For the first time since Hurricane Katrina made landfall 20 years ago, you can take a train ride across the Gulf Coast, from Mobile to New Orleans. And all these years later, the cities along that route are still living with the storm's aftermath. In this episode, we hop aboard the train and make four Gulf Coast stops along the way to share that story. About what happened during Katrina. How some places built back better, and how others are still trying to figure out how to rebuild.
This episode was reported and hosted by Stephan Bisaha of the Gulf States Newsroom. Sea Change's executive producer, Carlyle Calhoun, co-hosted the episode.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. For another great podcast serving up more great stories from the region, check out Gulf States Gumbo wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
TITLE
CARLYLE: I’m Carlyle Calhoun and you’re listening to Sea Change. And today we’re going on a ride. A special ride that’s taken 20 years to actually happen. We are taking a train ride.
(HORN)
CARLYLE: And our train tour guide today is the Gulf States Newsroom’s Stephan Bisaha. Hey, Stephan!
STEPHAN: Hey, Carlyle!
CARLYLE: So Stephan, where are we going and what makes this train so special?
STEPHAN: We are taking the Amtrak train from Mobile, Alabama along the Mississippi coast and into New Orleans. And with a few expectations it has been impossible to do this ride until this month. And it all goes back, like so many things do, to Hurricane Katrina.
20 years ago Katrina destroyed so much of the Gulf Coast including parts of this railroad. And also like a lot of the coastline, getting back what was lost has taken a lot longer than expected. Yet for two decades train lovers along the Gulf Coast have been fighting to bring Amtrak back. And earlier this month it finally happened.
Announcer: …behalf of our entire Amtrak crew, I would like to welcome you onboard the inaugural service. Mardi Gras service.
CARLYLE: [reaction to Mardi Gras service name]
The Mardi Gras Line! What a good name!
STEPHAN: So I recently took that train ride not just because it is a gorgeous ride – and trust me it is.
The real reason I rode this train was because these tracks help tell the story of how Hurricane Katrina has changed the Gulf Coast two decades later.
CARLYLE: So today that’s what we’re doing, riding the train and making four Gulf Coast stops along the way to share that story. About what happened during Katrina. How some places built back better and how others are still trying to figure out how to rebuild.
STEPHAN: So grab a ticket and grab a seat because we’re about to get rolling.
Announcer: All aboard!
BREAK
[train track rumble]
Amtrak: Southbound Amtrak, 969. Southbound Mardi Gras service. Inaugural run. From Mobile to New Orleans multiple stops in between.
Bisaha: Okay so the announcement says Southbound but mostly we are moving west. We wave goodbye to downtown Mobile and head into Mississippi.
The train itself is that classic blue and gray, pretty much new. And inside there’s way more leg room than a flight and at a cafe car serving Gulf Coast shrimp.
During this part of the ride there’s a sun shower giving the bayous and small towns we pass a warm late summer day vibe.
Amtrak: And ladies and gentlemen, our first stop, once again, will be Pascagoula Mississippi. Pascagoula, Mississippi.
Bisaha: Pascagoula is a small coastal city – it's got shipyards, raised beach houses, abstract steel sculptures downtown. And the important thing to remember about Pascagoula is that it is as far from New Orleans as any Missisisppi city on the coast gets.
It’s a roughly two hour drive to New Orleans from here, about 110 miles. And yet despite all that distance from the city most associated with Hurricane Katrina, that storm dragged enough water into Pascagoula to submerge… just about… all of it.
Including right off the train depot in the city’s downtown.
Paige: The geographic footprint of Hurricane Katrina’s wrath, it was the size of Great Britain.
Bisaha: Let me introduce you to Paige Roberts. She’s raised a family on the coast here and currently runs the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce. But back in the Katrina days she was the head of the Red Cross’s chapter for this corner of Mississippi. And she’s giving me a tour of Pascagoula, starting with the train tracks downtown – and these tracks, they serve as a sort of marker.
