start-stop way, each reiteration representing another house blown down, another car pushed into a ditch, another levee breached. As horrible as it was and as helpless as I felt, however, these feelings of dread were mixed with a feeling of relief as well.
You see, when it comes to hurricanes, there are “stayers” and there are “leavers”. I think only people who live through hurricane after hurricane know this. Some people will always leave, and some will simply stay and ride the storm out. My mom has been a proud stayer in her twenty-five years of Gulf Coast living. Not because she was ignorant of the storm’s potential for destruction, but because the finances have simply never been there to pack up and live in a hotel for a few days at a moment’s notice.
This year, however, mostly due to the nagging of her fiancé, she chose to leave for safer ground. We kept in phone contact as much as possible and reported the rumors we could gather about our small town. New Orleans was in trouble and the Gulfport-Biloxi area had been ransacked, but there was little news regarding Pascagoula. The only pictures shown were of our beach front, of the slabs wiped clean of their houses and the road cracked and torn.
It was a blur, a nightmarish campaign that simply had to be false. Nothing could have wreaked the amount of devastation seen in those pictures, but I had no way to blow the whistle on this conspiracy and no way to confirm that it was real. I could only comb the internet and national news for any hint of what had happened to my town, and the information seemed tabloidish at best and exploitative at worst.
My friends around the globe who hail from Mississippi and Louisiana and I pooled what knowledge we could, but the truth revealed itself to be far worse than we could have imagined. The ensuing months afforded me the opportunity to finally see it all firsthand, and to hear the stories of disaster and hope from my neighbors and friends. That, however, is a blog for another day.