Like a phoenix from ashes, a town rises from a hurricane’s flood
Mississippi community destroyed by water uses water to rebuild itself
By Stephen Padre
Down in the bayou, along the Gulf Coast, sits the small town of Pearlington, Miss. Moss hangs low from the mighty oak trees in the quiet, still air. The town’s sleepiness today belies what it has been through in the past several years. Part of its quietness is the result of the town losing many of its residents, not by choice but by force of extraordinary circumstances.
Pearlington is one of those places that defines itself by a major event. For this town, it was Hurricane Katrina, which hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August 2005 and became the costliest natural disaster in American history. Little Pearlington, sitting on a remote corner of Mississippi’s short panhandle, was slammed by the enormous hurricane. But like other small communities on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, Pearlington was overlooked and forgotten as the nation’s attention focused on the crisis unfolding in New Orleans, less than 40 miles away. Surrounded by major bodies of water—the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, and a river on one side—the town was flooded and nearly destroyed by Katrina.
Today, Pearlington’s residents speak of the time before Katrina and the time after Katrina. The hurricane did its damage through water. The sea came inland and swept houses away or left debris on property, leaving it uninhabitable.
But the town has another history, both before and after Katrina, that is also all about water. For two periods of a few years before the hurricane and since then, Pearlington has been receiving assistance from Community Resource Group, the Southern RCAP, as the town works to construct new drinking water and wastewater systems.
“I never thought I would spend my entire career [with RCAP] working with this community,” said Tom Johnson, the Senior Operations Management Specialist for CRG who has worked with Pearlington’s leaders for more than 14 years.
This is an unusually long lifecycle for an RCAP project in a community. Most technical assistance providers like Johnson spend three to five years providing technical, managerial or financial assistance for a system before moving on to help other communities in need.
Pearlington’s leaders first contacted CRG in late 1997 because it had an inadequate wastewater collection or disposal system. Many homes were discharging raw sewage directly into the Pearl River or various bayous. The state Department of Environmental Quality had sampled various sites in the area and found the water of the river and bayous contained high levels of fecal coliform bacteria.
From 1997 to 2000, and starting again in May 2005, Johnson worked with leaders to create a water district and secure funding from various sources to install a sewer system. While the area had functioning water wells, it was decided to also install a drinking water system. By July 2005, the district had a fully designed sewer system ready for bids from contractors as well as enough funding from several sources to get the project started.
Then Katrina hit.
Five years later, as Betty Baxter sat near where her home once stood, her eyes welled up with tears as she recounted how Katrina destroyed houses and devastated Pearlington. After she talked about the frightening days of flooding following the storm, she drove visitors around town in her car and stopped at her property. Now it is just an empty lot after the house she and her husband had lived in was razed because it was too damaged in the flooding to rebuild. Only the enormous, moss-draped oak trees sit peacefully around what Baxter said was her living room and dining room.
Tom Johnson and Betty Baxter“People lost everything they had—everything, except what they had on their backs,” she said.
Baxter was not alone in what she suffered. Prior to the hurricane, there were 871 homes and buildings in Pearlington. Katrina destroyed more than 700 of them and heavily damaged the others.
Baxter is currently the secretary of the water district and since Katrina has taken a key leadership role in pushing for completion of the water and sewer systems. She is 73, and her husband is 80. Since Katrina, they have lived 30 miles away from the coast. She knows they must make a choice. They can return to Pearlington and rebuild their house and their life there, but they are getting too old to start over again. Or they can remain where they are.
Baxter has invested too much time and effort in the water system through her service on the district’s board to leave her work now. She wants to see her town get its water system so it can continue to build itself up from the devastation of Katrina.
“I’m not a quitter. I feel like I am obliged to stick it out and see that they get a water and sewer system,” she said. “I live in Picayune, but my heart is here.”
Johnson said Katrina set the town’s work on its water systems back years. But he has continued his work with the town as well.
“We don’t know where we would have been without Tom,” said Baxter.
As a result of the hurricane, most of the funding that had been lined up with Johnson’s help for Pearlington’s project disappeared. Mississippi’s governor diverted grant funds to rebuild the infrastructure on the coast. Pearlington’s water district had already spent more than $800,000 on designs, easements and other preparations for its water system.
The district had hoped to obtain enough of the post-disaster rebuilding funds as grants to complete its project, but this did not happen. So the district is applying for a $1.5 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Rural Development to finish the work.
Nevertheless, 14 years later, the system is beginning to operate, and CRG, through Johnson, will work with the system until all construction ends and the system’s daily operation is running smoothly. Customers’ homes were being hooked up weekly to the system late last year.
“This is truly an example of where CRG/RCAP has worked from the start until today with a project helping them form [a district], secure funding, write manuals and procedures, and everything else,” said Johnson. “I feel that in the last 14 years I have been required to use all the experience I had prior plus educate myself and learn many other things to get this system to where it is.”
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Pearlington hopes to pull itself out of the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina. In addition to installing a new water system, one way it is doing this is with the establishment of a community center. The building was built by a charity as a gift to the town. Betty Baxter, the secretary of the water district, stands by the center’s dedication plaque.Padre is RCAP’s Director of Communications and editor of Rural Matters. He visited Pearlington in October 2010.