Paige: This is where the water came to from the Gulf.
Bisaha: It made it all the way to the tracks. Cause how far we from the water over here?
Paige: It’s probably a mile.
Bisaha: Quick Google Map check shows it’s more than a mile and a half from the coast and the storm surge made it all the way here. Other parts of the city were also drowned when water rose from the Pascagoula River that wraps around the city.
Paige: So about 90 percent of the entire city went underwater at some level.
Bisaha: Think about that for a second. 90 percent of this city, so far from New Orleans, 90 percent of it was flooded by Katrina. And this was not a gentle flooding. It was violent.
Paige: It flattened just about everything in its place. And if it didn’t flatten it, it lifted it up and moved it. (internal edit) There were houses in the middle of the street.
Bisaha: So remember how Paige said the whole stretch of area damaged by Hurricane Katrina…
Paige: Was the size of Great Britain.
Bisaha: Well the thing to know about a hurricane’s huge mass of wind and water, is that it’s not all made equally. Or at least not equally dangerous. What side you’re on matters.
I mean look, you don’t want to be on any side of a hurricane but bear with me for a minute and picture a hurricane. Like that big ball of white we’ve all seen in those satellite photos. Imagine the north half over land and the bottom half over water.
Hurricanes spin counter clockwise. So imagine those winds rotating from the west side, into the South where the water is, and then dragging that ocean water with it as it moves northeast. That’s what causes the worst of the storm surge.
The reason New Orleans is synonymous with Katrina is not because it got the worst of that storm. It was actually on the safer west side. But New Orleans was so badly flooded because of man-made failures like the levees breaking.
The Mississippi coastal cities were mostly on that more dangerous east side and they did get the worst of the storm itself.
And as Katrina started dragging that storm surge into Missisisppi and Pascagoula, Paige Roberts spent part of her time here.
[Ding dong]
Bisaha: The county’s emergency operation center.
Voice: It’s open.
Paige: Thank you.
Bisaha: And one of the people she spent that day and many days after with was Terry Jackson. At the time he was the center’s deputy director, now he’s the the office’s operations coordinator.
Terry: This is what it looked like during Katrina. This office. It was a mess. It was dump. (internal edit)
Paige: (laugh)
Bisaha: I mean it doesn’t look as messy as you would –
Paige: It doesn’t look that bad.
Terry: No it was bad.
Bisaha: Terry and Paige, they talk like old war buddies, and in a way they are. They trade off telling stories like a team. Like one story about when one of the guys at the operations center spotted his truck going under water early during the storm surge.
Terry: And he called his insurance company –
Paige: Yes.
before we lost power. You remember that?
Paige: I remember.
Terry: I need a report my truck I've got a claim and he she said what's the claim says it's on the water. (internal cut) And she said, well, the storm's not even over. What are you talking about? And he said, yeah, he said my truck's under water. And he was probably the first claim with that insurance company, she said.
Paige: That's one of the stories I remember too. So back to Terry's and my favorite story. So we're rescuing all these people. Well, that includes people with infants, babies and infants. And we didn't have formula. But the WIC building had formula. You know, the women, infant, children building, which is a government building. So Terry and some of my Red Cross of volunteers left here and tell them what you did.
Terry: So we, this was about day three, day four, we started needing the milk because infants were getting, were starving and nobody had any. So we come up with the idea, we'll just go over to the WIC building and see if anybody may be around there. Nobody was around there, so we just took it up on ourselves to break into it. We broke the lock off, got the National Guard over there and we hauled every bit of the product out of there. So they either gonna take us to jail or we'll ask for forgiveness, but we're gonna feed these babies and we did.
Bisah: Did they take you off the jail? I'm assuming not.
Terry: No, nobody, I don't, nobody.
Paige: At one point, I wanted to be taken to jail. Nobody would be able to find me or guess that I was there.
