Hurricane Katrina Memorial

I found this awesome article on the Sun Herald’s site today and it makes me want to go here that much more…

Every Aug. 29, the Mississippi Coast will pause, bow its collective head and pay respects to the unbiased, unflinching power of nature.

The blank spaces and lost landmarks near the beach will forever hold imaginations about Hurricane Katrina’s might, but the most profound and permanent reminders of that day will always be found in the holes ripped in the hearts of many Coastians by the 200 or so lives taken here.

In the haste to commemorate the tragedy, the one Katrina memorial constructed thus far in Biloxi contains no victim’s name, as perhaps it should not.

There are 169 victims listed on the storm reports of local coroners from the six South Mississippi counties. Statewide, there were 231 victims.

At the end of July officials released a list of 18 people who went missing that day and who probably died but were never found.

The old Hurricane Camille memorial in Biloxi had 172 names on it.

There are countless reports of people dying from stress of the storm beforehand, of people dying days later from injuries received during and after the storm and of people succumbing to the weight of tremendous stress or a broken heart. It is possible to argue that the unusually high suicide rate in South Mississippi these days should lengthen the list of Katrina victims. Yet all those numbers may never be known or counted.

We know, for example, that William Collins, 60, of Biloxi, died two months after Katrina in Nashville, Tenn., while in a coma from chemical burns he got in the water near his Back Bay home in Biloxi, struggling through the surge.

Though Collins’ wife, Judy Collins, is listed as a storm victim by coroners because she died that day, William Collins is not.

A vast majority of the people on the official list of Katrina victims in South Mississippi died sometime between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. – a time when most meteorologists and witnesses agree the storm surge was at its highest and most violent.

That surge had been building for days in the Gulf of Mexico and was aided by the most ideal set of circumstances for a murderous coming of water – very low pressure, a large storm size, a slow-moving storm and high winds. And Mississippi’s location in the Gulf and her shallow waters gave the surge little space to dissipate before hitting the shore.

“Had Ivan hit Mississippi, the storm surges in Mississippi would have been higher than those in Florida,” said Todd Davison, a FEMA mitigation specialist who studied Katrina’s meteorological events.

The world’s fastest river rapids move at about 10 to 12 feet per second, and even the strong and brave people who enter those waters with life jackets, helmets and sturdy kayaks sometimes do not make it out.

When Katrina’s surge was just 10 feet deep, it could have been moving at speeds as fast as 16 feet per second, a speed that rises with the water’s depth, said Joseph Suhayda, a Louisiana State University coastal oceanographer.

“Anything above a couple of feet per second is extremely difficult to wade in,” Suhayda said. “To operate a boat in anything close to 10 to 15 feet per second is extremely difficult. Being in (that kind of) water is tantamount to being dead.”

While that surge was building and preparing to change the Coast forever, almost everyone who lived here felt fear to some degree; despite that fear, many stayed.

The reasons people stayed are many, and a survey of the lives and experiences of more than 130 victims indicates no one reason for staying dominates the others.

Some people stayed because they felt experience told them they would be safe, or evacuating was too hard, especially on the elderly, or they were afraid of post-storm looters, or they could not let go of the idea they might be able to do something during the storm, or they refused to leave behind a spouse, neighbor or pet, or they rued the lack of cheap and comfortable places to go, or they just simply could not make a decision so they stayed put.

Some, such as storm victim Nelson “Nip” Lang, 76, of Pass Christian, stayed because they had survived Hurricane Camille in 1969 and other hurricanes, and felt nothing could be worse.

Though it is a popular belief on the Coast that Camille killed more people in 2005 than in 1969, and it is true a vast majority of the storm’s victims were old enough to have lived through Camille, at least half had moved here sometime after Camille.

More than 90 percent of the storm’s victims were older than 40 and almost two-thirds were older than 60.

There are only four unidentified victims, two each in Jackson and Harrison counties.

The storm’s oldest known victim was 96-year-old Pearl Frazier of Biloxi. The Oklahoma-born Air Force widow could not bear the thought of evacuating the home her late husband built on the Back Bay in the 1970s. She would spend hours on her dock fishing, crabbing and watching the world go by.

The storm’s youngest known victim was 2-year-old Matthew Tart of Pass Christian. Matthew died with his dad, Samuel Tart, 51, in their single-story Lorraine Avenue home, which was not destroyed but took on almost 20 feet of water. Relatives described him as an infectiously charming child whose crazy curls and bright smile made it impossible to be angry with him.

