I slept through Hurricane Katrina when it made landfall on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005. I’m a heavy sleeper, but I also happened to be 1,300 miles away in Phoenix at the time.

Two days later, I was in Gulfport, watching a banker, sunburned and filthy, siphon gasoline out of his neighbors’ Beamers and Benzes into a pair of five-gallon gas cans he had loaded on a child’s little red Radio Flyer wagon.

In flooded New Orleans, looting was a big part of the news coverage, yet for every person making off with a TV or pair of Nikes from some department store, there were hundreds of people roaming through grocery stores and pharmacies in a desperate search for the food and items needed for survival. TV news reports didn’t do justice to the survivors in telling that part of the story. Call it looting, call it theft, but whatever you call it, what the people in New Orleans were doing wasn’t any different than what the banker in Gulfport was doing.
Everybody was trying to get by as best they could.

It was a chance meeting to run into the banker, who I had known from the 13 years I had lived on the Coast (1992-1995). He was the only person in the beachside enclave of 10 of 12 houses who had chosen to ride out the storm. He sent his family north on Saturday, two days before Katrina’s landfall.

Now, he moved through his empty neighborhood scavenging for gas to keep his generator running.

By the time I had arrived, a simple rule had been established for anyone who lived or owned property along Highway 90, the beach highway that runs from New Orleans to Mobile: The only people allowed in the area were those who had never left. First responders, National Guardsmen, utility workers and clean-up crews were exceptions, as were reporters. That gave me access to the hardest hit areas.
When I arrived on the Coast, a National Guardsman looked at my credentials and waved me through to Highway 90 where Highway 49 ends at what was left of Jones Park.

I pulled off to the side of Highway 90 and walked onto the beach, which was littered with all sorts of debris that had been backwashed from the storm surge. Looking through the rubble, I found one of those old wooden boxes that are used as card catalogs at the library. The library was a half-mile away, my first clue nothing would be where I thought it would be.

I picked my way along Highway 90, which was also littered with debris. Some stretches of the highway were damaged or obstructed to the point where it was impassable, so I had to look for routes around the damage. The old truck was perfect for the task.

I had lived in this area for 13 years, so I knew the names and order of every street that intersected with Highway 90 from Gulfport to east Biloxi.

But it was hard to get my bearings because all of the landmarks had been swept into oblivion. All of it was a wasteland, indistinguishable.
Finally, I approached something recognizable – the ninth green of the historic Great Southern Golf Club near the Gulfport-Biloxi border.
Just west of there was the little neighborhood where the banker was siphoning gas.

I roamed the Coast for the next five days, telling the stories of residents, first-responders and guardsmen, sleeping in a National Guard barracks set up at the Gulfport airport. I rode with the Mississippi Air National Guard in Apache helicopters, where they delivered water, food and medicine to rural communities where bridges had been washed out leaving them stranded. I also flew in a Chinook helicopter as it delivered pallets of water to a shopping center in Picayune. As it sat down, the massive rotors of the helicopter blew out the windows of a van parked too close to the landing site.

Maybe it’s the passage of time or maybe a sign that I am getting older, but memories of those six days are drifting away. Now, 20 years later, it’s funny the things that I do recall with some clarity. The memory that lingers most is that banker and his little red wagon that carried stolen gasoline.

Hurricane Katrina is, after all, a story of survival.

Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].