Bisaha: You can hear both Paige and Terry laughing and smiling as they tell these stories, which can be a bit surprising.
Paige: You laugh instead of cry first of all. But second of all, it’s almost like, laughing is often times a relief response because and also like wow, we did that. (internal cut)
Terry: It wasn’t a laughing matter by no means. I have my horror stories I’m going to tell you and I’m not going to talk about them. (internal cut) Yeah no. I’m good.
Paige: (laugh)
Terry: (internal cut) The, hmm. I’m not going to talk about it. Because a lot of people suffered. In a bad way.
(beat)
(train tracks)
Bisaha: Riding through Pascaougla it’s hard to see signs today of what Katrina did. The downtown was rebuilt and they’re currently fixing up the train depot. But not all of the people have returned.
Today Pascagoula’s population is at about 22,000. About 15 percent lower than it was before Katrina.
Announcer: Alright ladies and gentleman that was Pascagoula, Mississippi. We’re now underway to our next scheduled station stop of Biloxi, Mississippi.
Bisaha: At this point of the train ride, we are over the Gulf on the Biloxi Bay Bridge. You can look out the left or right side window and see sparkling Gulf Coast water all around us before the bridge takes us down into the city of Biloxi.
It’s another coastal city and as the tracks move a bit north away from the water, I can still see in the distance all these different casinos that line the waterfront.
You know, I never really took the phrase “the other side of the tracks” literally. It wasn’t until I moved to a city where railroads cut through the city’s heart that I realized just how much train tracks really can be a dividing line. Like here in Biloxi.
Tyrone: They used to use that word (internal cut) back across the tracks, you know.
Bisaha: This is Tyrone Burton. Tyrone’s in his 80s and wears a button down shirt showing the blue sky blending into the blue ocean .
Tyrone: It was more, you had, better homes and everything was over on that side.
Bisaha: East Biloxi is split roughly in half by the railroad. The South half below the tracks is where all that casino glitz is, right off the Gulf. On this side north of the tracks, there are a lot of single story houses with plenty of them boarded up.
But on this side Tyrone has become a bit of a local celebrity. He’s been cutting hair for 64 years, mostly in this brick barber shop. They even recently named this stretch of street after him – Tyrone Burton Way.
(buzz sound)
Bisaha: Why did you want to be a barber?
Tyrone: Oh man. I’m a country boy. I came out of the field. And this is just like a toy. This is a hobby for me.
Bisaha: And for many of those years making that hobby his living, this part of East Biloxi was doing alright too.
Tyrone: The laundry mat. We had the doctor’s office. (internal cut) Other words (internal cut) it’s pretty much self sufficient. Didn’t have to go out, go get a loaf of bread. All you do, just walk cross the street.
Bisaha: So before the storm there were mom and pops, there were other businesses here….
Tyrone: But at the same time it was a decline.
Bisaha: Tyrone says this corner of East Biloxi, historically Black, started seeing businesses and people leave well before Katrina.
This decline was the fate of many historically black districts in the South – they were built up by a concentration fo Black wealth during segregation where they were some of the few places Black residents could shop. But when residents were able to start shopping anywhere, that meant less business in these districts.
One organizer I spoke to in East Biloxi
also talked about how some stores
left this street and moved to the growing | west side of town
decades ago.
Bisaha: So the decline of this neighborhood was happening before Katrina but Katrina accelerated it?
Tyrone: Oh it accelerated. (internal cut) Yeah it put a hurt on us.
Bisaha: East Biloxi was the part of the city most damaged by Katrina. The city says about 80 percent of the area's houses were either lost or made unlivable.
Biloxi also set a record for the highest storm surge ever observed in America according to NASA. An astonishing 30 feet.
And the casinos were especially vulnerable. At the time they were only allowed on the Mississippi coast if they were on barges. They couldn’t actually be on land. And so when the flooding came the casinos moved with it.
