Camille was the benchmark that pretty much all of us thought would last a lifetime. I know it would be hard to wrap your mind around the devastation after Katrina, but believe me, it was twice as widespread. My wife and I lived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for 25 years but had moved to Starkville before Katrina struck. We wanted to return to Pascagoula as soon as possible after the storm, but there was not a single filling station left standing along the coastal highway and when you were far enough from the Gulf, often several miles, though there were filling stations still standing, there was no electricity to run the pumps. The loss of electricity extended 100 miles deep. Therefore, because we could not refuel while there, we waited several weeks so that some areas would have restored electricity and thus filling stations could pump gas.
Several specific things that will always stay with me, other than the utter destruction that we saw for mile after mile. We had close friends that lived less than a block from our house in Pascagoula. Their house was still standing but only the second floor was livable. That consisted of two bedrooms and a bath. This friend was a judge (and still is). We stayed with them in that extra bedroom, sharing the one bath. There was no electricity even then and it was a month before they got power. He told me that for two weeks after Katrina, he slept in a Lazy Boy that sat in the gutted garage. Night after night he slept with a shotgun in his lap. Gangs from neighboring Mobile would drive over after nightfall, preying on anyone and anything they could rob/pilfer. You never saw this in the national news, did you? Again, he was a judge with close ties to law enforcement, local, state, and federal. This was not fantasy by any means.
Another thing that I will never forget is the day that we all loaded up to tour Pascagoula. As my friend drove out from his house, he asked my wife and I to close our eyes for a couple of minutes. Keep in mind we were still in our immediate neighborhood, a neighborhood that we knew like the back of our hands. When he told us to open our eyes, he asked us where we were. We did not know. There was nothing recognizable to either one of us. That was a shock. We were literally two blocks from our own house. By the way, our house was custom-built to withstand 200 mph winds and was also built up so that its bottom floor was at 13.5' elevation. Katrina brought such a tidal surge that sea water flooded the bottom 12' of the lower story. That means that the surge was over 25' high. A contractor owned that house then and he told us that the house was still solid as a rock and that as far as he knew, this was the only house for miles that got such a surge and was not gutted.
I could write a book about our experiences going through hurricanes. I went through four of them and they were all major ones. Katrina, though something we did not experience first-hand, would be the final chapter.
