Reflecting on Hurricane Katrina: Damage along Mississippi’s coast

Date:2025-08-28 08:07:37 Category:US Views:1 Comment:0

BILOXI, Miss. (WJTV) – We’re looking back 20 years to the most catastrophic natural disaster to ever hit Mississippi: Hurricane Katrina. The anniversary of the storm’s landfall is this week.

I made several trips to the coast in the weeks and months after Katrina.

If you ever visited Gulfport after Hurricane Camille and before Katrina then no doubt you marveled at the S.S. Camille. A shrimp boat was carried across Highway 90 by Hurricane Camille in 1969. We were amazed that a hurricane could do that.

Katrina lifted one of the casino barges out of the Gulf and deposited it straddling Highway 90. In Biloxi when the storm came ashore, it destroyed some of the old historic waterfront homes that had survived all of the hurricanes up until then.

Devastation in Biloxi: Hurricane Katrina’s destructive force

In Bay St. Louis, people would park their cars along the Highway 43 ramp coming into town to escape the storm surge during previous hurricanes. We noticed demolished cars all along the highway as we came in. I asked someone about it, and they told me to go back to the Interstate 10 bridge and see where the debris line was. When we got there, we saw how high the storm surge had been. It was absolutely inescapable for cars parked in the roadway or pretty much anything else down below.

The destruction was everywhere. There was nothing but slabs where houses had once stood. Streets were marked by piles of debris on either side. We took the two youngest grandkids down with us to see the damage in hopes they would never see anything like this again in their lives.

One thing I remember is the determination to build back that surfaced right after people started emerging after the storm. American flags were staked in the ruins, and messages to anyone who needed to know were posted all over.

Hurricane Katrina was a way station along the line of existence for the state and most anyone in it at the time. As we look back at these scenes, hopefully we will never have to see anything like this again.

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