The power and fury of Katrina is being felt along the Gulf Coast.

It came ashore in Louisiana early this morning as a massive category 4.

- The eye is now over land.

Not only that, it is over Mississippi's land, the center of the storm now, completely over the Magnolia State.

And the worst effects.

I'll never forget as long as I live.

Jim Butch, who was our warning coordination meteorologist who recently passed away, was sitting there across my desk from me, and he started crying.

And I said, you know what's wrong?

And he said, he said, it just occurred to me that there's going to be hundreds of people dead at this time tomorrow.

And he just couldn't believe it.

I mean, it looked like it looked like the hand of God had just wiped away the coast.

I mean, if there had been a nuclear weapon set off in the Sound it couldn't have done this much damage.

At some places, for blocks, everything was just wiped away.

But some places for miles.

We all cried.

On Wednesday, we started meeting with the Board of Supervisors and the mayors and all and said, hey, you know, we need to get together and decide, where are we going?

On Thursday, we got a little bit more concerned, but we were more concerned for Florida on Thursday because we said, you know, this thing's going into Florida.

But, you know, we know in the past things have happened.

It's turned a little bit.

So let's just be prepared anyway.

Friday was the first day we really recognized that Katrina was really going to be a threat here.

What I remember a lot about that Friday was when I came in that morning, you know, the hurricane center had shifted the track somewhat west.

So it was coming like to Pensacola, I think somewhere in that area.

And later that morning, the morning computer models started coming in, and I remember looking at the global model and it was showing it basically coming right up the mouth of the Mississippi.

And in New Orleans.

My first oh my God moment of that event was when that global model came in.

A lot of times the global models don't necessarily show a system as being particularly strong, but what was and what was really impressive about Katrina was that the model knew that it was going to intensify.

Phone calls start to come in about what areas were safe and what things were happening.

And, you know, trying to tell the people that, hey, you know, if this storm hits us, it's going to be bad.

Well, that night or actually early in the am, we received a call from the National Weather Service Slidell stating that they had bad news.

And the bad news was we were going to be ground zero.

Do you wanna hear something-- Absolutely not.

You do not want to hear something like that.

I was asked to stand by, to be, a mentor for one of the newer federal coordinating officers if it impacted the state of Mississippi.

Another day goes by and we're looking at the track.

I called the, FEMA headquarters and said, this doesnt look good for Mississippi.

I think I better get down there.

And, frankly, I don't have time to be a mentor to anybody at this thing.

Does what it appears it might do.

I will say that none of us, until very late Sunday, really had a full appreciation of how large the storm was.

We were accustomed to Camille.

That was our reference point.

But the forecasts, when they finally came out from the hurricane center that said, not only is it going to be a massive amount of surge, but unlike Camille, it's going to be very widespread, where Camille was largely, you know, about a 20 mile path of, of massive surge where this one was, you know, 100 miles or wider.

I believe it was the final press conference on Sunday afternoon at 5:00, when I made a statement to the media there that, by that point, we really knew.

And I made a statement that, you know, I think this will overshadow what Camille did.

And somebody came back and said, are you saying this is going to be worse than Camille?

And I said, I think it has the potential to be worse than Camille.

Like everybody, I guess on the coast.

Kind of had hurricane fatigue from some of the others.

We had had prior warnings that had not really developed into big storms.

And then I flew over with Commissioner Phillips in the helicopter Sunday afternoon.

And I have to say, I had a feeling that I would never see the coast the same.

The one thing that sticks out in my mind on that trip Saturday was as a travel down 90 from county to county.

And I see all the people on the beach and the people were barbecuing and they were having bonfires.

I mean, you know, if you haven't read the book about Camille, you know, that was very much what happened in Camille.

is that people just started partying and I called back to the EOC and I says, these people aren't evacuating, they're celebrating down here.

And I just fear what's going to happen.

The firemen and the policemen were going door to door telling people to please leave.

Get out of here, you know, and even getting them to sign a piece of paper, if they didn't leave, you know, if it was in the flood zone area down, because, you know, we knew this was going to be bad.

We just didn't know how bad.

I was very concerned.

I can remember Marsha and I talking about it Friday night.

It just wasn't.

People weren't responding.

Then Saturday night at home, up in Yazoo City, Max Mayfield called it.

He said, governor, this is going to be a Camille-like storm.

He said, what can I do to help you?

And I told them we were having trouble getting people to evacuate after the best thing you can do, if you can get the news media to start saying this is going to be a storm like Camille.

People get that.

People of Mississippi understand Camille.

I remember that night when I got back to Jackson.

