By Scott Libin
Leadership & Management Faculty
I didn’t see a single Christmas decoration.
Friday afternoon was cold and gray by Gulf Coast standards. Along Highway 90 in Mississippi, it was ugly by any standard. My Poynter colleague Kelly McBride and I took a tour with two local journalists of what was once a scenic stretch of beachfront from Biloxi through Gulfport and Long Beach to Pass Christian.
After Katrina, Seeing Still is not Understanding
By Kenny IrbyThe few trees left standing held no holiday lights. Where would you plug them in? The buildings are all gone. Uprooted or upright, the branches weren’t entirely bare. Thousands, maybe millions of scraps of fabric and plastic still flap in the breeze more than three months after the hurricane. Not what you would call festive.
It’s become a cliché to say that even video can’t capture the enormity of the disaster. It’s also true. I’m not quite sure why that is. The stories I’ve seen were powerful, meaningful and important. Still, watching them was like looking through a door open just a crack: What little I could see was vivid and compelling. It could almost convince me I had the whole picture. There was just so much I couldn’t see.
I had seen some pretty extreme tornado damage in other parts of the country, and this was a little like that – but this went on for miles and miles, and what the wind did wasn’t the worst of it. The wall of water, 30 feet high in some places, did damage unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered.
Dave Vincent says seeing it doesn’t get easier with time. He’s the news director at WLOX, Biloxi’s main television station. He’s been there nearly 30 years, and he’s done the drive along Highway 90 four or five times since the storm. Vincent says, if anything, it was harder this time. He thinks maybe that’s because he wasn’t behind the wheel.
His friend and fellow news director Randy Swan did the driving. Swan has been at WDAM in Hattiesburg, about 50 miles from Biloxi, almost as long as Vincent has been at his station. From the passenger seat, Vincent said, he could see even more on this tour: details that the distraction of driving had hidden from him on his first few trips.
No snowmen, no Santas, no reindeer, but some strange stuff survived the storm. From the gutted shell of a casino nightclub, a disco ball still hangs. The Olive Garden is gone entirely, but its sign stands intact. And in one particularly desolate stretch, devoid of all structures, the only thing to hold its ground was a boat – one washed ashore in 1969 and later renamed for the hurricane responsible. The S. S. Camille operated high and dry for years as a gift shop amid the hotels, restaurants and beachfront businesses . They’re all gone now, but the tourist-trap tugboat still sits where one storm put it and another – strangely – left it.
Vincent says unless you had seen the homes along Highway 90 before Katrina, you can’t fully appreciate how beautiful they were. To him they represent one of the differences in the disaster’s impact on his community, compared with New Orleans. As the rest of us learned last summer, in New Orleans, poor people lived in the city’s lowest-lying areas. In southern Mississippi, there was no place more prestigious than a home overlooking the Gulf. Katrina, he helped me understand, was a true leveler, in the literal and figurative sense of the word.
As we turned inland, the damage decreased gradually. Still, even well away from the beach, it’s bad – worse, in fact, than the aftermath of many natural disasters. Swan and Vincent say the multitudes living under blue tarps consider themselves lucky to have one of those, and a roof to support it. Even living in a FEMA trailer beats waiting for one.
Maybe there are Christmas decorations somewhere in the area. Maybe we even passed some. If so, I just couldn’t see them. Nor did I notice them missing, until I got back to St. Petersburg, where people believe that if decorating is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.
I don’t think people along Mississippi’s coast are without the Christmas spirit. I just suspect the way they show it has changed this year. Along with everything else.
