After Hurricane Ian – Q&A with Miss. official who oversaw Katrina recovery

Three days after Hurricane Katrina bludgeoned the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Ashley Edwards hiked four miles to see what had become of his house.

That was as close as Edwards, who was 25 at the time, could get to the home he shared with his wife in Pass Christian, Miss., about 10 miles west of Gulfport. At just 7 feet above sea level, he knew flooding was a possibility as Katrina strengthened in the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005. But he couldn't have imagined what he found in the aftermath.

There was no sign a house had ever been there, not even debris. Edwards saw only the concrete slab the house was built on, and the gleaming ceramic tile he'd added to the entryway just a week prior to the storm, looking as though it'd been mopped.

Soon, Edwards would not only be going through his own personal recovery but also helping steer Mississippi's long-term recovery efforts as deputy director, then director of the state's Office of Recovery and Renewal.

Edwards, 42, now lives in Biloxi and works as the president and CEO of the Gulf Coast Business Council, but his experiences in the years after Katrina have been top of mind watching Southwest Florida emerge into the fallout from Hurricane Ian, which has joined Katrina as one of the strongest storms ever to hit the U.S. With the benefit of 17 years of hindsight, Edwards offered a hopeful glimpse into what recovery and renewal could look like for Florida's Gulf Coast.

"You can never put back the things that have been lost. Certainly the lives that have been lost are tragic on a level that is indescribable," he said. "But in terms of a community charting a vision for its future, these types of disasters can also be tremendous opportunities."

Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What came to mind as you watched the storm approach then hit Southwest Florida?

The most striking thing to me has been the fact that Hurricane Ian is such a close analog for what happened in Mississippi with Hurricane Katrina. A lot of people across the United States associate it as a New Orleans event. New Orleans was devastated by the hurricane largely due to the fact that the levees breached as a result of the storm surge.

By contrast, we had all of the things that you're now seeing in the Fort Myers area, what I call the round zero area: the velocity and scouring action of the storm surge coming in and wiping out communities, neighborhoods, scouring out water lines, sewer lines, roads. For example, Highway 90, which is our main stretch that runs along the beachfront along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was scoured out completely in many places. So we lost the highway, the water lines, the sewer lines, the electrical systems.

Mississippians, especially along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, feel an incredible kinship with the people of Florida, having gone through very much what they're going through and now having 17 years to reflect on our experiences.

What can people

expect from here?

Recovery can't begin until the response has concluded. That's the immediate post-disaster environment: looking for survivors, rescuing people, doing the things necessary to get the infrastructure back up and running that can be brought back up. Response will eventually give way to the recovery process.

We began with an incredible planning effort. We brought together some of the best experts in urban planning — architects, engineers, folks who have expertise in sustainability and resiliency — to try to build the roadmap for what the Mississippi Gulf Coast would look like.

Then you begin to move into the resourcing process. There are an incredible number of funding streams that will be brought to bear through the long-term recovery effort. The next phase will be knitting together the various recovery resource streams to put together a comprehensive strategy for rebuilding these communities and rebuilding these shattered lives.

Keep in mind, especially in the most devastated areas, there's a sequence that has to occur. Before the reconstruction of housing begins, you have to have roadways to access these neighborhoods. You have to have electricity. You have to have water systems and sewer systems and all of the things that are necessary for the housing recovery to begin. Getting the schools back up and running was one of the most important things we did in Mississippi. We knew we were going to have to do things like that so people can start coming back, getting businesses back up and running.

There will also be a long process of trying to identify unmet needs in the population. That's something that we took very seriously in Mississippi because we knew that there was no way that we would recover holistically as a community as long as there were large groups of people who had not yet recovered.

What were some of the biggest challenges and pitfalls of that process?

People will never see an outpouring of love and help and assistance and volunteerism, like they seen in a post-disaster environment. Unfortunately, that environment also can attract a lot of unscrupulous people who are there to try to take advantage of the situation. Do your homework. Double check.

The second thing that really comes to mind is the difficulty in piecing together the various resource streams that will be used to build these communities. FEMA funding, in many cases, will pay only to put things back to the state they were in before they were destroyed, but in many cases the vision for what the communities will become will look different than the way they existed before. It becomes really a chess game, a strategy of piecing together the various sources of funding and assistance to realize these visions. The other thing is that sometimes these sources of funding are slow to actually flow, so time is of the essence.

