Everlasting, the Legacy podcast is the official companion podcast to the upcoming MPB original documentary focusing on the life of Medgar Evers. The companion podcast, hosted by me, Rita Brent, will feature in-depth conversations, extended interviews, and exclusive archive footage not shown in the documentary. Everlasting, the Legacy podcast, video and audio episodes premiere September 18th. Find it on mpbonline.org or wherever you get your podcasts. MPB, your stories, our mission.
The nation's longest-running traveling celebration of traditional arts, the National Folk Festival, comes to downtown Jackson for the first time November 7th through the 9th. A fun-filled weekend for the entire family exploring the roots, richness, and variety of American culture — non-stop music and dance, folk demonstrations, hands-on children's activities, signature southern foods, crafts, and more, showcasing the best of America, the best of Mississippi, all free. We'll see you in November. More at nationalfolkfestival.com.
What's happening, Mississippi? You found The Sitdown with Russ Tino right here on MPB Think Radio, where we explore the ideas and people that are shaping Mississippi's future. You know, 20 years ago, we had a storm cross over the tip of Florida, across the Keys, work its way into the warm Gulf waters of then the Gulf of Mexico — now we call it the Gulf of America — where it met those warm waters and churned up into something that was devastating: a Category 5 storm, bringing 175 mph winds, eventually making landfall in South Louisiana, across the tip of Louisiana around Buras and Triumph, before hitting the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It's a devastating Category 3 storm at the time, churning up waters that yielded near 28-foot storm surge across the Gulf Coast. It's crazy to believe that that was 20 years ago. But we have a special guest today as we commemorate that event and the impact that it had on Mississippi and Mississippians who were at the center of that tempest: Governor Haley Barbour. Governor Barbour, welcome to The Sitdown. It's good to have you.
Well, Russ, thank you very much. It is hard to believe it was 20 years ago.
Yeah, certainly. You know, it makes me feel old. I was telling former Governor Phil Bryant was in with me a couple weeks ago, and we reminisced a little bit about the storm. And I was in my last year of law school when the storm hit, and my mom and both of my sisters were on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and I have just a vivid recollection of cell phones not being great back then, and then not being able to get in touch with particularly my mom, who was very stubborn. She had gone through Camille and was one of those people that said, "I survived Camille. I'll survive this, too." We didn't know whether or not she'd gotten out and couldn't reach her. And there was a lot of trepidation, you know, around that, I think, for a lot of people across Mississippi and across the Gulf Coast. You were in this unique position that I can't imagine anything that you had done before had prepared you for.
Well, there's no question about that. I remember Camille. My brother was mayor of Yazoo City when Camille hit the coast, and I was in college, and he got me to drive a truck, a pickup truck full of mattresses down for part of Yazoo City's contribution to helping our sister cities on the coast. And I saw the devastation. It was nothing as severe or as big as Katrina. However, when you came to the railroad track there just north of the beach, it was all backed up 20 feet high with trees and limbs and cars and everything. And I thought to myself, good, I can't imagine anything. Well, years later, I became governor, and I found out that every year the state had a participation in a practice, a planning and a practice of what are we going to do for the next hurricane. And we took it very seriously and worked very hard at it. And the only problem was we prepared for the wrong hurricane, because Katrina was massive. Camille had an eye that was 9 miles across. The Gulf of Mexico was filled with Katrina.
I mean, when the front edge of Katrina was on the Mississippi coast, the back edge was still in the Caribbean Sea.
South of Yucatan. And we didn't prepare for that. Katrina actually did not have as high-speed winds as Camille. Camille was one of very few storms that actually hit the coast of the United States as a Category 5, but it was small. Katrina was gigantic. And you were talking about the storm surge. The storm surge was the thing that did the most damage. And at Waveland, Mississippi, the storm surge, if you include the waves on top, were 37 feet deep.
It's just absolutely incredible. Sometime during this broadcast, I'll tell you the story of the police department in Long Beach — I mean, in Waveland. I'll just tell you right now: the 26 police officers in Waveland, population 6,200, and their plan was, storm comes up, we'll wait it out in the police station. Well, before it got good daylight, the bottom floor of the police station is already filled.
Then they go up to the second floor, and the second floor filled. They all jump out windows. Some of them hang on to trees. Some of them floated all the way to the bay, you know, across Waveland. But at 8:00 that night, all 26 policemen in Waveland were on duty. And I thought to myself when I heard that story the next day, these people are ready.
