How Hurricane Katrina Upended My Family’s Life

I’ve had to learn how to talk to my son about the next potential hurricane

Hurrican Katrina aftermath in Long Beach, Mississippi; photo by Patrick Heidingsfelder

As I drive around town, I keep noticing the signs: K20#MS. Oh, right, I think to myself. It’s been 20 years.

20 years since I cried, incredulous, into the phone, “You still haven’t left yet?”

“I’m waiting for the last load of laundry to dry,” my mom replied. “I promise, we’re leaving within the hour.”

20 years since the bizarre sleepover nobody wanted—eight adults, two kids, a dog and three cats crammed into my tiny two-bedroom Oxford apartment. My roommate and I did the best we could to keep our families sane. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and tried not to panic while Jim Cantore described the wind and the storm surge and the flooding on TV.

Twenty years since I waited days for news of my dad, who had refused to leave.

Has it really been that long since we crowded around my desktop monitor, scouring the internet for the first aerial photos of home?

Long Beach. Can you tell what neighborhood that is? That looks like the steps of the library. Is the church still there?

Gulfport. There’s the Grand Casino, pushed clear across Highway 90. Can you see Nannie Margaret’s house?

Biloxi. The hospital looks demolished. Oh god, where’s the bridge?

Bay St. Louis. They’re saying a 26-foot storm surge. There’s barely anything left. Have you heard from your dad yet?

It’s been 20 years since August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana—sowing chaos, demolishing everything in its path, and causing significant loss of life, property, and livelihood.

Twenty years since Hurricane Katrina claimed the title of “The Storm,” unseating 1969’s Hurricane Camille. During my childhood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the 1980s, Camille was The Storm spoken of, almost reverently, by the adults around me.

Be careful with that frame; it’s the only baby picture we have of him. The rest were all lost in Camille.

See that souvenir shop shaped like a boat? It is a boat. Camille pushed it up on shore, and they decided to leave it there as a reminder.

We never got to open our wedding gifts. We had to cancel our reception for Camille. We put all the gifts in the attic for safekeeping, thinking we’d open them when we got back, but The Storm took the whole house.

My cousins and I listened with respect and awe.

Today, my 7-year-old son asks for our stories of Katrina, and we are the adults speaking in hushed, serious tones. I tell him about how I was in college up north, about how Hunny and Papa and Uncle TJ evacuated and came to me. How they decided not to go home right away when they heard there was no town, no electricity, no roads, no jobs to go home to. How they went to West Virginia to stay with Papa’s family for a few weeks before deciding what to do next. How Paw Paw Tim watched the water come all the way to his doorstep, but no further. How lucky.

My husband tells him about the house he grew up in, before The Storm. How it sprawled as they added on rooms themselves. How they could walk to the beach whenever they wanted. How there was nothing left after Katrina but the concrete foundation. How they found their sailboat months later in a tree, two miles away from where it had been anchored. How glad they are that Mimi grabbed the baby pictures off the wall before they left.

I don’t tell him about the heartbreak, or the grief. The horror and sorrow of watching catastrophe unfold for our neighbors in New Orleans. The fearful unease as the National Guard rolled out razor wire, sectioning off the unsafe half of town. The frustration of fighting with insurance companies to make good on their promises. The exhausted disillusionment as the nation’s gaze turned toward the next spectacle, the next disaster.

The achingly slow progress. The donations, once pouring in, that slowed to a trickle. The friends who lost everything and never came back. The rock that now lives in my stomach for five months every year.

How could he possibly understand the guilt I felt for not just surviving, but thriving, at college upstate while my family dealt with the wreckage of home? How do I explain that shameful tension of wishing I could be in the mess with them, while secretly feeling relieved not to be? I finished my senior year, blessedly removed from the chaos back home. Meanwhile time all but stopped for my family. There was so much work, so much unknown, and so much waiting. We waited weeks for news of the hospital where my mother worked, for power to be restored to my grandparents’ neighborhood, for evacuees to return. Months for the high school to reopen, for the roads to be cleared, for the repairs to our childhood home so we could finally move back in. Years to feel normal again.

I don’t tell him these things. Not yet.

Instead, we focus on the good, the gratitude. The volunteers who came, year after year for a decade or more, to help us repair and rebuild. The ones who fell in love with our coast, chose to stay, and became our dear friends. The beach cottage we live in now, which we’d never have been able to buy before The Storm.

We remind him there’s always an after.

Mimi and Poppy bought the 3rd Street house, where you have sleepovers now, after Katrina.

You know your favorite restaurant, the one where Daddy and I had our first date? It was built after Katrina.

It’s really something to see how people come together after a storm—sharing gas and water, helping clear debris, cooking meals together. You’ll see one day.

Every June I read the annual Biloxi Hurricane Preparedness Guide that comes in the mail, as if there might be some new breakthrough about keeping your trees trimmed and stocking up on gasoline and batteries. I keep a mental list of the irreplaceable things I would grab if we had to evacuate: the hard drive with wedding and baby pictures, my great-grandmother’s engagement ring, my grandmother’s cast iron skillet. That’s it. That’s as far as I’ve got.

Maybe I should be better prepared. As if there’s truly any way to prepare. If Katrina taught us anything, it’s that control is a fantasy. In reality, we do our best to face what comes and find a way to live in the after.

I wonder, are we crazy for living here? For rebuilding our towns, our homes, our lives this close to the water? Sometimes I think so. But other times I drink in the delicious pinks and purples of a winter sunset over the sound, or watch my son triumphantly reel in a 24-inch red drum on a Sunday morning, and I think, I couldn’t live anywhere else.

Every June my son asks me, “What will we do if a storm comes?”

“If it’s small, we will ride it out together, like we did for Hurricane Zeta,” I say. “If it’s a big storm, we’ll leave. Either way, we will have each other. And we’ll be okay, no matter what happens to our home.”

It’s not entirely true. But after 20 years, it’s the only thing I know to say.

Ashley Peterson is a freelance copywriter and project coordinator for nonprofit organizations working in the reproductive rights space. Based in Biloxi, Mississippi, Ashley writes for fun (and healing) about what it’s like to be a progressive white lady from the Southern U.S.