The decisions that (local and state leaders) start making today will be decisions that will affect where their community will be five years from now, and 10 years from now. It is so important, even in the chaos of the immediate response, to always have that eye toward the long-term recovery of the region.

What were some of the ways Mississippi built back better, so to speak?

One of the big pieces of our Katrina model was a real focus on resiliency. We had so many homes in coastal Mississippi that were not elevated to proper requirements. Many of the things that were rebuilt after Hurricane Camille (in 1969, the last major storm before Katrina to hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast) were not rebuilt to any kind of code.

So you saw an immediate effort by our cities and counties — even some counties along the immediate coastline that didn't even have a building code — to do things like adopt very stringent building code requirements. As a result of that, if Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2022, the damage that it would inflict on our community would be far less than what occurred in 2005.

Our focus really was home by home. We made the case to the federal government that we felt like federal money should be deployed to help homeowners rebuild because the federal government established then and establishes now the flood risks for individual homes, and in many cases, there were homes outside of the federally designated flood zones that received catastrophic flooding. We felt like the science was in place at the time that these folks had a higher level of risk than what they would have assumed based on the federal flood rate maps.

We made the case that there was no way that our communities would be able to rebuild unless we were able to help individual homeowners become whole over time. So we employed a lot of resources to do that, but in doing that, we also were able to require that the homes be rebuilt to higher elevations to recognize the latest and greatest science of the time.

To what extent did the Mississippi Gulf Coast lose residents like what happened in New Orleans?

(New Orleans lost more than half its population, from 484,674 people before the storm to 230,172 after, according to The Data Center, a nonprofit that gathers and provides data and statistics about the Greater New Orleans area. The population still hasn't reached pre-Katrina levels.)

We've had a net population gain since Hurricane Katrina. But that was far from a certainty. You look at our communities, especially some of the communities that were at ground zero right around where the eyewall made landfall — those communities were absolutely wiped out. We're a region of about 400,000 people, and at its height, we had almost 40,000 temporary housing units here.

We understood how unsustainable it was to have people in travel trailers and mobile homes for temporary housing. When you've got 40,000 people living in temporary housing, when next hurricane season comes, you can imagine the scale of a disaster.

We tried to demonstrate to FEMA (through the Mississippi Alternative Housing Pilot Program) that we could build temporary housing units up to full codes and standards to withstand 150 mph winds that could then become the foundation for long term housing recovery. Rather than putting them in group sites, we put them back on the individual's lot. That becomes so critical because when people are back living on their own property, and their kids are back in their local school districts, and they're back in their local jobs, they're much more motivated to quickly bring about their personal recovery.

I personally lost my home. There is no more hopeless place that a human being can be than when they've lost everything they have through absolutely no fault of their own. But the good news is, there's a tremendous amount of help that has already arrived and will continue to arrive over time.

I'm sorry to hear you had your own losses. Could you tell me more about what that was like?

I evacuated about 75 miles inland to my parents' home. The house I lived in was 7 feet above sea level, so we evacuated because we knew it was very likely that our house was going to be flooded. We could have never imagined that it would be completely destroyed.

As crazy as this is gonna sound, I knew immediately that I was one of the lucky ones. I knew I wasn't going to have to go through a long, drawn-out battle with my insurance company because it wasn't going to be a question of 50% damage or 60% damage.

It's an entire payout on your policy because there's nothing left. (Edwards said he had both homeowners' and flood insurance.)

If you drive through coastal Mississippi today, you still see a lot of the scars of Hurricane Katrina, even 17 years later. Not everything has been rebuilt, especially in some areas along the coastline.

But in other places, the development is magnitudes better than what it replaced. So you have a lot of pride in your community because you know that you've been knocked down flat on your face and (had) the ability to stand back up, to get back on your feet and to recover.

For the folks that are in the midst of it right now, it is so incredibly difficult to get your mind at a place that says, 'One day this will be okay.' But I can promise them one day, it will be.

Kathryn Varn is statewide enterprise reporter for the Gannett/USA Today Network - Florida. You can reach her at kvarn@gannett.com or (727) 238-5315.

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