Tyrone: It took one casino like two blocks down the way and just set it down. And it was even (internal edit) It was just it moved it down there.
Bisaha: What did they do it with it?
Tyrone: Oh they had it destroyed.
Bisaha: But despite all that, the casinos today have rebuilt – on land this time – and are booming. The Mississippi Business Journal says casinos in the state generate about two and a half billion dollars each year.
Which isn’t all good. Tyrone says he’s seen some residents on this side of the tracks get trapped in gambling addiction at the casinos.
Tyrone: I mean people you didn’t think would ever get involved into gambling got caught up.
Bisaha: So it sounds like you are not happy the casinos are there.
Tyrone: Oh I love it. I mean, it bought jobs.
Bisaha: The casino industry employees about 16,000 people across Mississippi, many in Biloxi. This city used to be more of a fishing city but over the years that part of its economy has shrunk while the casinos have grown.
But while the casinos have done well, Tyrone says his side of the tracks still hasn’t gotten the support it needs.
Tyrone: Some reason, we don’t get the funds over here like I think we should be receiving. You know? To help rebuild over here.
Bisaha: Oh, like funds from the state and federal government?
Tyrone: From the state and federal government. Right. And the city, look like they’re just waiting for us to dry up. So they can take this area.
Biloxi does have a comprehensive rebuilding plan and. it does talk about rebuilding homes here. But it also And it basically says due to the environmental problems here like how low the area sits and the poverty, news houses and people will likely continue moving north instead. in the areaenvironmental and economic constraints for rebuilding in East Biloxi, residential development will likely continue moving north instead. And that’s where a lot of people living in East Biloxi before Katrina went after.
The need to elevate homes to protect them from storms only makes rebuilding here harder. High insurance costs don’t help either. The city’s plan does talk about rebuilding housing, but from the front of Tyrone’s barber shop, you can still see boarded up homes.
Bisaha: How do you feel about like, it’s been 20 years since Katrina. How do you feel about the status of East Biloxi?
Tyrone: The status right now is down, down. (internal cut) We was already going down. And when the Katrina come it just give them more opportunities cause they were able to get the insurance and get out of here.
(beat)
Announcement: …we will be coming up to Bay Saint. Louis draw bridge. Coming around the curve right now. If everyone wants to look out the windows here shortly. Coming over beautiful Bay. Saint Louis.
Bisaha: Beautiful is the right word for Bay Saint Louis. The ride leading up to the city has a long stretch over the water. And as you go across that water you can see the marina filled with boats and along beach boulevard there are lots of colorful bars to choose from with a view of the Ggulf.
And just a couple blocks up from there near the tracks are plenty of places to pick up a local art souvenir. Including at Gallery 220.
Jenise McCardell: It’s always been an arty town. Which, that’s why I’m here.
Jenise McCardell is the gallery’s owneries and and she likes to say in college majored in mud. You know, ceramics.
Bay Saint Louis has grown into a fresh air, beach spot getaway from New Orleans. And residents Visitors from New Orleans often come in here to pick up a ceramic tile based on all sorts of New Orleans buildings – churches, bars, high schools.
McCardell: In New Orleans they love their high schools. It doesn’t matter where you went to college. And everyone knows where you live, who you know, and it all depends on what school you go to.
Bisaha: So remember how I said which side of a hurricane you’re on matters? Well it also matters how close you are to landfall. And Bay Saint Louis was about as close to that spotpoint as you can get. Its neighbor town Waveland was that landfall point and so much of Bay Saint Louis was just washed away. Jenise shows me a printed out picture on her wall. It’s an aerial shot of this part of the town shortly after Katrina and with all the sand and collapsed buildings it really does look like a warzone.
McCardell: This is all bars. Restaurants. Art galleries along here. And then water is in front, you know, here. And then the water is in front, you know, here.
Bisaha: And there’s like nothing there right now.
