STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Hurricane Katrina was one of those moments that changed people's lives so much that they think of their lives in two parts - before and after the storm. Friday marks 20 years since Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, eventually killing almost 1,400 people. Later this week, we look at how the storm reshaped New Orleans. Today, we revisit Waveland, Mississippi, which took a direct hit. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: To understand the 30-foot wall of water that Katrina pushed into Waveland, Mississippi, sit down with police Chief Michael Prendergast. He'll tell you how officers who had hunkered down during the height of the storm had to fight their way out of the police department.
MICHAEL PRENDERGAST: When the water started coming in the PD, we couldn't get out.
ELLIOTT: The force of the water was so strong that the doors wouldn't open. And the windows had been boarded up.
PRENDERGAST: So we had to get a couple of big chairs and bust out the glass of the window and then wind up beating the board off the front of the building.
ELLIOTT: They formed a human chain and floated up as the water rushed in. Then swam out the window, hoping to find higher ground, but everything around them was inundated. And this was about three miles inland. Prendergast, assistant chief at the time, says they were treading water. Some of them climbed atop the roof. He and others clung to a row of crape myrtles out front, waves lashing around them.
PRENDERGAST: Everybody, like, hung on to the trees. You know, the guys were, like, just shivering, so we, like, hugged on each other, tried to keep each other warm and, you know, everybody, like, mentally stable.
ELLIOTT: It was four or five hours before the water receded, he says, and everyone made it - 27 people. Then the reality of what they were up against set in.
LISA PARKER: It was kind of like an apocalypse.
ELLIOTT: That's Lisa Parker, the chief's administrative assistant, the same job she had in 2005. Nearly everyone on the police force had lost their homes and belongings, and they had no equipment either.
PARKER: We're the ones who supposed to keep the law and order, and everybody's coming to us for help, 'cause that's what you do, but, you know, we were in the same boat as everybody else. You only had so much things you can do with no means to do it - no guns, no radios, no cars, no anything.
PRENDERGAST: Katrina didn't discriminate.
ELLIOTT: Chief Prendergast.
PRENDERGAST: Rich, poor, it didn't matter, you know, how you lived or whatever. Katrina, like, wiped out the whole city.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR OPENING)
ELLIOTT: A local museum is now dedicated to telling Waveland's experience.
BERNIE CULLEN: Here, we were ground zero.
ELLIOTT: Bernie Cullen is the chairperson of the aptly named Ground Zero Museum, marking where Katrina made landfall, slamming the city with a three-story storm surge.
CULLEN: Look at that. That is an aerial view of Waveland. There's nothing, you know - absolutely nothing, you know.
ELLIOTT: How long do you think it took before, when you were, you know, driving around town, it felt like home again?
CULLEN: Ooh. Isn't that a great question? Years. Just years.
ELLIOTT: She says the community would grasp onto small signs of hope, like when Walmart reopened.
CULLEN: There's always hope, even in the bleakest times. You know, you take one day at a time. You say, I'm going to rebuild.
ELLIOTT: But not everyone came back. In the decades after the storm, Waveland lost nearly 20% of its population, which was 7,800 before Katrina. You still see empty slabs dotting neighborhoods, and the downtown business district is mostly empty.
CULLEN: That sense of main town - Main Street, USA, is missing.
JAY TRAPANI: My name's Jay Trapani, and I'm the mayor of the city of Waveland, Mississippi.
ELLIOTT: He says the recovery here has been a long slog.
TRAPANI: Ninety percent of the city was destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. I remember driving in from where I evacuated and hearing on the radio it would take 10 years for the coast to come back. And here we are sitting at 20, and we're still trying to recover.
ELLIOTT: One factor has been stricter building requirements for the high flood risk here that makes construction more expensive. For instance, he says he had to rebuild his beachfront house on concrete pilings 24 feet above sea level. Trapani says getting local businesses back would help, recalling what used to be here.
TRAPANI: We had three restaurants, a couple of barrooms. We had a post office, a bank, a gas station, convenience store, liquor store, laundromat, all in this three-block area. And it's taken a long time, but right now, we got a lot of things in the works.
ELLIOTT: Katrina also wiped away cultural treasures in Waveland, including the United Methodist Gulfside Assembly, founded a century ago as a sprawling waterfront retreat for African Americans. Executive director Cheryl Thompson says it was a gut punch to find nothing left - no hotel or chapel or auditorium or anything.
CHERYL THOMPSON: It hit Gulfside like a brick wall. There was essentially nothing there. You know, it was - felt like a relative or somebody I knew had died. It was just very emotional.
ELLIOTT: Thompson grew up in New Orleans and spent her childhood summers at Gulfside Assembly, which she says was an anchor for the Black community in the segregated South.
THOMPSON: There were no other places for us to go where we felt free to stay in the hotel, to swim in the water, to have our own place. You know, there weren't places where we could go to stay in hotels. I'm 77 years old, and so when I was growing up, that was not a thing. And so it was special to my family.
ELLIOTT: It was a place for weddings, reunions and civil rights strategy meetings, she says. Twenty years after Katrina, the organization is still struggling to regroup and working out of a donated church building.
THOMPSON: You grieve, but you have to - we have to move on, you know. It's not going to be what it was before, but we can still do our ministry.
ELLIOTT: Part of that ministry is a sunrise Katrina remembrance service on the anniversary Friday, overlooking the gulf from a newly built pavilion at Gulfside Assembly.
Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Waveland, Mississippi.
(SOUNDBITE OF NAT WALKER'S "ROSARIO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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