I said, you know, we've got to do something to change this because we may have had somewhat of an evacuation, but it wasn't nearly as successful as we had had the year before in Ivan.

I don't know how he did it, but Saturday night, all of a sudden, the news media started reminding people about Camille and saying that this was going to be a storm as bad as Camille and Sunday.

The evacuation picked up a pretty good bit before the storm came in early Monday morning.

Sunday, and I don't recall exactly what time, We did have a FEMA representative that looked at me and said, Hootie, y'all need to leave.

And I said, well, Eric, unfortunately, where do you want me to go?

And if I go somewhere, can you give me the phones I need to talk to our citizens, because if you cant, I'm not leaving.

I said I will forward everybody else to leave except myself and my paid staff.

And I said, but we have a job to do.

And he looked at us and said, y'all are all going to die.

And I hope y'all hear when I get back.

I said, Hootie, you need to get out of there.

I said, you need to leave your EOC and you need to go to, to Stennis Space Center, where we relocated a lot of the, our assets, our employee and some of the the name of the FEMA people and the National Guard.

And he said, I agree with you.

I understand we're in danger, but I cannot convince my local governments to leave, and I'm not going to leave them.

And I sat down with with the remaining of our crew and told them point-blank that hey guys and ladies, if it's time to leave, if you want to leave, leave the office now.

The only thing I ask is yall come back as soon as its over because we're going to need help and not one person left.

The biggest issue that happened was, Sunday night when the storm started, kind of diminishing.

And it was started.

The strength of it went down while people got a sigh of relief.

And, we heard it more than one time, or people saying, hey, I, you know, I lived through Camille.

This is not Camille.

I lived right here in this house during Camille.

This is not a Camille.

I can handle this.

A lot of people did not live through Katrina.

Theres several people that I can think of right now that are no longer with us because of what they did.

And we begged them and begged them and begged them to get out.

Leaving a couple hours ago that a lot has happened.

And of course, a lot of flooding on the coastal area.

We are anticipating hearing from Governor Haley Barbour.

Here he is right now.

Here we are.

Live.

The thing that probably tugged at your heart the most is, first of all, we lost contact with, Hancock County EOC.

Didn't know for about 24 hours what happened to them.

Early that morning, I say between 7 and 9.

I'm not sure the exact time, we lost phones well we started getting water into the EOC itself.

How shocking is that?

That was very shocking.

You know, figured we was 25, 26ft above sea level.

From 4:00 in the morning to about 11:00 in the morning.

It was really tremendously bad.

And, people were getting problems and, you know, to where the water was coming in, the wind were taking over and things were happening.

We had no contact with any outside source.

The only contact we had was Bryce Phillips with WQRZ, who was a radio station was housed in the EOC a day prior to the storm because his place was not going to be able to withstand the storm surge.

And I tell you what was the best move I made, because not only is he a has a radio station, but he is a ham operator and a good one.

And he was able to climb up and for the 30 to 40 mile an hour winds and straighten his antenna back up, and where we could finally get out and say, hey everybody, we're okay.

The Hancock County EOC and its staff is okay.

There has been tremendous damage done.

We can't specify it or quantify it at this time in the same way that we don't have any specific casualty reports, but we know there will be some.

First thing Tuesday morning, I went to get on a helicopter.

Marsha was there, and it struck me she wouldn't go in the helicopter.

And shes not afraid of helicopters, But she had already been at daybreak, with General Cross and with George Phillips, who's the head of Department of Public Safety.

She wouldn't go again because she said it was so terrible.

So I, I took some people and we took, I think, three helicopters.

And you just couldn't believe it I mean, it looked like it looked like the hand of God.

It just wiped away the coast.

I mean, if there had been a nuclear weapon set off in the Sound it couldn't have done this much damage.

At some places for blocks, everything was just wiped away, but some places for miles.

And we went up.

We went all the way to the refinery and to the, to the shipyard before we turn around.

Came back and Marsha was there waiting.

We all cried.

I, I don't expect to ever see anything like that again.

I sure, I sure hope not.

But it never left me that a person could not comprehend the damage without literally seeing it.

On the way down there of course, you looked like any category 1 or 2 storm as you get closer and closer to the coast.

You see we saw what devastation and we.

But it still didn't look so bad until we got right to the coast.

And then it was obvious that addition to the wind damage, the surge was devastating.

More devastating than anything I've ever seen.

But we had some initial reports from Hancock County and, Harrison County as well as Pearl River, and we knew there was dead on the ground, but but they didn't know because they were kind of stuck in their EOCs trying to dig their way out Some of our troops made it down, just down the road to the beach, and come back and said, hey, the Bay bridge is out.

