Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Katrina Hits Hoyas Close to Home

Disasters have always been a mind-blowing phenomenon to me. When the tsunami hit South Asia last December, I could not comprehend the destruction of communities and individual lives it caused. Until it happened to me.

I never used to be afraid of hurricanes. I loved to listen to my mom tell me stories about Camille, the devastating 1969 category five storm that served as the measuring stick for all other hurricanes to come. So when I heard that yet another hurricane, Katrina, was headed our way, I wasn’t very concerned. They’ll ride it out, I figured, and in a few days, everything will be back to normal.

Then I saw the pictures of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and now I just don’t know if anything will ever be the same.

My hometown of Bay St. Louis, Miss., an artsy little beach town discovered by French explorers in 1699, was one of the country’s best-kept secrets.

Was.

Now Bay St. Louis is so badly damaged that nobody is allowed to go in the city, effectively cutting me off from any reports. Is my church still there? Our Lady of the Gulf has stood majestically by the beach for over 150 years, but so has Beauvoir, the Biloxi home of Jefferson Davis turned tourist attraction and field trip locale, and that’s now gone.

Is my high school, my junior high, my elementary school still there? The Old Town district in the heart of the city, where I spent every afternoon of my childhood on the beach and at my family’s two restaurants, is no more. I’m not even holding my breath to find out if the Little Theater still stands – that neighborhood next to the yacht club has always been in danger of floods during thunderstorms and tropical storms, much less hurricanes that bring a 22-foot storm surge.

I haven’t even been able to talk to my parents to find out what happened to our house. Everything I’ve heard is second-, third- and fourth-hand from other relatives calling to let me know that at least everyone in our family is safe. All I know is, when the flood waters started coming into our house, my family had to go up into the cramped, stuffy attic to escape.

And I don’t even live on the water. I have friends whose entire neighborhoods have been washed away.

What do you say to someone who’s lost everything they have?

You’re lucky if all you can say is, “I’m sorry.” For us, the general response is, “Me, too.”

Nobody was spared from the destruction, not even my Congressman, Gene Taylor, who lived in that same neighborhood as the Little Theater, or my Senator, Trent Lott, who had a 150-year-old home in Pascagoula, Miss., about 60 miles east.

And then there’s New Orleans, the place of my birth, a city with such great personality and history. I always feared the day it would go underwater, but I never thought I would live to see it. But there it was, all over the news, gasping for breath. St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, the Aquarium of the Americas, the French Quarter restaurant where my grandmother worked for so many years – these are the places that I’ve grown up with, the places that I thought would always be there, the places that I thought I’d be able to share with my own children. I just don’t know what’s gone and what can be saved.

I wonder what happened to all the animals at the Audubon Zoo. It was one of the finest zoos in the country, and it had the only hill in all of New Orleans, a manmade pile of red dirt known as Monkey Hill.

I even think about where the Saints will play. The Superdome was always the one thing that everybody thought could weather anything, but Katrina proved us all wrong. Sports might sound irrelevant right now, but I sure could use a football game to get my mind off of everything. Even if the Saints will blow it in the fourth quarter, those lovable losers have a way of bringing the community together.

You can’t help but to think of diversions when the heavy questions start to set in. I dropped about $500 on textbooks just a few days before Katrina hit. What if my family needs that money now? Can we even afford to keep me in college this year?

But the biggest question is, how can the region recover? Every industry we had on the Coast depended on the Gulf – casinos, shipping, shipbuilding, tourism, seafood. Thousands of jobs have been lost. The total damages in New Orleans and the Coast have been estimated at $25 billion. And it doesn’t just affect the Coast, or even just my state, whose dire economic situation just worsened. The oil that came from the waters of Louisiana has been cut off, causing prices around the country to skyrocket.

The weirdest thing about all of this, though, is that I know what happened, I can see the pictures online, but I still can’t fathom the enormity of it all without standing there on the beach, looking at the casino barges that, once docked in the ississippi Sound, now lie on the opposite side of the highway running parallel to the beach. It’s like living in a parallel universe, with my picture-perfect Georgetown life on one side, but a home life with an uncertain future on the other. While Katrina huffed and puffed away at my home, I was sitting at a baseball game in Camden Yards, completely removed from the situation. So, I can understand that for people who have never been to the Gulf Coast, August 28 and August 30, the days before and after Katrina hit, probably feel exactly the same. It’s so hard to comprehend that thousands of miles away, hundreds of thousands of people are being displaced, most of them with nothing left but the shoes on their feet. But please, don’t forget about your fellow Hoyas who come from the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Your peers are a few of the hundreds of thousands whose lives have forever changed.

Donations are accepted at the Southern Society table in Red Square or online at https://www.redcross.org.

Emily Liner is a sophomore in the College and is senior sports editor of THE HOYA.

More to Discover