I think Mississippians are just built differently when it comes to stuff like this, and I mean, it's a credit to our state and kind of the hardiness of our stock. My mom was actually in Shoreline Park in Waveland, where that's where her house was. Luckily, she got out. She did leave because she was utterly slabbed, right? I mean, it was completely covered by water. You know, and that whole area was obviously devastated. I mean, I find it interesting because you're right. I've looked at the maps before, and Camille is this tight little powerhouse, right? I mean, it's clearly packed winds that broke the wind vanes back then, you know, when it crossed over Louisiana. They don't actually know how fast Camille was, really. And then you compare that to Katrina. Obviously, we know it slowed right as it got to Mississippi. But you're right. I mean, it covered the entirety of the Gulf of Mexico. It's just a completely different beast.
10 feet deep water in Mobile, you know, almost 100 miles away from the eye of the storm. Trent Lott's house in Pascagoula on the beach, or on Beach Boulevard, elevation 19 feet, nothing left.
I mean, it was just unbelievable. And in fairness, the federal government, the National Hurricane Center, gave us warning the last couple of days: this is going to be worse than Camille.
So that brings up a good point. Like you said, when it first crossed over, I guess it had hit Miami and the Keys.
Did anybody at the point that it crossed into the Gulf have any expectation that it was going to be what it became?
Well, Dr. Max Mayfield, who was the head of the Hurricane Center at the time, thought that the storm would increase because of the warmer water. What they didn't know was it would go all the way across, almost get to Mexico, and turn due north. And it turned due north without anything that knocked it down until it got to the mouth of the river, where you were talking about. And it went over the bottom few miles of the river, but enough that that started knocking the wind down. And then when it came through the Chandeleurs again, it settled a little bit, but the storm surge was already pushed out in front of it, and it was gargantuan. I mean, we were told the day before the storm that a buoy out in the Gulf had registered 55 feet — a wave 55 feet tall.
Which is unheard of in the Gulf of Mexico, or Gulf of America, you know, it's just unheard of. So you said a couple days out, the National Weather Service tells you, "Hey guys, this is going to be really bad. It's going to be worse than Camille." What's the level of preparation happening in your office and in MEMA at that point? What are you trying to get people to do?
The storm came in on Monday morning. About Tuesday or Wednesday, the National Guard, MEMA, the police, also FEMA, the federal agency, came in, and we established a unified command, so that all the cities and counties would know everything that the state knew. And thank God we did, because I'll tell you, as I said earlier, we had prepared, but we didn't prepare for this storm. But I can tell you that doing the preparation and doing the planning, even though it didn't turn out exactly like what we thought, our guys and gals were way ahead of where they would have been, or where their colleagues or ancestors, whatever you want to call them, in Camille were. The storm came in on Monday, as I said, and they would not let us fly because of the winds — it wasn't any bureaucracy, just the weather service wouldn't let anybody fly. So we cut a deal with the Department of Transportation that they'd let us go out first thing Tuesday morning, and flew down. And they had three helicopters there for us, the Guard, and we got up and we flew from Gulfport-Biloxi Airport to Pass Christian, through the Pearl River on past Waveland, and just the utter obliteration. I often said it looked like the hand of God had just wiped away the beach. It just wiped away the coast like an atomic weapon had gone off in the sand. We created, Russ, a new verb: slabbed.
My house got slabbed, meaning there was nothing left but the slab. There were over 20,000 houses that were slabbed. And the biggest thing that bothered me — we turned around and we went all the way to Englewood over on the Alabama line — was you could see that the ground was just covered with debris, that everything was sort of light brown.
And there were piles and piles. There were piles and piles and piles of different things. And Russ, oh, used to be the head reporter for WLBT.
Oh gosh, was that — that wouldn't have been Bert.
So, cut that out. Bert Case, we let the reporters have one of the three helicopters.
So that they saw what we saw. And we got back and landed at the airport in Gulfport. Bert Case got out and he said to me, "Governor, what is your worst fear?" And I said, "My worst fear is how many bodies we're going to find under all that debris." As it turned out, we only had 238 fatalities, and a third of them were not on the coast. I always try to remind people this was not just a coastal calamity. We had hurricane-force winds above Columbus.
And it spawned what, like 60-some tornadoes across the country, too.
Yeah. And 17 of those in Mississippi. And one of the fatalities was here in Jackson. It was a lady, an older lady, who was in her house, and a tornado knocked down a tree on the roof, and it fell on her and killed her. So as it got to be a week or two afterwards, I was relieved that it was only 238 fatalities. That's a lot of people.
That is a lot of people. But in Louisiana, they had 1,600 or 1,800.
And they didn't have the kind of wind, or much less water, that we had. Their water came from broken levees.
Yeah. Just completely different calamities between what happened in Louisiana and what happened in Mississippi. We got to take a brief break. We're talking with Governor Haley Barbour about Katrina at 20. We'll be right back just after this.
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Everlasting, the Legacy podcast is the official companion podcast to the upcoming MPB original documentary focusing on the life of Medgar Evers. The companion podcast, hosted by me, Rita Brent, will feature in-depth conversations, extended interviews, and exclusive archive footage not shown in the documentary. Everlasting, the Legacy podcast, video and audio episodes premiere September 18th. Find it on mpbonline.org or wherever you get your podcasts. MPB, your stories, our mission.
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You're listening to The Sitdown with Russ Tino right here on MPB Think Radio. Talking today with former Governor Haley Barbour about Katrina at 20, obviously just a couple days away from the 20th anniversary of the storm that changed Mississippi and changed the face of Louisiana in so many ways. And before the break, we were talking about, you know, your first impression of the damage after the storm. And I can tell you, I didn't get to go up in a helicopter. I did see the pictures of it, right? And I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In a lot of ways, I still consider that home, even though I've lived in central Mississippi for a good while. And I remember seeing the photographs, and the same word that you just used is what I thought of, which is it looked like a bomb had gone off, because all the things that I was accustomed to seeing as a kid growing up on the coast was gone off of Highway 90, right? And it looked like a kid's pickup sticks situation where you just had, to your point, debris everywhere, and from that high aerial view, it almost didn't look real. And then a couple days after the storm, Governor Barbour, I got to go down to the coast. We figured out my mom had evacuated, and got to go down to the coast. And I had a buddy that worked at Mississippi Power, and so he got us past the railroad track. You know, National Guardsmen were at the railroad track, and they had razor wire already up and everything. He got us past the railroad track, and I'll never forget driving down Highway 90. One, the smell was so atrocious from the port with the chickens and the paper and all of that. But then the other part of it was, and people say this and it's true, without street signs, without the landmarks that you were used to seeing, I grew up there, and I had no idea where we were.
Yeah, Russ, I've heard that so many times, and heard it so many times, particularly those first few days, that people would go to where they thought their house was or had been, and they couldn't find any remnants of it. It was just swept away. And at the end of the day, or five years after, we had picked up — and the reason I know this is because the federal government was helping us pay for it — so they counted 47 million cubic yards of debris.
That's incredible. Just, I mean, unbelievably incredible.
And how much of that was dredged out of the Gulf?
A good bit of it. A good bit of it. You had sand that came out of the Gulf, but you had stuff that had been sitting on the bottom for so many years that got pushed out. And then once you got over the railroad track, what normally was the stopping line for the debris, it wasn't. It would go under things, under bridges. It was just unbelievable. And I think that's one of the things that makes the recovery so unbelievable, is when people saw the utter destruction, that there was nothing left of their home. They just got knocked down, and they got back up and hitched up their britches and went to work. And they went to work not only helping themselves, they went to work helping their neighbors. There was, you know, America is the most generous country in the history of the world, and never did it show more than during Katrina. Not only the way people helped their neighbors, people who came here from other states — we had 46 states give us part of their state government.
Highway patrolmen, National Guardsmen, people who ran pickup trucks — 46 out of the, actually out of the 48 remaining states, because Mississippi and Louisiana you can't count. But the governor of Alabama, 10 feet of water in downtown Mobile, sent us two companies of Alabama National Guard military police.
People you need the absolute most. And Alabama said —
"You need this more than we do."
It really is. Jeb Bush in Florida sent 50 highway patrolmen.
Yeah. And Florida certainly has dealt with more than their fair share of bad weather and hurricanes over the years. I remember I had worked at First Baptist Church of Gulfport, which at the time — this was when I was in law school and college — but at the time it was located on the other side of Highway 90, sort of kind of up on a hill there, and very close to the intersection of 49 and 90, basically right there in Gulfport. And I just vividly remember where the storm surge hit. It took out all the bricks, all the pews, everything. Just washed it clean and then dragged it back out into the Gulf. But there was that point where the storm surge stopped, where all the brick was still there, the steeple was still there, and my buddy and I went in there, and, you know, the main sanctuary is just cleaned out, Governor, but the baptistry is completely intact because it was elevated, and the cross over the baptistry was completely intact. And it was just a surreal image, right? Because you see this devastation, but it was like there was a stopping point, is how high the water went.
And then everything else was intact.
That's — and you saw that over and over and over again. One of the places that I thought was the most peculiar was the Beau Rivage. The bottom three floors of the Beau Rivage just got obliterated, completely washed away. You couldn't have found it anywhere. However, not a single window was broken in any room above the third floor.
And so when the storm withdrew, all inside the whole hotel was moisture. The Beau cost, I think, $8 million to build. It cost $7 million to repair it.
