Former editor lived through Katrina’s fury

Hurricane Katrina inundated New Orleans, but on the Mississippi Gulf Coast the Category 3 storm blew and washed away lives and buildings in a Monday morning siege of fury.
From Bay St. Louis on the west side to Pascagoula on the east side, coastal Mississippi was transformed into a wasteland by wind and water on Aug. 29.
Former Eunice News Editor Jim Butler was at his home north of Back Bay of Biloxi when the storm arrived.
“It was devastating,” he said. “You went to bed on Sunday night in a civilized gorgeous place and woke up the next day on the back side of ... unbelievable. We had better than 50,000 occupied dwellings demolished that morning. We had no power. We had no water. It was just unbelievable.”
The lack of services lasted eight to 10 days, he said.
Butler was working as night editor of the Sun Herald, a daily newspaper in Gulfport.
Butler and the other newsroom employees would earn a 2006 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service Journalism for their coverage of Katrina.
“Everybody we would see on the street was asking us, ‘When are they coming? What are we doing? What is the situation? And we are out there busting our butts trying to find out for them.
“It was one, the only time in my entire career when people were actually glad to see me every time I walked up to them because I had a Sun Herald badge on. And they knew if there was anything new, I knew it. It was astonishing.”
The Sun Herald was reduced to a four-page publication with news dictated to a newspaper in Georgia where it was printed and trucked to Mississippi.
Everyone helped hand-deliver the newspaper.
“That process lasted probably three days before we were able to get uplinks to send pages,” he said.
Among Butler’s post Katrina contributions to the newspaper was his Katrina Notebook, which he is sharing on his Facebook page.
Here are a couple of samples
The System
September 2005 — What could a man possibly need with 10 generators wondered those lined up behind him at Gulfport’s Lowe’s as a truckload of the precious machinery quickly emptied.
Turns out free enterprise was at work.
He said he would take them back to Bay St. Louis, or what remains of it, and sell them for twice what he paid to people desperate for electricity, and he seemed confident he would very shortly have none on his hands.
Those behind him in line wondered if he would find enough precious gasoline to fuel his haul.
Most hoped not as the captain of industry drove off.
To the watering hole
They begin to gather at sundown, coming in ones, twos or larger groups on Day Two of life after Katrina.
Much like Serengeti animals drawn to the watering hole, residents of the subdivision are attracted to a fire hydrant and the pipe wrench discretely hidden nearby.
A shower, or what passes for one in this community circle, is the primary purpose after another day of no power and no water in the stifling heat.
Another objective is collecting in buckets enough water to facilitate toilet use.
And always there is an alertness for the prowling lion— in this instance represented by the patrolling law enforcement unit.
The surreptitious bathers aren’t sure their actions are legal, but there is an unspoken sense that they probably not acceptable in normal times, but these are not normal times.
***
The newspaper staff worked until 4 p.m. Sunday, he said.
“At the time, we told people ‘Go where you can God speed and get back here Monday when you can and some didn’t come back until Thursday. They just couldn’t get through or they had elected to leave town.’
Going to sleep was an iffy thing given the anticipation of Katrina.
“Finally, about 4 o’clock in the morning I could begin to hear the train roar. I’m telling you by 6 o’clock it was unbelievable. Unbelievable. For two solid hours from 6 to 8 it was the loudest noise I’ve ever been exposed to.”
The storm ripped Jim and Bonnie Butler’s house in half . In other areas, a wall of water up to 22 feet deep scrubbed structures away.
Jim Butler’s car had survived and he started at about 10 a.m. Monday for the Sun Herald office.
“You had to drive around trees. You had to drive around stalled vehicles. You had to drive around water. You had to drive around bodies in the road. When we got there, we had no power.”
The trip from home to the office normally took 20 minutes, he said. On Aug. 29, the drive lasted six hours.
But on Tuesday morning they hand-delivered the first post-Katrina edition.
By the end of the week the newspaper’s parent company, Knight-Ridder, was sending help.
“We had a tanker of gasoline that was a premium commodity. At the time you just couldn’t get any gas.”
Next came about 30 visiting journalists to help with the Katrina-battered staff.
“It was just quite an experience,” he said. “I’m sure that people who have been through Rita and Ike and all these other hurricanes it is the same sort of deal, just in this case it magnified.
“We had people I worked with who lost all of their homes. Bonnie and I lost half and were able to rebuild. They got home and there was nothing but a foundation. They lost loved ones. You are working with a woman sitting across from you whose brother drowned that morning.”