And I looked at them.

I said, there's no way, you know?

And unfortunately, when I had time to go down there, found out it it was and it was devastated.

I grew up in that area right in that same area.

And I couldn't tell anything because it was so devastated.

And to see the destruction like that was very, very unsettling.

And, fortunately, not being real emotional, that that helps, you know, because, you know, you have a job to do.

Immediately as soon as it got to the point that we could go out, we, we left the emergency operations center and, we went out and started trying to find anybody we could to help and, obviously come up on some situations we didn't like.

Some of them were deceased and we couldn't do anything about it, but, a lot of people, we were just trying to assess the damage at that point and try to decide what we could do, and what we needed to do.

So then it becomes, you know, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, this is worse than we had feared.

And we really at that time feared that a whole lot of folks had lost their lives.

We did everything we could to put the word out.

And unfortunately, you have those that do not want to leave.

I could go there with a with a gun and a police officer.

They're still not going to leave.

And and that's something you don't want to accept.

But you know, it's going to happen.

But I will tell you this from after surveying the damage from a helicopter as soon as we could get up to, to survey it, if you'd asked me and they did ask how many deaths I thought we had, I figured it was going to be several hundred.

Way too many folks lost their lives.

But it was not, as it turned out, because of some of the work done by, by MEMA, by Robert Latham, by the governor to get folks to evacuate.

I mean, it could have been just really, awful in terms of loss of life.

I contributed to two things.

One, I want to think and hope that people listened to us, and two, that thank God it hit in daylight because a lot of people, a lot of stories we were told as they clung on logs boats floating by, they hung in trees.

Most of the people we saw at that point were walking around in a state of shock, because they just didn't know what had happened to them.

They had lived through it outside some of them had swam, some of them had, swam to safety.

And then they sat there and waited it out and, you know, north of the railroad tracks or wherever they could get.

Some people were, walking around and trying to get back to where they thought the house used to be.

They couldn't figure out where it was at anymore.

And they were just in a state of shock.

It was basically a rescue stage is where we were at.

We were in rescue for 14 days.

That's what we stayed in.

And within eight hours after the storm subsided, we had a search and rescue team out of the United States.

USAR and started operating immediately.

And of course, we had teams from all over the United States come in to help us, and we had our own teams out there, too.

I mean, even though some of our own firemen and policemen werent trained in it, they needed a real good job.

So we pulled up at the Hancock County EOC.

Obviously they can't work in the building because a roof collapse.

So they're working out under a tent--Congressman Taylor was one of the first persons we saw.

If you had known him, you thought he was a homeless person.

I mean, that's the way he looked.

He was a victim too.

Congressman Taylor said, we got somebody we need for you to talk to.

And it was the local funeral home director.

And, you know, we had just been told the estimates of the number of deaths were about 1500, just based on the magnitude of the event and the damage.

So, I sat down with him and talked and and he was he was just in tears.

He said, you know, my morgue is full, I don't have any more room for bodies.

And he said, Im fixing to have to start stacking bodies in the parking lot of my funeral home.

And I said, well, I don't know what we're going to do, but we're not going to do that.

And about that time a guy pulls up, you know, 18 Wheeler and he's got a reefer truck.

And, and he says, I said, what are you hauling?

He said, well, I just dropped a load of ice at Stennis Space Center.

I'm on my way back to get another load.

I said, can I rent your truck?

He said, well, yeah, what are you going to do with it?

And I said, oh, we need a morgue.

He said, you know, I can't do that.

This is the way I make my living if I let you use it, as I won't ever be able to haul anything in it again.

I said, can I buy your truck?

And that turned to Bill, and I said, Bill, can I do this?

He said, whatever, we'll figure out a way to pay for it.

And that's what made us such a good team.

You know, he had the authority under Stafford to do a lot of things, and he had also ordered the reefer trucks and they just hadn't gotten there.

And they ordered them on Saturday.

So, you know, we just couldn't wait.

This guy had a problem that, you know, I wasn't about to leave there till we fixed that problem.

And it wasn't that, that nobody pre-positioned them or nobody did all that stuff.

There weren't enough resources in the nation to bring to bear at one time.

Now theres plenty of resources throughout the United States but in something catastrophic to bring all those to bear in a small a relatively small geographic area compared to whole continental United States.

It's a very difficult thing to do.

And then get the distribution systems to get them out and placed.

Logistics did not go well.

It's hard for a civilian organization to truly understand logistics on the scale that's required for disaster response.

Even large companies like, like, Walmart and others, their mindset is we will restock based on demand.

