When Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, it sent residents of New Orleans and the Mississippi coast scattering.
People drove inland until they could find a place to stay. Many found places in the Golden Triangle.
In fact, Cindy Lawrence, director of Lowndes County Emergency Management Agency, said that within the first week after the hurricane, 550 evacuees had landed in Columbus.
“Hotels were just booked everywhere,” Cindy Lawrence said.
Hughes Elementary, which could hold up to 300 people at a time, was set up as a shelter. Mississippi University for Women set up some of the campus dormitories for people to stay in. The Red Cross set up a shelter near the fire department on Martin Luther King Drive. Several churches also offered shelter, Lawrence said.
Between 220 to 250 people volunteered in one way or another after the storm, Lawrence said. Columbus and Lowndes County residents opened their homes to people needing a place to stay. Baptist and Mennonite groups arrived to help where they could. Groups like the Red Cross and the Salvation Army, which have organized disaster relief programs, were particularly good at setting up shelters and passing out food and necessities to people who needed them.
“I don’t know what I would have done without (the Salvation Army and the Red Cross),” Lawrence said.
The EMA’s main focus was to take care of evacuees, who were finding lodging as far inland as Tupelo and Memphis. Lawrence and her employees would call hotels every day to check on available rooms.
“If there were no rooms here, they would send them to the next county,” Lawrence said.
All in all, Lowndes County sheltered about 900 evacuees. Some left and moved back to home to rebuild. Some found other places to go. Some made Columbus their new home.
Local damage,local responses
In addition to being the landing place of nearly 1,000 people left suddenly without a home, Columbus was dealing with its own damages from the storm. Though no houses were destroyed, there was flooding and some houses had roof damage.
“You think it happens just on the coast,” Lawrence said. “But it’s not. It’s up here, all the way inland.”
In the first few days after the storm, 4-County Electric Power Association had to fix power for 33,000 consumers who had lost it when the hurricane blew winds of up to 50 mph into the area, according to a media release from Brad Barr, communications director with 4-County. Once power had been restored to 95 percent of consumers, groups of employees began heading to damaged parts of the coast to help restore power there.
Brian Glusenkamp, a lineman who traveled to repair power lines and restore power on the coast, remembers seeing boats in trees.
“The houses were just completely gone,” he said.
Another lineman on the team, Jaron Andrews, said the closer the group got to the coast, the more damage they saw.
“The smell in some places was unbearable,” Glusenkamp said.
Andrews remembered one occasion where the smell became so bad that someone suggested it was most likely a dead body.
“I think at that point we really realized how severe and how horrible the storm really was,” he said. “It was a reality check.”
The 4-County group stayed in tents the size of football fields, according to construction foreman Rob Giles.
Major Alan Phillips with the Salvation Army in Columbus was also deployed to the coast as a first responder. He stayed 12 days in Biloxi, working alongside other volunteer organizations like the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. He made dinner for people out of a Salvation Army canteen set up to store and cook food in disaster areas.
“We’re seeing people where they’re really hurting,” he said. “Sometimes they can’t even talk. Sometimes they just break down in tears when you give them food and water.”
Phillips wasn’t the only one doing so.
Alton Ming, who works for the Salvation Army, was in Shreveport doing the same thing, distributing food and goods and listening to people tell their disaster stories.
“A gentleman came in and had lost everything,” Ming remembered. “And the only thing he was looking for was a suit and tie to wear to church.”
All in all, the Salvation Army had 178 canteen feeding units and 11 field kitchens brought in from across the country and they served more than 5.6 million hot meals and 8.2 million sandwiches, snacks and drinks. Between distributing food and volunteering in other ways, the organization assisted over 2.6 million survivors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Other organizations, like Fairview Baptist Church and First Baptist Church, sent members down to help distribute food or rebuild houses.
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