Sat, Feb. 18, 2006
The Sun Herald
WHY DID THEY STAY?
By JOSHUA NORMAN
jdnorman@sunherald.com
Nadine Allen-Gifford, 79, built her Gulf Hills house in 1977 with hurricanes in mind, adding height and steel beams to its design.
Nadine's family frequently gathered at their home with her and her husband, E.W. "Ted" Gifford, 79, for festive occasions and to ride out storms.
When Hurricane Katrina was approaching, there was little question whether the Giffords would stay.
"We were very aware of the warnings," said Doug deSilvey, 59, who went to the couple's home to be with his ex-wife, the Giffords' daughter Linda deSilvey, 57, as well as his daughter, the Giffords' granddaughter Donna deSilvey, 35.
"We stayed at Nadine's house because it was tried and true," Doug said, adding a Camille standard was applied to their decision to stay, even though Nadine's house - which never flooded - had been built after that storm.
"We've always been together and supported each other. Even if Donna wouldn't have been called down here to consult, she would have come home for the hurricane anyway."
As Aug. 29 began, the Giffords and deSilveys ate breakfast and readied the house. Doug went outside to check on the generator after eating, and for the first time realized how bad things would become.
"I saw that my truck was already under water and I realized then that we couldn't go anywhere," Doug said.
Nadine had back problems and Ted had lost an eye, so evacuation at that point was out of the question. Even if they had decided to evacuate before the storm, Doug said, it would have been almost too hard.
Doug deSilvey was the only one to make it out of the house alive.
There is no one reason why Katrina's victims stayed on the Gulf Coast. Like the Giffords and deSilveys, many stayed because their experience had suggested they would be safe, and staying for storms was a tradition.
However, at least half of Katrina's victims moved here in the years after Hurricane Camille, and perhaps did not know how bad storms could be.
Additionally, more than two-thirds of Katrina's victims were of retirement age, and evacuating is especially complicated for those with health problems that accompany old age.
There were other reasons Katrina's victims did not leave:
• Inconsistent evacuation orders were not taken seriously.
• A fear that looters would strike after the storm.
• The idea they might be able to do something to save their house if they stayed.
• A lack of public shelters for pets.
• Bad experiences evacuating for other storms.
• A decision was too hard to make so they just stayed put.
• A lack of comfortable and cheap places to go and sometimes, no means to get there.
Ultimately though, the decision was a question of fear. Unlike the situation for many citizens in New Orleans, a very small percentage of Hurricane Katrina's South Mississippi victims had no means of evacuating. Everyone who left was afraid enough to leave. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that very few families with small children stayed behind and became casualties.
When Hurricane Ivan was barreling through the Gulf of Mexico a year earlier, South Mississippi civil defense officials issued a mandatory evacuation order for all areas south of Interstate 10, 48 hours before it made landfall.
By all accounts, nearly everyone left and Ivan barely brushed this part of the Gulf Coast.
In July 2005, as Category 4 Hurricane Dennis approached, officials hedged a bit and waited until about 36 hours before to order people only in low-lying areas to evacuate. Many local civil defense officials noted fewer people evacuated for Dennis than had for Ivan. Only Hancock County ordered all zones to evacuate.
Dennis ended up being a bad rainstorm in Mississippi, and many returned grumbling of the pains of evacuating for nothing.
Several weeks later, officials waited even longer to order mandatory evacuations. The evacuation orders were inconsistent in the coastal counties, with each county largely deciding on its own which flood zone to evacuate. Nearly all of the mandatory evacuation orders happened in only flood zones A and B, the lowest zones, just 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Flood zone C did not receive a mandatory evacuation order at any point, and lives and homes were lost to the surge in some parts of that zone on the Coast.
People such as Anna Ruiz of Bay St. Louis were tired of evacuating. The 74-year-old dancer with deep blue eyes decided the stress of evacuating was too much, so she stayed and died in her Clermont Harbor home.
"There's a frustration tolerance with these things that has to be managed properly," said Tim Donohoe, a counselor at the Applied Psychology Center in Biloxi who had decided to stay in his since-destroyed Waveland home until police asked him the night before the storm to write his social security number on his body in permanent marker for easy identification later on. "I think our systems for doing that are very inadequate. It's a cry-wolf thing. That can cloud judgment."
Donohoe said people have three responses to a potential threat or danger: fighting, fleeing or freezing. Many of the hurricane's victims were prone to the last one, especially the elderly.
Dr. Louis Maxey, 92, and his wife, Harneitha Maxey, 75, of Long Beach were just plain tired when the decision to evacuate came around. The Maxeys evacuated for Hurricane Ivan and Louis' health had suffered as a result. By the time Katrina came around, they decided to stay in their West Azalea Drive home. Neither survived.
Louis Maxey and many of the storm's victims, who had lived with the daily stresses poor health can bring, struggled with the additional stress of the approaching storm. This makes important decisions incredibly difficult. So they often make no decision, Donohoe said.
Even if someone was well aware at the time of what Katrina might do and the warnings were well heard, many felt the fate of their home was too important to leave to chance.
"Our homes are our sanctuaries," Tim Donohoe said. "It's where we take our safety and security when something threatens us like that."
The storm's oldest known victim, 96-year-old Pearl Frazier, did not leave because she wanted to stay in her beloved home on Biloxi's Back Bay that her late husband had built 30 years earlier.
The love of a place can be just as powerful a persuader over fear as loyalty to a person, a neighborhood and for many, to pets. For as many as a third of the hurricanes victims, there was no way they were going to leave a neighbor, a mother, a husband or a favorite animal behind, no matter how much their fear told them to do otherwise.
Kenneth Lantier came to Gulfport from Lake Charles, La., shortly before Hurricane Katrina to take care of his mother - Clay Lee Lantier. He doted on her and wanted to be there for her when the storm hit. The last time either was seen, Kenneth was floating his mother out of her apartment on a mattress.
Malcolm Blackwood of Pascagoula stayed and died in his home on Lemans Circle because of what relatives described as loyalty to his neighbors. The single 63-year-old could not bear the idea of leaving them alone.
Patricia Meeks of Waveland loved her dog and potbelly pig so much she could not leave them behind and died with them. The 60-year-old Chicago native's pig had grown too fat to fit in her car and even if it had, there are no public evacuation shelters that accept pets in Mississippi.
Roselyn Desrochers' 17 Chihuahuas would have been nearly impossible to care for on the road. Desrochers, 57, died while trying to rescue her dogs from her Clermont Harbor home.
Some, like Jack Prather of Dothan, Ala., felt a broader sense of duty to stay behind. Prather died making one last run in a van for the Seashore Mission United Methodist Church bringing people to safety.
There was no shortage of shelter space in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, said Robert Latham, director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Of the 70,000 available beds, only 17,000 were filled.
Latham is optimistic a "Katrina standard," which is much lower in terms of storm strength than the "Camille standard," will now be applied when people think about leaving for storms. Even then, he said his agency struggles with figuring out ways to get more people to leave earlier before bad storms.
"I don't know that I have a good solution to the problem," Latham said. "Now we have another challenge in public education: It's not about wind speed, it's about storm surge. I have some bold ideas but I'm not going to come and say this is what we're going to do. There's a certain percentage of the population that aren't going to leave, I don't care what."
Related: http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/13903306.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
) and I did with CBS the day after the storm - August 30, 2005:
