 GCN Feature - A Story of Katrina Survival and the Changes it Brought Dane’s Story – Part 1 The following is a recalling of recent events as they really happened in a little unincorporated town called Clermont Harbor, just on the other side of Waveland, MS after Hurricane Katrina delivered her catastrophic blow to the Gulf Coast. The story is being told by Dane St. Pe, a resident for many years of coastal Mississippi. His story is so powerful, that it cannot be taken in all at once, but is broken up into a three-part inspirational series of stories that shows the true depth and breadth of the human spirit of tough, coastal Mississippians. By Mark Proulx - Special to GCN Filed 6/3/06 I hope that I can do a good job of expressing these events to you as they actually happened - Dane The Friday before the storm (Katrina, Aug.
29th, 2005) Dane St. Pe (pronounced Sahn Pay) was in Baton
Rouge working on LSU stadium as an electrician. Saturday morning, he had
been told by his company in Biloxi “The wind was blowing hard Sunday evening and it was raining just as hard. We couldn’t really see much since it was so dark, but we could hear the damage being done in the tree branches snapping off around the house,” remembers Dane. “The really strong hurricane force winds started up around 2:00am. I couldn’t really tell how bad the damage was around the house until early the next morning when the sun came up. I was telling David that this was gonna be bad.” David hadn’t take Dane seriously up till then but by the time they got up Monday morning, David had gathered the tools up. Around 9:00am, Dane was on the phone with his brother, Lance, who was in a hotel in Shreveport, LA. Dane noticed the water was flooding all over the yard, thinking it was flooding due to the rain the night before, so Dane told his brother that he had to go and needed to move his truck closer to the house. “That was the last conversation I would ever have with my brother.” Dane moved his truck to the front of the house, and by the time he walked back into the house and looked out the window, the water had suddenly reached the house. Just then the house phone rang. It was David’s nephew, Eugene, who lived on the property. Dane and David had both thought that he and his wife had left the night before. He told them over the phone that they were headed over to “mama’s house.” Eugene had his wife with him and her eight-month-old baby in a baby carrier with a diaper bag. By the time they got inside, the water had started to seep into the house. Dane told them they needed to get everything they needed into the attic: water, food, batteries, light, candles, radio, and the tools…even had the beer on ice in the attic. He told Eugene to get into the attic with his family and that he and David would stay downstairs. “How foolish was I! I was standing in the kitchen next to a sliding glass door watching the water come up. When it got to about three feet, the sliding glass doors in the den on the other side of the house broke. When the water hit us, it knocked us off our feet.” The water surprised them even more by rising to four feet of water within ten minutes…and it slowly kept rising. Dane was much taller than David, so when it got to his chest, Dane yelled, “Let’s get in the attic, too!” “So there I am, sitting there with my feet hanging from the attic. When the water got to my feet, I said, ‘We gotta get on the roof.’” Dane looked at the attic vent at the peak of the roof in the direction he was sitting thinking maybe he could break through there. By mere chance, he turned to look behind him and saw the back of some sheet rock in the form of a square. “What is that?” Dane asked. Eugene yelled with glee, “That’s Mama’s skylight over her bathtub!” David took a hammer and knocked the sheet rock away, exposing a plastic skylight. By the time they got everyone on the roof, the water was coming into the attic, now about 12 feet high. When Eugene’s wife got onto the roof, she went into hysterics thinking that she and the baby were going to die. Eugene spotted a boat caught in some trees, and assured her that if they had to they would swim to the boat. “No matter how much we tried to convince her that we were going to be alright, I thought for sure that we were going to die. I mean, we had this much water come up in an hour, and I knew we had six to eight more hours to go. I thought for sure the water would continue to rise.” According to Dane, he had been called to the ministry, and even spent two years in Bible college in Texas when he was younger, but considered himself a “back sliding Christian” for about six years since his divorce. When all hope seemed lost, he walked to the backside of the house and prayed. Dane said he prayed to the Lord that He could take his life, but that he was not going to watch this young family die. After a little while, the eye passed us and they were relieved. The storm had subsided and they were hoping against hope that the worst was over. They had thoughts of leaving the house roof…the only problem was, they were surrounded on all sides by water and cut off from the rest of the world. Nobody would be able to rescue them anytime soon. They simply sat and waited. “We got scared again when we noticed that the water had come up about another foot and a half. We didn’t know how much more we were going to get, when it finally stopped rising. When it stopped, I can tell you I let out a big sigh of relief. We felt like were going to live through this after all.” Just about the time they began feeling better, however, the storm started up again….from the other side.
