In this installment, Hurricane Katrina's unprecedented storm surge begins to push ashore, crushing the author's illusion of safety.
- by Ellis Anderson Chapter 4 of the award-winning book that follows Bay St. Louis through the very heart of Hurricane Katrina – and three years of grinding aftermath. 
Citizen Street during Hurricane Katrina's surge on August 29. Photo by Joe Tomasovsky
When the trunk of a large tree careened past—looking like a kayak caught in rapids—adrenaline began to roar through my veins. The roots of my hair rose up in a futile effort to desert the rest of my body. Denial wasn’t possible any more. I was watching a storm surge charging in from the Gulf of Mexico.
I’d always prided myself on being cool in a crisis, yet now, only one thought ran through my head, repeating like a record on an unbalanced jukebox: “You idiot. You should have gone to Diamondhead.”
Diamondhead is a community five miles north of Bay St. Louis. Friends who had evacuated to ride out the storm there had begged me to join them. I had resisted. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “No surge will make it back to my house—I’m a quarter mile from the beach,” I assured them. “It can’t be worse than Camille.”* But now, Katrina had me feeling like I was trapped in the Alamo, surrounded by an enemy whose strength had been vastly underestimated. No reinforcements would arrive, no escape was possible. If the walls were breached, my survival would be in doubt. How did I find myself in that precarious position? The decisions had fallen into place like dominos of denial, ending with my resolution to ride out the storm. 
Before Katrina: Citizen Street and Beach Blvd, about a 1/4 mile from Webb Schoolhouse and Joe Tomasovsky's house, photo by Ellis Anderson
Three days before I’d been packing for a trip to North Carolina for my dad’s eighty-fourth birthday celebration. Katrina was already in the Gulf, but our town was well outside the cone of the predicted path. How could the storm alter course enough to affect my plans? After fretting through the morning, I packed my car and hit the road that Friday afternoon. I drove for six hours and was on the far side of Montgomery when my cell phone rang. “The storm’s changed course and it’s headed straight here,” said my friend Lori. “You’ve got to come back.” To someone in another part of the world that might sound like advice from a madwoman, but it made perfect sense to me. I had to prepare my house. I pulled off the interstate, sat in the parking lot of a fast food joint, and made calls to several other friends. After an hour of listening to conflicting reports, I regretfully turned the car south and headed home, just to be on the safe side. Late that night, I stopped in a motel and slept for a few hours, continuing the drive at dawn on Saturday. When I neared Mobile, I was struck by a sudden resentment that my vacation had been cut short. I veered off the interstate and headed down to Dauphin Island, slightly to the south and west of Mobile. I’d always loved the place and wanted to play tourist for a few hours. Once I crossed the causeway onto the island, the atmosphere changed. An eerie sense of doom hung in the air like a thick fog. I drove to the west end of the island and saw that it was already underwater, although the storm was still two days from landfall. Waves had engulfed the pilings of several raised houses, giving them the appearance of abandoned oil rigs. A few crews were out boarding up windows, but for the most part, it looked as if residents had given up any attempts at protection. I stopped for breakfast in the only open café. There were few diners, and, while I ate, I listened to the local waitresses terrorize the tourists with stories of past storms. It was amusing, but the sense of crisis was contagious. I didn’t linger for more coffee. Knowing the stores at home would be mobbed, I shopped at an Alabama grocery store, stocking up with gallons of water, some canned goods, and a large bag of dog food. I also filled the tank of my car with gas, blissfully unaware that it would be for the last time. On the road back to the Bay, an escalating urgency made me ignore the speed limits. My home in Bay St. Louis is a renovated schoolhouse—the Webb School—built in 1913. My contractor friends assure me that it’s as strong as a fortress. It’s a raised building, set on solid concrete pilings that are ten feet tall. I’d already had the largest of the many windows boarded over, but there was still a lot of work to be done. The next twenty-four hours blurred by as I put my hurricane preparation system into effect. 
Webb School House, built in 1913 and a designated Mississippi Landmark, photo by Ellis Anderson
The list is long: take down every piece of art and store it in the most protected closets (a strong storm can vibrate the walls so much, paintings will crash to the floor). Move all the potted plants and outdoor furniture to safety beneath the house. Ditto the car. Cover the important furniture with tarps in case the roof blows off. Pack up all the pottery and sacred books in plastic crates. Fill up the bathtub. Check the battery supply and make sure all the flashlights are working. Make backup discs for the computer. By Sunday afternoon, I was utterly exhausted. The squalls were beginning to roll in, with thin bands of clouds hurling through a sky tinged with a freakish yellowish cast. As I worked, images from The Wizard of Oz kept flashing in my head. I saw myself as Dorothy, racing for the root cellar while a relentless tornado bore down on her. The wicked witch cackled in the background. I checked the internet for the latest information on the storm. It looked bad, but not as bad as Camille. My house hadn’t taken any damage with Camille. My property hadn’t flooded in Camille. Another domino fell and I made the decision to stay. After all, in thirty years of living on the Gulf Coast, I’d ridden out numerous tropical storms or hurricanes. What could be different this time? My ninety-two-year-old friend Mimi agreed. Through the years, she and I had ridden out four storms together. She’d recently been confined to a nursing home in the Bay, which was busing all their patients to Jackson, where they’d sleep on a gym floor. She felt like the journey would kill her, so commanded that her son Jimmie—another good friend—bring her to my house. A Camille veteran, Mimi was not afraid of this hurricane. As we were helping her into my house, I jokingly asked her, “Where’s the family silver?” Usually, when she’d evacuate her low-lying house, she’d bring a little carpetbag crammed with sterling heirlooms. I’d always thought it the epitome of southern charm. This time, it’d been forgotten in the rush and there was no going back. We both made light of the oversight, assuming it’d be safe. But Mimi had seen her home and her silver for the last time. 
