Katrina and the Mississippi Coast: The Forgotten Devastation

The storm made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, at six-ten in the morning on August twenty-ninth, two thousand five. By the time it reached the Mississippi coast, which it did within the hour, Katrina had generated a storm surge measured at twenty-seven to thirty-four feet in some areas. To understand what that means on flat coastal ground: it means the Gulf of Mexico moved inland for miles. It moved through houses, through businesses, through anything that had been built within reach of it.

Pass Christian, chartered in eighteen forty-eight, lost the overwhelming majority of its structures in a single morning. Long Beach, Bay Saint Louis, Waveland, and Biloxi sustained comparable losses. The Mississippi coast's total death toll and proportional destruction were comparable to those of New Orleans. The difference was that New Orleans had the photographs, the Superdome, the flooded streets that television could frame and repeat. The Mississippi coast had a different kind of loss, the kind where the buildings are simply gone, where there is nothing left to photograph.

The Vietnamese fishing families of Bayou la Batre, across the border in Alabama, lost boats and gear they had spent decades acquiring. Low-income neighborhoods of Biloxi that had been excluded from casino prosperity for years were the least equipped to absorb or recover from the surge. The uninsured homeowners of Pass Christian had nowhere to appeal.

The casino industry on the Mississippi Gulf Coast rebuilt within months. It had political connections, insurance coverage, and capital. Many residential neighborhoods rebuilt much more slowly, or in some places not at all. Seventeen years after the storm, the gap between what was rebuilt and what was not remained visible on the ground.