Minor: Mississippi will remember national Katrina snub

Noted historian Douglas Brinkley, a New Orleans native and for years a resident of Bay St. Louis, wrote after Katrina pounded New Orleans and Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in August 2005: “America as a nation will never forget what happened.”

Certainly when the 10th anniversary of the great storm was observed last week, Brinkley’s words rang true.

But in Mississippi, there was a somewhat different twist to the “never forget” part. As in 2005, many Mississippians resented that the grand old city of New Orleans got far more attention from the news media and national officials than did the Mississippi Coast.

A 30-foot surge from the Gulf of Mexico sent a wall of water across Mississippi’s chain of cities. What happened in New Orleans was far different. It was a man-made disaster.

Eighty percent of the city was blanketed by salt water when levees bordering two lakes on the north side of the city were breached. Many were reminded of the 1927 disastrous flood of the Mississippi River when the “Big Muddy” broke levees upstream — and were expected to flood New Orleans.

These lakeside levees, built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, were undermined and topped by water pushed by Katrina. The corps later admitted the levees were ineffective, costing millions to reconstruct.

Hundreds of New Orleanians died when water 10 feet deep covered five neighborhoods including the poverty-stricken Ninth Ward. The city’s flat land remained flooded for a month. Spared was the French Quarter, which was on land high enough to protect it. Also spared was the uptown Garden District near Audubon Park. However, several feet of the flood covered the lower side of Tulane University (where Brinkley taught) causing many students to be shipped off to other universities for a year.

Mississippi’s Gulf Coast took a major wallop from Katrina’s winds — some as strong as l50 miles an hour — that shredded buildings and sent many residents clinging to tree limbs. Some lives were lost here as well, including a couple of my friends who ran a B&B near Waveland, which bore the brunt of the storm.

There was nothing more disheartening from the storm than when some 30,000 desperate New Orleanians, mostly African Americans, sought refuge in the Superdome, where the air-conditioning failed when power was lost. Toilets overflowed and there was no drinking water. Several aged persons died in wheelchairs, left alone before help finally arrived. Twenty thousand more refugees faced similar conditions in the nearby Convention Center.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco became a casualty of Katrina. Though not harmed bodily, she chose not to seek reelection after taking much of the blame for failures in preparedness and a breakdown of emergency services. She was left out of the loop when PresidentGeorge W. Bush arrived on the scene, after initially taking only a fly-over in Air Force One to see the destruction. Bush later uttered his infamous remark “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” to Michael Brown, the floundering head of FEMA who deserved immediate dismissal, according to several national publications.

Brinkley in June, 2007 wrote the definitive, detailed account of the hurricane, “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” published by Harper Perennial. The book gives close-up observations of how official luminaries handled the situation. Brinkley’s most brutal criticism is aimed at Ray Nagin, the clownish mayor of New Orleans who became paranoid as he viewed his ailing constituents from the sixth floor of the Hyatt Hotel. Nagin is now serving time in prison for taking kickbacks on recovery contracts.

Neither does Brinkley give very high marks to former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who came out of the Katrina dilemma as something of a hero for his leadership. That comes out in Brinkley’s assessment of Barbour’s reluctant handling of the painfully slow FEMA response to provide emergency services. His view is that Barbour sought to make President Bush, his fellow Republican, appear in a better light when the federal response was inadequate. And he pounces on Barbour’s constant reference to the death-dealing hurricane as merely a “Big Deal.”

Bill Minor is a contributing columnist. Contact him at P.O. Box 1243, Jackson MS 39215.