South Bend Tribune

WAVELAND, Miss. — Davis Martinez and Julie Thibodeaux stuck it out for three months in a tent atop the slab where their mobile home, now slammed against the woods, used to rest.

Their FEMA trailer came three weeks ago, and they love it. It’s warm, clean, new.

But their daughter, her husband and their 9-month-old and 3-year-old gave up tent life after one week and moved to Alabama.

Footlong rats started to snoop. And the Hurricane Katrina stink was horrible — that sickly smell everyone talks about in the areas of standing water. Martinez and Thibodeaux kept a tiny, smoldering fire to mask the odor until it dissipated.

The couple used a bucket for a toilet and either buried the sewage or dumped it in a bag in the trash.

“It’s amazing what you can do when you don’t have anything,” Thibodeaux says.

“Come back in another year and you’ll see a house,” Martinez says, dreaming of a home elevated from floodwaters on pillars. “You won’t see a trailer.”

Sun Herald

Searching for his missing sister, Freddie Lee made his way from Oxford to a Hancock County shelter six days after Hurricane Katrina. Once inside, he immediately identified the distinctively husky voice of Marian Thiac.

The 71-year-old had been a friend to his sister, Faye Grygo, for more than 25 years.

“I had to tell him what happened to his sister,” Thiac said.

It is a story she had told many times and will tell again. It is a story she believes should not be forgotten for the sake of those who died in the storm and those left behind to pick up the pieces.

Thiac and Grygo attempted to ride out Hurricane Katrina in Thiac’s home on Edna Avenue in Waveland, a location that received a near direct hit in the storm. The two had evacuated for previous storms.

As the hurricane came ashore, water began filling Thiac’s living room with a speed that surprised her. The pressure was so great that they could not pull open the front door.

“Water started coming in around 9 a.m. and by 9:30 had reached the living room ceiling,” Thiac said.

Thiac described Grygo as thin and somewhat frail. When the water reached two or three inches from the ceiling, Grygo knew she couldn’t hold on to her friend any longer and said goodbye before letting the swirling water pull her under.

“After that, I started to panic and went under a few times and came up by the air-conditioning filter,” Thiac said.

Thiac pulled off the grate and filter and pulled herself into the air-conditioning duct work just enough to keep her head above water.

“I used to gripe because I had to climb on a stool to change that filter,” Thiac said. “It was only 16 or 18 inches high, but it gave me enough room so I wouldn’t drown.”

Thiac tried to claw her way into the attic, but only managed to fill her air space with stinging bits of insulation material.

“The water got up to my bottom lip and I just prayed,” she said.

After hours of fighting to stay alive, Thiac finally stopped struggling. That’s when the water started going down.

Thiac said it was seven hours after the water started coming in when she climbed down to her living room mantle. From there, she saw her drowned friend curled in the corner of the room.

Thiac described herself as unrecognizable, soaked with surge water and covered in bits of insulation. She could not stay in the home.

Dressed in an old velour robe, she climbed over downed lines and trees and made her way to Waveland Avenue, where she saw Eddie White, a fellow hurricane survivor who had previously helped her with chores. Together, they made their way to the highway.

Record-Courier

Almost every Christmas in their 14-year marriage, Tom and Sally Sagar hosted a huge holiday party.

The Sagars would open their Gardnerville Ranchos home to neighbors and friends who would be treated to platters of food and a Christmas wonderland with elaborate decorations covering every surface.

This year, the Sagars are counting their blessings as survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

They lost everything to the hurricane: The 3,000 square-foot home they built for their retirement in a Gulfport, Miss., suburb and all their belongings except the contents of three suitcases they packed for themselves and Muffy, their 4-pound Chihuahua.

The Sagars consider themselves lucky.

Sitting at their kitchen table in a home in Chichester Estates they’re renting from a fellow parishioner at St. Gall Catholic Church, Tom Sagar said he has mixed feelings.

“I feel guilty and grateful that we survived so well,” he said.

WLOX-TV

Home sweet home right now for Lee and Chi Chi Bryant is a FEMA trailer at 508 Beach Boulevard in Gulfport. The trailer sits where their 3,000 square foot home used to be before the hurricane. But this pad is short term.

“I plan to rebuild,” says Lee Bryant.

Neither Hurricane Katrina nor another storm will scare Bryant away from his front deck view of the Mississippi Sound.

“I’ll come back again. I was here during Camille, I’m here during Katrina and I’ll be here when the next one gets here hopefully. Lord willing,” he says.

But apparently not everyone feels that way. One realtor tells us right now two out of three beach front property owners are hanging up the For Sale sign.

Daily Press

Months after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, a team from Colonial Williamsburg that helps with recovery efforts says there’s still much work to be done.

“Even though the hurricane hit three months ago, it looks like it struck last week,” said one team member, Travis Fulk. “The people still need a lot of help, and we can’t forget that they need that help.”

Fulk was part of a six-person team of architectural conservationists who worked for one week earlier this month in Gulfport, Miss. The team assessed 83 historic homes that were in Katrina’s path to assist the Mississippi agency that coordinates the state’s historic preservation projects.

CW has provided similar assistance in other natural disasters. In 1989, it sent conservationists to the historic area of Charleston, S.C., after Hurricane Hugo. In 1993, it sent a team to the historic part of Petersburg after a tornado. One point of the recent trip was to provide one-on-one advice to Gulfport homeowners. The team met with many homeowners and tacked letters to houses, said Tom Taylor, CW’s director of architectural conservation, who led the trip.

One homeowner “just wanted somebody to reassure him that it would be worthwhile to go ahead and make the effort (to rebuild),” Taylor said. “A lot of these homeowners are getting pressure from FEMA and others to bulldoze their sites.”

The team also wrote assessments that Mississippi officials can consult when requests to demolish historic homes come in from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The state will be able to say, “whoa, not so fast,” Taylor said. About 90 percent of the 83 homes that the CW team inspected are salvageable, he said.

The homes they assessed were built between 1910 and 1940 and follow a “bungalow style” that is distinctively American, Taylor said.

Because such homes are more than 50 years old, they meet standards for the National Register of Historic Places, he said.

Early 20th century bungalows like those the team looked at in Gulfport represent an increasingly important subject to historians because so many are being lost, Taylor said.

While the Gulfport bungalows differ from colonial homes, the CW team still could apply its general knowledge of construction techniques and building materials. “That knowledge comes in handy irrespective of the age of the building, and most of us have some experience with 19th and early 20th century buildings,” Taylor said.

Working in two groups of three, the CW conservationists typically took about half an hour to assess each building. Mornings were spent on the streets of Gulfport, while the afternoons and evenings were spent writing reports and labeling scores of photos.

The team’s trip was funded mostly by CW. The state of Mississippi and the National Trust for Historic Preservation provided an unheated house in Biloxi that served as an office and place to sleep.

It was through the trust that the CW team got in touch with Mississippi officials and ended up in Gulfport, Taylor said. He also said he hopes to take the team back to Mississippi in February or March.