WAVELAND, Miss.—When Beverley Coleman thinks about her home in Waveland, Mississippi, before Hurricane Katrina, she remembers the trees: towering oaks with full canopies that flanked her single-lane street and continued down to the beach several hundred yards away.
Coleman and her wife, Betty Ruth Hawkins (known to friends and acquaintances as “BR”), had moved to Waveland in 1997, buying a small Jim Walters house amid the cluster of weekend homes and fishing camps that became an incorporated city in 1972. They shared their street with two dozen other families, and they grew to love the slow pace of life and community gatherings, like the annual St. Clare Seafood Festival at a nearby church.
“Waveland was a well-kept secret” in Hancock County, Coleman told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 5. The city’s population ranged from about 5,500 to 7,000 depending on the season, she explained, and businesses and tourists were concentrated in neighboring Bay St. Louis.
Today, a single gnarled oak tree is all that’s left of the grove along the road that Coleman had grown so attached to. On the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, a 30-foot wall of water slammed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast and swallowed up Waveland and surrounding municipalities, reducing the colorful city to piles of rubble and dirt.
Few structures around town survived Katrina’s wrath: On Coleman and Hawkins’ street, 23 out of 24 homes were demolished beyond recognition, and nearly everything inside was swept away by the storm surge.
The devastation in Waveland mirrored the destruction along the rest of the Gulf Coast, where cities from Pass Christian to Pascagoula suffered catastrophic harm.
Federal estimates indicate that Katrina damaged or destroyed 134,000 homes and 10,000 rental units throughout Mississippi, displacing tens of thousands of residents and causing $13.6 billion in insured property losses. In October 2006, over 100,000 Mississippians were living in travel trailers supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and dozens of residents were still missing.
The storm claimed the lives of 238 people in Mississippi, including 65 in Hancock County and 25 in Waveland.
“The gravity of it is beyond being able to explain,” said Hawkins, who evacuated Waveland the day before the storm with her daughter and two cats (Coleman had been away on business, and the couple reunited in Memphis several days later). “When you tell someone we lost everything we owned, it does not resonate with them unless they have lost everything that they own. It is a concept that people cannot put their arms around and grasp.”
Twenty years after Katrina made landfall in Mississippi, Waveland has regained much of its old greenery and quiet coastal splendor. Palm trees and magnolias line the city’s sidewalks, and cars buzz lazily down South Beach Boulevard overlooking the Mississippi Sound. Homes have reappeared on the properties just north of the Sound, and there’s construction happening elsewhere in town.
Still, signs of the storm and its aftermath are visible throughout the city: Houses closest to the water are perched on top of massive columns to protect against flooding, their raised foundations reflecting federal elevation requirements imposed after Katrina.
Plots of land along Beach Boulevard and the once-bustling Coleman Avenue remain stubbornly vacant—a result of the updated building codes and sky-high insurance rates that have priced some businesses and families out of Waveland, Hawkins said.
“Everything that’s getting built is up to the new codes,” she explained. “It’s new money coming in, rather than families that had relocated being able to come back.”
Those families include low-income homeowners and renters across the Gulf Coast, who did not get the same level of assistance as others following the storm. Many moved to nearby urban centers like Houston, Memphis or Atlanta, choosing to resettle rather than waiting for affordable housing options to materialize.
“Renters don’t have the ability to rebuild—they have to wait on others,” Kimberly Jones Merchant, president and CEO at the Mississippi Center for Justice, told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 27. “If you’re underinsured or uninsured and you completely lost your home, it’s so much easier to just relocate.”
Coleman and Hawkins were among the subset of Waveland residents with the resources to rebuild after Katrina. Their new house sits on the same lot where their old Jim Walters home once stood, and they’ve planted trees and other vegetation on adjoining properties.
But there are days when they miss their old lives and the Waveland they knew before Katrina.
“All of us, to one degree or another, pine for what was,” said Coleman. “It doesn’t matter the circumstances that we find ourselves in (today). We’re always going to … remember what it was like and wish that things had not changed.”
A County Under Siege
On Aug. 28, 2005, Hancock County issued a mandatory evacuation order to its 48,000 residents in anticipation of Katrina’s arrival. The storm had reached Category 5 intensity over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico as it barreled toward the Gulf Coast, with winds nearing 175 miles per hour.
Residents like Betty Ruth Hawkins heeded the county’s warning. Others stayed behind, betting that they would be safe in homes that had survived past storms, like the mammoth Hurricane Camille in 1969.