McCardell: There’s nothing. It’s like a tsunami just came in and just crushed our little town. (internal cut) It probably took us at least 10 years to get our infrastructure structure back together, because as you can see we're dirt, we're just crumbled buildings and everything had to be bulldozed away and it took months and months and then it turned into years. But what has happened to the town since we have our marina out in front of this Hancock Bank is just tremendous what's happened (internal cut) with the place. (internal cut).
Bisaha: : Yeah, that's where Bay St. Louis is now booming. [00:11:29][2.3]
McCardell: Yes, yes.
Bisaha:Bay Saint Louis has rebuilt and has a reputation as a New Orleans ocean air getaway. .The populations in both Pascagoula and Biloxi have shrunk since the 2000 census. But Bay Saint Louis has grown. Nearly 10,000 people now live in the town – an almost 20 percent jump.
And now after 40 years Jenise is retiring and selling this gallery.
Bisaha: You think it's going to be a challenge to sell this space? Do you think it's gonna be easy to find buyers?
McCardell: We've only been on the market for two months and three weeks and I've had seven offers and I'm in a contract right now.
Bisaha: Wow, okay so we'll move fast.
McCardell: Yeah, we’re very excited. There’s not very much property for sale around here. Commercial property so and it's a wonderful building.
Bisaha: One thing that has not been wonderful has been insurance.
McCardell: Absolutely terrible. It’s almost like we have a division line, which is I-10 our Interstate That goes from Jacksonville to San Diego and comes, you know, right above us and anything below I-10 It's on I mean, there's no insurance. I mean they're very picky and most people I hate to say this have to self-insure.
Bisaha: Meaning they have no insurance, beyond their own savings. Jenise does that too.
McCardell: You have to just have money to self-insurance, which is sad. (internal cut) We want all types of people here. But you know it’s kind of made society choose who can live here.
Bisaha: And is that an economic decision. People who can afford it can live here?
McCardell: Yes. Yes. Which, it's wrong, because we should have everybody, and that's what makes a cool town, all kinds of people.
(train tracks fade up)
Announcement: We are going on out of Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi. Underway to our next and final station stop of New Orleans, Louisiana. (internal cut) So once again ladies and gentleman, let’s give a round of applause for everybody who made this happen. This is a very big milestone as far as the coastal area. Especially since Katrina. Shows we are rebuilding back better than ever.
Bisaha: When I spoke to people in Mississippi, there was a frustration, a feeling that Mississippi’s suffering from Katrina was ignored immediately after the storm and the years after. That New Orleans got all the media attention.
But the people in Mississippi I spoke with were always clear, New Orleans deserved that attention. They just wanted Missisisppi’s problems in the spotlight too.
Again, New Orleans did not get the worst that nature could throw at it with Katrina. Instead it man made failures that drowned parts of New Orleans for weeks. Places like the Lower Ninth Ward.
Bisaha: So for people who don’t understand, like they just think, okay New Orleans got hit bad, the Lower Ninth Ward, that was the worst it right?
Burnell: The Lower Ninth Ward got hit the hardest. And people don’t understand we’re still suffering from Katrina. We’re not going to talk about everything else.
Bisaha: This is Burnell Cotlon. He grew up in the Lower Ninth Ward and moved back homehere right before Katrina.
This is a historically Black neighborhood and before Katrina it had a mix of low to middle class home owners. But levee breaches during the storm submerged the entire Lower Ninth Ward. It took about 43 days for the Army Corps of Engineers to pump the last of the flood water out of the city.
Burnell decided to stay and with his wife they eventually ended up purchasing a destroyed liquor store and rebuildingdecided to rebuild it, but not as a place to sell alcohol.
Burnell: The Lower Ninth Ward didn’t need another liquor store and New Orleans definitely doesn’t need another restaurant. The Lower Ninth Ward needed a grocery store.
Burnell says he unofficially opened in 2007 and at the time there was no other grocery store there. Today there is a Family Dollar and another local store called Sheaux Fresh selling produce. But even nowthen groceriesy in the Lower Ninth are pretty limited.
