Biloxi residents still recovering from Katrina

Toussaint Losier

In hindsight, L.C. and Sylvia McCray say they should have left their home in East Biloxi before Katrina hit.

But they didn’t, largely because their house, nestled between the Back Bay to the north and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, survived Hurricane Camille in 1969.

They thought they could ride this one out too, despite National Weather Service warnings that southern Mississippi faced “devastating” damage from approaching Hurricane Katrina.

As it turned out, the Weather Service was right. “Camille was bad,” said Sylvia McCray. “But not as bad as Katrina. Katrina had a lot of tornadoes in it. That water come in so fast. Nothing but straight water. Water. Water. Water. That water had to be real powerful to move boats. And the way these houses done got picked up off the foundation. Split, busted all loose. Not just taking the roof here or there, but taking a whole house.”

Though it was not as strong as Camille, Katrina was wider, pounding the coastline for a longer period of time. Where Camille brought a record 24-foot storm surge, Katrina hit the Gulf coast at high tide, with high winds and a 30-foot surge. Though New Orleans has received the bulk of attention, small towns like Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis and small cities like Gulfport and Biloxi bore the full brunt of the storm as well, prompting one newspaper to call the stretch of land, “Mississippi’s Invisible Coast.”

According to local officials, nearly every home in East Biloxi went under water. Over 5,000 homes have been reported destroyed and another 2,500 uninhabitable. Little more than half of the residents have returned to the area, and most of them live in cramped FEMA trailers.

L.C. and Sylvia McCray are two of them.

“At the time, there was about four or five people that we knew personally that died,” McCray said. “Just in that one day. It was bodies laying all over the streets a couple days after because they didn’t come and pick ‘em up and stuff. A lot of people they found were drowned in the house. A lot of handicap people in wheelchairs drowned. A lot of children drowned. A lot of them still missing.”

In Biloxi, over fifty people have been reported killed as a result of the storm. Statewide, thousands are listed as missing.

“It was just real hard, just like the first four or five days. That was terrible right there. Because you had all this sticky stuff on everything. You couldn’t bathe. No water, no lights, no nothing. It was really hard. And you had to get all this stuff out because after the second day it went to smelling. You had to hurry up and get it out if you didn’t want that mold to get in here,” said Mrs. McCray.

“Next time, I would not stay here,” she said. “I have a hard time sleeping now. A lot of depression, a lot of stress.”

Some of that stress, she explained, has eased since a work crew from a Presbyterian church in Knoxville, Tenn. has twice visited to help her family rebuild. Like many in the neighborhood, the McCray family has relied on faith-based volunteer groups to assist in the recovery.

While the McCrays only have the flooring and paint jobs remaining, much of Biloxi still bares the hurricane’s scars. The storm surge wiped clean this resort casino coastline.

Six months later, only foundations remain of beachfront mansions, hotels, restaurants, and gas stations. Only recently has work begun on the gambling barges that Katrina broke from their moorings and swept miles down the coast.

“The fact that the storm did so much damage on the beach and the casinos, I figured, God is whooping somebody,” continued Mrs. McCray. “He’s very angry, he don’t want this here, see. He took all of them but three that I know of. Now they are talking about bringing it on land. So I’m thinking, he’s really angry now, because they’re not doing what he’s saying.”

In the aftermath of Katrina, the Mississippi State Legislature has allowed casinos to build on land where they had earlier been relegated to water. “Now they’re trying to turn [Biloxi] into a big old city like Las Vegas and I don’t like Las Vegas,” said Mrs. McCray. “This is greed. And it’s power and it’s politics.”

Many residents in East Biloxi are concerned that long time residents will lose their damaged homes to the city and their land to new casino construction. Through the East Biloxi Coordination and Relief Center, Councilor Bill Stallworth has been working to block the loss of residential homes to eminent domain and delay for one to two years FEMA’s proposed home elevation regulations calling for many structures to be raised higher, making many homes virtually unaffordable.

However, Stallworth warned that the biggest threat to the community is land grabs by condominium developers seeking to build pricey high rises. “Condos prey on people who are not able to rebuild, either because they have no money or no home or too little money to rebuild.”

As much as 82 percent of Stallworth’s district did not have flood insurance and those with other forms of coverage have seen their claims denied.

For the McCray family, this meant that the insurance coverage they had paid for the past thirty-nine years only paid out a couple thousand dollars to cover damage to their roof. Mississippi’s Attorney General and other lawyers are suing larger insurers for refusing to cover damage from Katrina’s storm surge.

Councilman Stallworth emphasized that local residents face an uphill battle: “It’s a process. We are rebuilding a whole town. At most we anticipate that it will take five to ten years. But hopefully we can have things back to normal in two years.”

Thus far, an estimated twenty-five hundred homes have been cleaned. Though residents receive support from volunteer groups, there is a constant need for building materials.

Though some residents have received recovery money from FEMA, it has been nowhere near the $20,000 per home Stallworth estimated necessary to rebuild. The U.S. House of Representative recently passed a bill that included $4.2 billion in Community Development Block Grants for the Gulf Coast, but the measure will not be voted on in the Senate until May 9. In the mean time, many of those who left East Biloxi are reluctant to return without affordable housing and quality jobs.

Mrs. McCray put it plainly: “The people that’s really gonna suffer is the one’s that earn fifteen thousand, twenty thousand, twenty-five thousand a year. They are going to have to have at least two jobs each to survive. If they don’t have a home or at least something they can call home, I don’t see them surviving. Everybody else in my family was renting, you see what I’m saying. Is they gonna come back? I don’t see that happening.”

Those interested in assisting recovery efforts in East Biloxi can contact the East Biloxi coordinator and Relief Center at (228) 435-7180. Donations can be sent to the at the Greater St. John AME Church, 511 Division Street, Biloxi, MS, 39530.