“The problem we had was people kept telling us, ‘We didn’t get water (during) Camille,’” said Brian “Hooty” Adams, who grew up in Bay St. Louis and has been director of Hancock County’s Emergency Management Agency since 2003. “There wasn’t nobody nowhere prepared for what Katrina gave us.”
Though its winds had weakened by the time it made landfall just west of Waveland, Katrina’s massive storm surge and sea waves proved catastrophic for Hancock County, which contains 165 square miles of low-lying area that are highly susceptible to flooding. Water enveloped whole neighborhoods and inundated structures up to six miles inland, including the old bowling alley-turned Emergency Operations Center where Adams and his 35-man team were stationed.
“We never thought the EOC would get water, but it did,” Adams recalled, noting he and his staff wrote numbers on their arms and on a sheet of paper next to their names so their bodies could be identified if water levels kept rising. “Thank God it stopped (and) we didn’t get but a few feet. But we were still answering phones while the water was coming in.”
Adams described the aftermath of the storm as a blur of frenzied rescue missions and efforts to connect newly unhoused residents with shelter and other basic needs. Katrina destroyed over 10,000 homes in the county and left another 4,000 uninhabitable, forcing many families to take refuge in the Bay St. Louis High School gymnasium. Others stayed in whatever was left of their homes, worried that leaving would invite looting and other crimes of opportunity amid the chaos.
Adams said that Hancock County’s disaster response would not have been possible without the incident management teams, National Guard members, federal workers and other first responders who arrived in Waveland and Bay St. Louis hours after Katrina tore through them. He also highlighted the bevy of volunteers and faith-based organizations that helped sustain the response long after the storm, setting up food and water stations around the county and ensuring donated items were organized and sorted.
“We had help from the outside … that worked with us tremendously, and showed me a lot as an emergency manager,” Adams said. “Without the cooperation of everybody, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Longer-term recovery efforts progressed more slowly. While Hancock County was among the 47 Mississippi counties deemed eligible for FEMA’s individual and public disaster assistance after Katrina, the scale of the devastation along the Gulf Coast—coupled with bureaucratic slowdowns at FEMA and drawn-out reimbursement disputes with insurance companies—created long wait times for aid in many instances, Adams explained. It took about 18 months, for example, for Coleman and Hawkins to be reimbursed through FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program after they were denied individual assistance funding.
“We had good help, but we all thought that we probably could have gotten (it) a lot quicker,” Adams said. “Did we all feel that we got everything we needed? Absolutely not—but we got help to help our people.”
Estimates of FEMA’s total Katrina-related expenditures in Mississippi vary from just under $5 billion to around $10 billion, with the latter figure encompassing funding from federal programs deployed years after the storm. A decade after Katrina, FEMA clawed back nearly $30 million in recovery funds from the state after audits revealed insufficient oversight and mismanagement of previous disaster payments.
Controversy also swirled around Mississippi’s use of supplemental Housing and Urban Development funds earmarked for low-income home reconstruction after Katrina. When former Gov. Haley Barbour redirected nearly $600 million of those funds toward a port expansion project in Gulfport, a coalition of civil rights groups sued, seeking to reroute the money back to the most vulnerable disaster victims. In 2010, Barbour, HUD and the plaintiffs reached a settlement that would allocate $133 million toward low-income housing repairs along the coast.
“We were most offended by the fact that … at a time where the community on the coast needed this money the most, the focus was on expanding this port,” said Kimberly Jones Merchant of the Mississippi Center for Justice, which was part of the lawsuit challenging the funding diversion and helped negotiate the settlement. “The truth is, the recovery was disjointed, oftentimes confusing, and of course, certain people were left out.”
Despite the funding delays and other setbacks, Adams says Hancock County has made remarkable progress in recovering from a disaster that nearly wiped cities like Waveland off the map. He plans to retire at the end of the year, and he feels the county and its residents are better equipped to handle the next storm thanks to the lessons Katrina imparted.
“Everybody (here) has a resiliency,” he said. “As far as rebuilding and where we are now, I think we’ve built back stronger.”
A Legacy of Perseverance
Katrina’s ferocity left Waveland in ruins, but one structure on Coleman Avenue was still standing after the storm: The Waveland Elementary School, built in 1927 and later designated as a historic landmark, suffered major damage but survived.
Since 2013, the building has been home to Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum, a space dedicated to preserving Katrina’s legacy in Mississippi and honoring the bravery and resilience of residents and volunteers.
The museum also has a forward-looking mission, aiming to use Katrina as a tool to show visitors—particularly younger ones—how to prepare for future disasters.