You can't do that in disaster response, and you can't do that in in a military operation, you've got to anticipate what the needs are and push the resources forward.

And I think that was the biggest shortfall at the federal level is that they didn't quite understand that.

You can't wait and find out what the need is before you order the commodities and have them pushed into place.

We were only getting for the first seven days, about 20% of what we were requesting every day, because the national system just couldn't support us, that's what, to 20%.

And that's when the need is absolutely that.

That's right, that's right.

But there's not.

So Americans kind of fool themselves that disasters are like Disneyland.

It ain't that way.

Theyre called disasters because they are.

It was kind of good news, bad news stories, all the CNN cameras and Fox News and all those other 24 hour cycle guys went over to and went over to Louisiana, which gave us an opportunity to deal with, you know, local news here and people who knew what kind of what was going on.

But the bad news is that Washington, of course, they they feed off of CNN and Fox right now.

Everybody hasn't there.

They haven't all the EOC and whatever going on there, whoever's standing up, you know, in front of the TV saying things are bad, that's where they send their resources early on, water and ice were the biggest problems.

But by Friday, the food became a major issue.

And of course, fuel was non-existent down there.

So we were all concerned for the first 2 or 3 days after I got down there that we could start having problems with the public losing confidence because we couldn't get food to them.

So we, we asked for commodities even well before landfall.

I'm not sure where those ever were in the system.

It appears that they never got to.

They never got to wash or they get lost in the shuffle was because of the press coverage over in Louisiana because, as the days wore on and we kept, saying we needed, certain commodities like food and water, and ice, for the first week, we had a heck of a time.

We've got about 20% of what we're asking for.

But after the, we had the storm, of course, the storm with, as everyone knows, up the entire state of Mississippi.

And I think it's hard for people to realize who don't live in the hurricane states, that it's not just the coast who gets impacted.

But a couple of things happened fairly early on Saturday or Sunday or Monday.

First, the the FEMA supplies of food started to pour in more rapidly.

They released more stock from the department, the Department of Defense, and they brought in these huge C-17s or whatever they were at the Air guard base with MREs on them, which really helped a lot.

And all the volunteer agencies by that time really kicked into gear big time.

And I'm talking about everything from the large denominations that have these huge feeding kitchens to very small denominations that would come down and pick up a load full of food and, and diapers and that sort of thing.

So the combination of the federal response getting kicked into high gear, along with the volunteer efforts, kind of turned the tide.

The volunteers were so indispensable.

I mean, unbelievable.

At one point, we had captured the names of 600,000 people who at one time or another, had come down there to help, during spring holidays of last year in school, we had 20,000 kids a week.

At this point, we got to convert from rescue to recovery.

We had to make a statement that we got to quit.

I had to tell the community that that we got to stop.

None of us had quit helping, but we didn't find anyone after that.

We didn't find a single soul after that was alive.

How do you deal with 80,000 homes, destroyed.

People's lives, destroyed.

everything that they have worked so hard to get, you know, and giving them money's not going to replace that, you know, because now you're going to have all of a sudden another generation or two of children who are going to grow up and they're going to remember the worst disaster in this country's history.

And they were a child in some of their formative years were spent, FEMA travel trailer.

It's easy to look back now and say that there's that we've come so far and we have.

But what bothers me more than anything else is the is the mental health of those that actually had to live it.

We need to start teaching disaster preparedness from the time kids enter preschool all the way through college.

I mean, they should be a part of our curriculum.

I mean, if we don't, then government is going to always be expected to do it.

Disasters, bring out the absolute best and worst in people.

And I saw so much more of the good things I saw very little of the bad things I really did.

I'm sure that there was, you know, some looting and there were people that were trying to take advantage of the, of the victims on the coast, but I saw very little of that.

Any time people will get knocked down and you were able to help as a person.

I think it's a life changing experience.

And yes, I think it makes us better people.

I just think it's better to give than to receive.

There were nights after the storm that, you know, that I would go home and I'd just say, you know what else could I have done?

I mean, you know, the fact that we only lost 231 or something like that, you know, every life is so precious and, you know, you would like to think that no one had perished in that.

But when the first estimate was 1500 fatalities on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you know, and then we wound up with only 230 something.

I said, you know, it's just pretty remarkable, except that with every one of those individuals, there's a story, there's a light, there's a family.

It's a hard story, but it's a really it's a great story.

I genuinely believe Mississippi's response to Katrina has done more to help our state's image than anything thats happened in my lifetime.

And, we're going to continue to benefit, if we will, keep working together and keep our eye on the ball.