Joe Tomasovsky's Citizen Street house before Katrina, photo by Ellis Anderson
When Jimmie and his mother were comfortably settled in, I walked next door to ride out the storm with Joe Tomasovsky. He’d moved in as my neighbor just three months before, after retiring from a long career as a photography teacher in Florida. We’d been friends for years and had only started “seeing” each other that spring. Joe had lived most of his life on the Gulf Coast where hurricanes were part of the package. After considering the weather reports, he’d decided to stay in his house. It wasn’t as high off the ground as my own, but it’d weathered many storms in the past century—the previous owner had told Joe she’d only sustained thirty dollars’ worth of damage in Camille. Joe made a last-ditch attempt to send me packing to Diamondhead, but my mind was made up. I was convinced surge wasn’t an issue and felt safe in his time-tested house. Besides, it might even be a “bonding experience.” In Joe’s living room, Cleo the squirrel leapt around in a large cage. Joe rehabs baby squirrels and Cleo had been his latest orphan. He’d released her as a mischievous adult into his yard shortly after he’d moved from Florida, but she still showed up from time to time, performing antics and begging for nuts. That afternoon, she’d appeared on his porch after a long absence. She was completely wet, leading Joe to believe she’d returned from afar to take refuge. He’d interrupted his work to assemble a cage and brought her inside. Cleo didn’t seem to resent her lapse into captivity. She darted around the inside of the cage with a manic energy, pausing only to accept a peanut from my hand. 
Joe and Cleo
We spent the rest of the evening on the computer, pulling up every weather site we could find. They were all still predicting a local surge of twenty to twenty-two feet, although one or two doomsday sites warned it could be as high as twenty-five. A friend called from Florida and reported the news that buoys in the gulf were registering waves fifty-five feet high, giving me my first real burst of alarm. But waves aren’t the same as surge, I told myself. I wasn’t going to allow alarmists to cause me extra anxiety. Fatigue finally overcame foreboding, and we fell asleep to the sound of fitful winds slamming through the trees. We woke about two in the morning with gusts hitting the house like the fists of ogres. Rain tore at the windows. The light in the kitchen went out and we knew we’d seen the last of electricity for what we naively imagined would be a few days. The rest of the night was punctuated by sharp cracks as trees fell and heavy oak limbs snapped. When something hit the house, one of us would leap from bed to make sure the roof hadn’t been compromised, then we’d drift back into an uneasy sleep. The morning brought dim light, but no letup in the winds. My cell phone rang at about eight o’clock. Lori, hunkered down with friends in Diamondhead, had managed to get through. “Heads up,” she said. “We just heard on the weather radio that the storm surge is supposed to be worst in Waveland and Bay St. Louis. It’s going to hit between eight-thirty and nine. They’re saying it could be twenty to twenty-two feet.” Her voice sounded calm. She didn’t tell me that she’d dreamed both Joe and I had perished in the storm and thought it was a premonition. Joe and I patrolled the house aimlessly, looking for leaks, trying to keep busy. The walls were shaking from the force of the storm. Curtains billowed into the rooms, so I kept checking the windows to make sure they were closed. I found none open. Despite the extra protection of storm windows, the thundering winds still penetrated the house. Cleo hid in her nesting box, only the tip of her tail visible. It looked like an enviable place to be.
At nine o’clock, I began to feel more at ease. According to Lori’s report, the surge should have already hit and was probably receding. That would mean we were halfway through the storm with no major mishaps.
I could see many sheets of tin had blown off the back of my own roof, but wasn’t terribly concerned. It’d be a little wet inside. Mimi and Jimmie would be fine. This was going to be just another bad storm. We’d probably forget its name in a few years. Then around quarter past nine, Joe called me into the front room where he’d managed to force open the door. Erratic gusts slammed against him and he gripped the doorframe to remain upright. He was looking up the street towards the beach. I fought to join him as sharp blasts of air ripped through the house like psychotic poltergeists on a rampage. “The street’s flooding,” he shouted to be heard over the wind. “Has it done that before?” I shrugged. “No, but we must have had seven or eight inches of rain in the past few hours.” Joe pointed out that the grass in his yard was beginning to be covered by water, too. “My yard floods sometimes, too,” I said, a little more doubtfully. But ten minutes later, when the water had already reached a foot and was rising steadily, the awful reality of the situation was clear. The last domino had fallen. I was about to spend the longest two hours of my life. Next Installment: Chapter 5 – The Fourth Step My cell phone became a high-tech rosary. My fingers fumbled as I punched number after number into the keyboard. Even when I managed to enter a correct number, I’d only hear a busy signal. Lines were either down or overwhelmed. I rehearsed the one question I’d ask if I was lucky enough to make outside contact: Where is the eye of the storm? If it was passing, the surge was peaking. If the hurricane was still at sea, we were experiencing just the beginning of a tsunami. to be continued... 
Under Surge, Under Siege is available in paperback and as an ebook.
In 2011, Anderson founded her first digital publication, the Shoofly Magazine and served as publisher from 2011 - 2022. She established French Quarter Journal in 2019, where she currently serves as publisher and managing editor. Anderson currently divides time between the New Orleans French Quarter and Mobile, Alabama.
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