“We want to really educate about storms, and … Katrina is a good example because she’s historic,” said Bernie Cullen, a New Orleans native and longtime nurse who relocated to Waveland in 1997 and now serves as museum board chair. “The thing that you want to teach is: You shouldn’t be afraid of Mother Nature. Be prepared, not scared.”
Cullen was working at a New Orleans hospital when Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. When she managed to return to Waveland three weeks later, she found a waterlogged wasteland that bore no resemblance to the vibrant coastal town she’d visited often as a child.
“It was like we were all in Technicolor, and then we were in black and white,” she explained. “Everything was gone. It wasn’t just homes. Our sewer system was damaged, our water system was damaged … no infrastructure was left.”
Like Brian Adams, Cullen attributes Waveland’s recovery to the thousands of volunteers who descended on the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina. Support poured in from all over the globe: In the year after the storm, Hancock County became a temporary home to college students from neighboring states, faith-based groups from Pennsylvania to Pakistan, and numerous other people of varying ages and backgrounds. Many stayed for weeks or even months after arriving, according to Cullen.
“We were a town of 7,000—we could not have done this by ourselves,” said Cullen, noting that she and other Waveland residents are still in touch with volunteers two decades later. “When you go through something like that together, that’s a bond you can’t break.”
The Ground Zero Museum pays tribute to that lasting connection through its Katrina Recovery Quilts exhibit, which features quilts made from T-shirts donated and signed by volunteers.
The quilts cover two walls in the museum’s main hall, and the various names and logos on the fabric hint at the size and scope of the relief effort that made recovery possible.
Cullen said she hoped to see former volunteers at the museum as Waveland prepared to commemorate Katrina’s 20-year anniversary.
She also has grand plans for the museum moving forward, like establishing a young professionals advisory board and ensuring all exhibit materials are archived for future generations.
“For me, to be able to honor all this legacy is huge,” she said. “This has been a great gift to me in this … phase of my life: to be able to make sure that all these stories are told.”
A Risk Worth Taking
Though they live less than 10 minutes from the Ground Zero Museum, Beverley Coleman and BR Hawkins have never been inside. Sharing memories about Katrina is one thing, Coleman explained, but reliving the storm through the museum’s exhibits would simply be too painful.
Even 20 years later, “it is still a little raw,” she said, sitting on her living room couch on Aug. 12 with Hawkins by her side. “We can talk about it most of the time with relative ease. But then there’ll be that moment when … it just explodes and overtakes you.”
Coleman and Hawkins know they took a big risk by rebuilding in a hurricane hotspot like Waveland. In the 20 years since Katrina, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tracked 285 extreme weather disasters in the U.S. with damage costs at or above $1 billion—a figure that is poised to grow exponentially as climate change worsens, NOAA officials and other scientists say.
While past administrations have taken some steps to mitigate against climate change and future disasters, experts say the Trump administration is undoing much of that groundwork, increasing the likelihood of more extreme weather events of the same magnitude as Katrina.
“The Trump administration is … denying the evidence of climate change, and it’s actually making policies that are making climate change worse,” said Sam Sankar, Earthjustice’s senior vice president for programs, speaking at a Katrina anniversary press briefing with reporters on Aug. 21. “Even worse, (those policies) are taking away the preparedness that we need for the next major climate events.”
Leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s anniversary, a group of more than 180 active and former FEMA employees released an open letter blasting the administration’s cuts to the agency, warning that the actions risk eroding progress at FEMA in the decades since the storm. President Trump has repeatedly threatened to eliminate FEMA since taking office in January, and roughly one-third of the agency’s full-time workforce has left or been fired in that time period.
The administration has suspended more than 20 of the letter’s signees as of Tuesday, according to BBC News and other outlets.
Should another Katrina occur in their lifetimes, Coleman and Hawkins haven’t ruled out the possibility of rebuilding in Waveland again. The city has become a part of them since the storm, burrowing deep into their hearts like the roots of an oak tree.
“It’s home,” Hawkins said simply, echoing the words of ABC News anchor and Pass Christian native Robin Roberts after Katrina. “It does defy logic, and it’s hard to describe to somebody else. But it’s home.”
Read more Free Press coverage of Hurricane Katrina, with our archive dating back to 2005, at www.mississippifreepress.org/hurricane-katrina.
Editor’s Note: Beverley Coleman and Betty Ruth Hawkins have donated to the nonprofit Mississippi Free Press in the past. Gifts to our nonprofit have no bearing on our coverage choices and reporting.
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