Biloxi was the site of the most deaths, with about half of its 53 victims perishing within a four-block radius of Yankie Stadium. Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis had 24 victims each, despite having a fraction of Biloxi’s population.

Most storm victims appeared to have died in or near their homes. The Sun Herald found only 11 victims on the Coast were not at or near their home addresses – such as Sheila Aultman of Long Beach, who went to a friend’s house in Waveland to ride out the storm, and Jack Prather of Dothan, Ala., who was volunteering at the Seashore Mission Church in Biloxi and died driving people to shelter.

There were at least 25 married and dating couples who died together in the storm and there were several instances of friends and relatives coming together to ride out the storm.

Some couples had been together for years, such as Ralph and Joan Dagnall, who had moved to Bay St. Louis from Pittsburgh the day before Hurricane Camille. Ralph, 73, and Joan, 69, liked to tell their children about waking up the next morning in the Driftwood Motel, to discover half the building missing. Their self-designed concrete home did not survive the storm surge.

Others were new couples such as Jerry and Colette Vierling, 45 and 51 respectively, of Waveland, who had exchanged vows a little more than a month before Katrina came.

At least 11 victims were with a significant other who survived the storm. Most of the survivors, such as Gulfport resident Stina Anderson, who lost her husband Tony, 81, to the surge, emerged profoundly shaken.

Katrina took just one family in its entirety, the Banes of Waveland. Edgar, 48, Christina, 45, Edgar Jr., 15, and Carl, 13, were lost when their Rue De La Salle home was washed away.

Many of the storm’s victims were ill or infirm before the storm, such as Biloxi resident Victoria Moore, 85, who found that late in life she was no longer able to grow the turnip greens, okra and tomatoes she loved to share with her neighbors.

Katrina’s victims came from a host of professions, even though a majority were of retirement age. There was a handful of casino workers, and there were also oceanographers, custodians, chefs, restaurateurs, fishermen, and one known artist, Paul Phillips of Gulfport.

Katrina deprived the Coast of some of its most colorful characters, like the “Hermit of Point Cadet,” Danny Goff, 55, so named for his long, unruly beard and generally oddball ways. Danny was homeless, but he picked up odd jobs where he could, like at a Vietnamese grocery store where the owners named him “lazy bones.”

Pass Christian lost Emma Seals, 81, a reclusive German woman who cursed like a sailor, and nightly fed the raccoons and possums that lived near her home. Despite her quirkiness, friends and neighbors felt “Oma,” German for “grandmother,” was generous to the extreme when caring for others.

Katrina passed into legend dozens of other wonderful nicknames that carried interesting personas behind them: Turkey Neck, Jug, Miss Pineapple, Nip, Babs, Buttercup, Captain Fox and Megga.

Jug, aka Kemp Ramsey, 54, of Biloxi, will never again tell those stories that left his family in stitches.

Turkey Neck, aka John Holley, 68, of Biloxi, will never watch the world pass by his porch again, craning that long neck of his.

The angelic singing voice of Miss Pineapple, aka Rose Marie Walls, 56, of Biloxi, soars no longer.

Hurricane Katrina’s victims now call to us from a distance, their voices bound to grow fainter with each passing August 29. If they could speak, it is easy to imagine they have a simple message for us: If a bad storm approaches, leave.

I live a few miles from it, yet I have never been.

The Katrina Memorial in Biloxi, Mississippi is located near Highway 90 in Biloxi’s Town Green. It’s dedicated to the Gulf Coast victims who perished in Hurricane Katrina. It opened February 15, 2006 in a ceremony with ABC’s “Extreme Makeover” crew.

The Memorial stands as tall as the height of the water during Hurricane Katrinas storm surge at the Town Green. It contains a tile inlay of a wave and a glass case containing various items from destroyed buildings. The artist, Aaron Kramer, was asked to assemble and create the collection of obects that were placed in the “Time Capsule” as part of the Memorial. All of the objects were collected from survivors and recorded by the crew of Extreme Makover. He describes his collage as a “hurricane of debris.” At the center is a clock he set to roughly the time when Katrina hit this city August 29th. The memorial has space for the names of the people who died in Mississippi.

I’m amazed I haven’t visited this place yet since I’m only an hour away. I really want to go see it soon.