Of course, the storm came in on Monday the 29th of August. My awareness of it began while I was still on an economic trip to Japan. Little did I know that this hurricane that was about to hit the southern tip of Florida was going to come across into the Gulf and turn due north and hit us. That was the beginning of something I never thought I would go through in my life. Since Camille, we have annual hurricane practice every year since 1969. We had very serious practice for this hurricane. Katrina turned out to be totally different from Hurricane Camille. And so we'd been practicing for 20 years for a hurricane that didn't exist. We practiced for the wrong hurricane. And it was unbelievable. Dr. Mayfield called me on Saturday. He was the head of the National Weather Service and said, "Governor, this is going to be like no hurricane we've ever seen." I said, "It's going to be as bad as Camille." And he said, "It's going to be worse than Camille." He said, "What can I do to help you?" And I said, "You can do what you just told me, that this hurricane is going to be worse than Camille, because in Mississippi we understand what that means." And he did. He went on the air all day Sunday. The weather service said, "Worse than Camille, worse than Camille." And the reason that's very important is that we had had two hurricanes in the one the previous year and one earlier this year that Katrina came, and both of them right at the last had dodged off to the east. And so we were having a terrible response to our evacuation. And it was really important that Dr. Mayfield made the announcement, "Hey y'all, get out of there because this is going to be worse than Camille." And the last day and a half, most of the people who evacuated evacuated in the last day and a half. And one of the biggest people in all of that was Trent Lott, because Trent was telling people he wasn't going to evacuate. And I called him and I said, "Trent, if you don't evacuate, what do you think other people are going to think? They're all going to stay and you're going to have put a lot of people's lives at risk." That wouldn't have been a risk if they had listened to the weather service. And Trent rightly said, "You're right. We're going to leave. We're going to pull out." His house was at elevation 19 feet in Pascagoula there on the beach road, totally obliterated. Nothing left. And so Trent thanked me a whole lot of times in the last 20 years for reminding him that he had to be the leader even if it wasn't what he'd like.
When I got up in the airplane, I realized why. I mean, it looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast. Like an atomic weapon had blown up in the sound and just obliterated. I remember we coined a new verb: slabbed. Our house has been slabbed, meaning there was nothing left but the concrete slab on which it was built. We had over 25,000 homes that were slabbed, including some that weren't even on the coast. A lot of people don't realize Katrina was not just a coastal disaster. It went hurricane force winds went all the way up to West Point and something miles, maybe 200 miles. The floodplain that came in went all the way to the interstate. And in Hancock County, it went under the interstate in some places and continued further north. At Waveland, the storm surge was 37 feet deep when you counted the waves on the top, which at the time was the greatest deepest storm surge recorded in the history of meteorology. We probably had 60,000 houses in Mississippi that were either destroyed or uninhabitable because there was debris 3 feet deep, 6 feet deep, 15 feet deep. There was debris that went over the railroad track. As I say, it looked like the hand of God had wiped away the coast. It took the federal government after 11 months still paying to clean up debris and to rebuild houses and to rebuild churches and all that. We had 3,000 Mississippi National Guard in Iraq when the storm hit. And with them were about 800 or 900 full regular duty military army from Fort Lewis, Washington. And we offered every one of them who lived in a county that had bad damage to bring them home to stop their duty. 770 out of 3,000 took us up on it.
The governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, a former chairman of the National Democratic Party, just like I'm a former chairman of the Republican party. He called me and asked me, "What could they do to help?" And I said, "Well, if you got some National Guard to spare, send them down. I got 3,000 in Iraq." He sent 3,000. He sent 3,000. They stayed about a month. And Bob Riley, the governor of Alabama, sent us two companies of military police. When Mobile was underwater, he sent two companies of his most important people to help in a disaster over to us. Jeb Bush, he sent I don't know 50 or 60 highway patrolmen. There was legislation passed the week after the storm. They had several other bills that passed. Trent Lott and Chip Pickering got a finance bill through Energy and Commerce maybe. But the last big bill was passed in December, signed by the president on the 17th, I think. And it was the bill that most of the money was in. And it's the bill that almost all of the new legislation was in. And candidly, a lot of people here in Jackson helped work on this and law firms and accounting firms like Horn. When I got back to the governor's mansion, Senator Cochran was waiting on me. And so he had had the helicopter tour Wednesday after I'd had it on Tuesday. I'll never forget what he told me. He said, "You're going to know more about what needs to be done to recover from this than anybody else. Nobody in Washington's going to know. Nobody here is going to know. You're going to know. You tell me what you need and I'll do everything I can do to get it for you." He had waited and worked with us and worked with the Bush administration and worked with Congress, the House, and at the end of the day, he got us 24 billion dollars, which helped Louisiana, because Louisiana just said they wanted the same programs we got. And it helped Alabama. A lot of people forget the night after the storm, Mobile had water 10 feet deep in downtown. I mean, that's the kind of monster this was.
The other thing I remember about this is I got together Pete Perry, Paul Hurst, and Charlie Williams. I said, "We've got to divide up this work because it's going to be like nothing we've ever seen." I had three things that I thought were the three most important things to get done the fastest. Rebuild, reopen our schools, get our economy back going. That if we didn't get people where they had a home to live in, even if it was temporary, they weren't going to stay. If you didn't have a place to work, you're not going to stay. You can't rebuild till you clean up. You can't borrow money from the bank to rebuild your house. You can't borrow money from anybody to rebuild anything unless you can show you can get it cleaned up where it'll work. I mean, we're talking, like I said earlier, many, many places had several feet of debris piled up. And you got to get that off and disposed of. And don't think disposed of isn't a problem. But the federal government was very generous to us. Bush was everywhere he could. He bent over backwards to give us the most that we could get. And I will say to you, I mean, it went on for several years, but I'll tell you something that all of us ought to be proud of. At least two inspector generals, the kind of the accounting department for a federal agency, at least two of them wrote up Mississippi's programs as what ought to be the national standard. And it was because we took accounting and keeping up with the money seriously and did a good job of doing it. I think Mississippi ended up being able to legally account for over 99% of the money we received. But we set a standard here for playing by the rules and getting the federal government its money's worth. My saint and mother used to say, crisis and catastrophe do not create character, they reveal character.