And Burnell’s store is pretty bare bones too. It only has two aisles. But it does have some of the essentials – milk, bananas, onions. Canned soup, corn and carrots.
The place also has a ton of other services too. Laundromat. Hair salon. He’s even making an internet cafe after seeing kids doing homework in his store for the WIFI.
And Burnell made this happen DIY.
Burnell: Look down on this floor. See how it’s all wibbly wobby.
Bisaha: It’s a little uneven.
Burnell No, it's a lot uneven, I'll go ahead and tell ya! I poured the concrete. And I didn't know you're supposed to smooth it out. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea. (internal cut) All I knew is you should not have to catch three buses to get to Walmart to feed your family. (internal edit)
Bisaha: Is the challenge that there’s not enough people that have stayed in the Lower Ninth Ward to sustain those stores?
Cornell: It's a big challenge. We didn't go, not even one third of the population came back. But you do have people here. There's quite a few people here, but the people here are suffering. But the big box stores, they're not coming back because there's not enough people. And the people that want to come back, they're gonna come back because there are no stores. So it's like, what came first? The chicken or the eggs? In this situation, what came first? Me. The first grocery store.
Bisaha: Burnell has a wall of celebrity photos of people who stopped by the store. The queen of bounce Big Freedtia and Mark Zuckerberg are just a couple names.
Clearly Burnell has a lot of pride in this place. But as we step out onto the street we see just how much work needs to be done in the Lower Ninth. The empty lot in front of us used to be a movie theatre. Now it’s overtaken with grass. Burnell wants to rebuild homes but he needs the cash to do it. He says it’s like a bad dream and wishes there was more that he could do but it’s been like this for so long.
Burnell: It's painful. It is really, really painful and it's frustrating. It's very frustrating, but I have to keep going. I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stop until I can see, you know, people can still walking to here and feel like, okay, this is our home. This is our neighborhood. They didn't forget about us. But it's hard. See the cars, that’s passing. That's what I'm saying. There's a lot of people here, but this is the only place. There's nowhere else for them to go. (internal cut)
Bisaha: I mean, where does that leave your headspace? Cause like when there's some, obviously there's pride in this place and there's what you accomplish. But I also hear this like, it's painful. Like where, where are you at? Like emotionally with all this.
Burnell: I'm going to tell you something that I very rarely talk about. Some days, some days it's harder than others. Some days I'm human, some day I break down because I see so many people suffering. Some days... I'll just cry, I'll be honest with you. Because I see many people hurting.
Bisaha: I want to take a moment here and skip back to the other side of this train route. Back to Mobile, Alabama. Earlier this month there was a special ride of this train was met with a brass band to celebrate its return. And Missisisppi Senator Roger Wicker spoke at the city’s convention center about how important the moment was.
Wicker: This is one of the last pieces of the puzzle to doing an accomplishment that I made my maiden speech about when I was a new United States Senator. I said that we needed to recover from Katrina. This is one of the last pieces of that puzzle. It took us 20 years. Took us too long.
Bisaha: Look, the train coming back is something well worth celebrating. Along with celebrating Pascagoula’s downtown. Biloxi’s strip. Bay Saint Louis. The initiative it takes to be the first grocery store in a neighborhood post storm.
But it doesn’t feel like we’re at the last pieces of that puzzle just yet. Even 20 years later there is still so much to do to recover from Hurricane Katrina.
Announcement: And on behalf of the entire Amtrak crew and family, I want to personally thank each and every one of you for riding with us on the inaugural southbound Mardi Gras service. (internal edit). See you all on the platform. Thank you.
OUTRO
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This episode was hosted by me, Carlyle Calhoun and Stephan Bisaha. Stephan reported the story.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. For another great podcast serving up more great stories from the region, check out Gulf States Gumbo wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
