Camarillo man checks on Gulf Coast efforts
By Mark Storer

BILOXI BLUES-Mark Storer, center, sees the devastation of Hurricane Katrina firsthand on a recent follow-up visit to Mississippi. Church groups helped bring relief supplies and support to the community.

The breath-hot moist air beads on you and forms sweat before you really get started doing anything here. At low tide, you can stand on the beaches of Biloxi and not see any waves, not hear the ocean at all. For a Californian, this is most unnerving.

It's the silence of Biloxi that pervades--not even the sound of crashing water--just cars going by on Highway 90, Beach Boulevard.

When I first got involved in this Katrina relief effort, it was from my home in Camarillo. I heard radio host Hugh Hewitt saying the best way to become involved was to organize with a group down in the area. I thought this was a fine idea and began using the contacts Hewitt provided on his blog.

My first contact was with Gary Taylor, the church secretary from Beauvoir United Methodist Church in Biloxi, Miss. As he puts it, "the phone worked that day."

Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005 and my phone call to Gary was on Sept. 4. What did they need? What could I do? How could I do it?

I began organizing drives of necessities-clothes, food, dry goods-whatever they needed. My friend Brian Davis of PR Supply in Ventura agreed to arrange shipping for us and he helped pay for it. We sent our first eight pallets of goods to the region within 10 days after the hurricane-and we kept going from there.

Gift cards from Home Depot, Lowe's, Wal-Mart, cash and check donations, more food, more dry goods. Then, after placing my contact information on Reliefconnections.org, I received a phone call from a restaurant in Fresno, Calif. called Fiore di Pasta. They wanted to donate 35,000 pounds of frozen food to the area and they would arrange shipping. If I would give them contact information, they would use my resources and get the food delivered there.

It took a month to go through the red tape to make a major food donation to the city of Biloxi, but because of the contacts our church had made and because we were able to make calls directly to the source, Biloxi received the food.

I contacted California Lutheran University, my alma mater, and worked through the campus ministry department to get 21 students to go to Biloxi for a week in January. They went and worked through Beauvoir Methodist and another contact I'd made, Bethel Lutheran, and built houses, tore out damaged drywall and repaired roofs. They want to go back again.

It's been a year now since the hurricane hit. I've wanted to come here so much but obligations at work and at home in Camarillo never allowed it. Finally, a window of opportunity opened, my wife and daughter agreed I should go and see what our church had done-and as I write this, I have just finished my first tour of Biloxi, Gulfport and surrounding environs.

Along with Joe Bulock and Ray Chodd, fellow parishioners and friends from Westlake Lutheran, we are only the latest in a long line of visitors to be awed by the spectacle that is the Gulf Coast.

Biloxi has made long, even monumental, strides in a year. The city is rebuilding with the help of tax-infusing casino dollars. Casinos spring up like wire grass around here and they are everywhere along the shore. Pre-Katrina, Mississippi state law said that casinos themselves had to be floating on a naturally occurring body of water.

That law got rapidly changed and so the gigantic barges that once held the casinos are now in the buildings themselves, some of which are already rebuilt to a large degree. The reason for this quite simply is because at least two of the barges left their moorings and came up across Highway 90. It is an impossible scene to imagine. One of them landed squarely on a historical landmark, Tullis Manor.

One of the more famous casinos wiped out in the storm was the Beau Rivage. It has been rebuilt and as a thumb in the eye of old Kat, or perhaps just as a way to tempt fate, it reopened on Aug. 29--a year to the day that Katrina came ashore here.

Biloxi's city officials decided many years ago to purchase a natural disaster insurance policy for $10 million through Lloyd's of London. The day after Katrina hit, Biloxi-unlike its neighbors in Gulfport, Pass Christian or Ocean Springs, was able to begin writing checks.

Combined with an extraordinary volunteer effort from religious and nonreligious groups alike and the aforementioned casino help, Biloxi has been able to rebuild.

Still-nothing prepares you for the devastation. Nothing prepares you for the scene of a nearthe-beach cemetery where graves washed open that August day, littering the beach with corpses. Nothing prepares you for seeing mile after mile of sand and weeds, brush and trees-- where once stood homes, businesses and apartments. The vast emptiness of what was once a thriving beach community is startling, to say the least.

Our host and friend, Taylor of Beauvoir United Methodist Church, seems to take so much of it in pieces. "You have to laugh at it," he says in his deep Southern drawl, puffs of smoke escaping his mouth from yet another cigarette. "If you don't, you'll just go insane."

He's right, of course. There is no way to process devastation like this on any fundamental level. It is out of the ordinary and in a place that itself is out of the ordinary, even if no hurricane had come ashore here.

And make no mistake, looking out at the Gulf of Mexico's calm and placid waters, one finds it hard to imagine that a little more than a year ago, this sea churned up and a Category 5 storm hit with full fury right down the center of this town. The storm surge rolled in at a recorded 30 feet high at the beach.

Moving up the dunes and across Highway 90, by the time the 12-foot-high surge reached into the residences and businesses that were beachside, the swirling water wiped out everything in its path that could not stand up to it, and that was most things.

It uprooted trees, razed homes and even large buildings to the ground. It poured swirling, turbid, polluted waters with crushing force through the civilization of this Southern Belle of a city and it left no small reminders of its path, everywhere you turn.

The visit here has been more than just powerful. We have all been changed by what we have seen. More important, we have all been awed by the palpable power of ordinary individuals from all over the United States who have come here to help rebuild.

One story from the local representatives of a group called Hands On USA is of a woman from San Francisco who came here to help. When she finished her first tour, she went home, put her house up for sale, quit her job and moved to Biloxi to continue helping the community.

Biloxi has that effect on us- all of us who come here to help.