It’s bad enough in the day, but Katrina’s destruction at night is other worldly. We took a ride through Gulfport, but it could have been any of a dozen towns. There is no power, no lights, and you can’t tell what is inhabited.
We found mile after mile, one abandoned neighborhood after another. There were a lot of civil war era mansions along this coast— but not anymore.
What used to be inside many of the most expensive homes is now often outside. Like elsewhere, there has been looting here. There were few police officers in the first nights, now there are more.
And every once in a great while, you see a person.
We met Sy Faneka who rode out the storm with his wife Georgia Ann.
The Fanekas told us how looters had been in all the neighbors’ houses, and how Georgia even fired the gun Sy gave her to scare one off.
“I'm an 8th grade school teacher. I don't do that. My husband is very trained in using guns, but he wasn’t here,” she said. “I was on guard, so I raised the gun straight up and I shot one time,” she says.
But mostly, they told of how theirs was the only house left standing and how they’d barely escaped with their lives.
“It’s an ocean with the wind driving the waves, with all this debris. It’s indescribable,” says Sy. “It’s like, I think it would be comparable to being down river when they are sending the logs down the rapids.”
As waves crashed through the first floor, they retreated to the second floor and then another house hit their house. “This is when we really got scared because this was the height of the storm. We saw our south wall collapsing.”
Sy raced downstairs and blew off his backdoor with a shotgun. That released the debris and water pressure tearing the house apart.
Then the Fanekas tied themselves up together thinking they would swim for a huge tree outside. It was just as much a desire that if they were about to die, they would die together.
We visited the Fanekas again this morning as they were packing to leave. After days alone, their friends had come to help them move. Their son had just arrived— he was home from college.
“It was a sign of life, it was like, ‘Ok, life is going to go on and there is going to people and its not going to be just us,’” Sy realized. “We are not going to be living in a cave and we are not prehistoric people. We are gonna have a normal life again.”