“The wind and roar of the tornadoes were deafening. We practically had to scream at each other to be heard. That big brick chimney protected us from the wind. Somehow, not one piece of debris hit that house. As we watched, we saw huge pine trees snap like toothpicks. Nothing fell near the house, but we got pinged with a pine needle every once in a while.” During the fever pitch of the backside winds, they saw a cow struggling and swimming by. David tried to call the cow onto the roof, and Dane yelled to leave it alone because it would make the roof collapse. Dane began to reminisce and sharing his stories to the others about what his parents used to tell him about Hurricanes Camille and Betsy, when David – obviously frightened, but trying to lighten the mood– chided, “So……you’ve waited your whole life for this, huh?” “Up till then, I had ridden out every storm either in Clermont Harbor or on the Westbank, except for Hurricane Eleanor because my mom made us leave.” Well, Dane definitely had one up on his parents! Around 3:00pm was when the wind and the water changed direction, and the rain really started to come down hard. The water in the yard had been sucked back enough to allow Eugene, his wife and the baby back into the attic for protection from the pelting and stinging drops being shot at them. Only problem was…as fast as that water came up, it got sucked back out...and left a horrifying Gulf muck over everything. As the water got lower, David and Dane crawled out of the attic and looked out. David’s parents’ Winnebago had gone under water, but since it was locked tight, it was not full of the mud. So they broke into it. Eugene went scavenging for clothes around the neighborhood, and found dry clothes and blankets in the top of a closet in a nearby house on stilts. When it seemed safe, the rest started to
venture out a little. According to Dane, it was eerie seeing what they “I think that sometime after midnight we heard a bullhorn. It was a guy on a four-wheeler who said he and some others had been trying to get this way, but had been having a tough time clearing the road.” The group turned out to be a bunch of local men with their chain saws and trucks who had obviously escaped being totally flooded out and were now attempting to rescue survivors. Two of these locals, according to Dane, were Hancock County police who had escaped with their lives and who had returned to try and save as many lives as possible in the unincorporated areas of Hancock County. It took them another couple of more hours to cut their way to them because of the huge piles of debris. Getting out was not going to be easy. When they finally broke through, they all piled into a nearby truck that had somehow survived and headed out. “We headed off toward Ansley to see if we could find more people who needed help,” Dane said. “It was so dark by then and we had no idea what time it was. I decided to stay with the guys in the truck and go to a shelter, but David and the others said they were sick of riding around and were going to walk back and stay in the Winnebago. The police told us that they might evacuate all of Hancock County, so I figured I would see David and them within a couple of days anyway. In the meantime, I had to try to get to a place where I could get in touch with my family to let them know I was okay. The truck took me – and many others - to the Stennis Space Center. When I got there, I couldn’t believe it…they had no communication whatsoever.” After waiting it out for two days for David and his family, Dane decided to find his way back on foot and look for them. He hitched a ride back to Lakeshore, and when he got back to the house, everyone had already gone. Having no one around, Dane felt the overpowering need to see what was left of Clermont Harbor. As he walked out to the road, a Humvee with some rangers came by and gave him a ride toward Clermont. The military had cleared the road half way down Clermont Boulevard towards the railroad tracks. Not able to travel any further, Dane set out on foot. He climbed over huge piles of trees and destroyed houses just to get to the tracks. As he was climbing up and over a pile of trash to look around, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The town was gone! “The whole of my childhood memories were gone. The only things that were recognizable were the concrete pillars that stood in front of Garcia’s Grocery. I tried to get to the home I had grown up in, but there was too much debris. It reminded me of photos I had seen of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb. It looked as if a bomb had exploded in a lumberyard. I was numb. I couldn’t think straight. All I could do was walk.” Dane backtracked to the place where some volunteers were still clearing the road and hitched a ride in a FEMA truck to the Save-a-Center in Waveland, on Highway 90. The flood waters couldn’t begin to prepare Dane for the sea of people there. Dane witnessed people as far as the eye could see all the way around the huge parking lot, standing in line and waiting politely to get water and ice that military trucks were giving out. Unlike the images he later saw on television of the lawlessness in New Orleans, there was no rioting and no arguing– just good Southern people waiting and talking to one another making sure that everyone was okay. “I am so very proud to be from here. People who had lost everything were conducting themselves with concern for others and with dignity and respect. Everyone cared.” At least Dane was alive. That was something at least. Sitting there with only the ripped shirt on his back, his head began to clear. The pain of seeing everything he had ever known completely destroyed was slowly being replaced by the big question….. “Now what do I do?” In Part Two, Dane makes a life altering decision and his life takes him in a direction he never expected.
Contact the author: mxpowerdive@hotmail.com
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to report back to work on Monday. Rather than drive all the way to
Biloxi, he stopped in Clermont Harbor, just on the west side of Waveland.
Dane lived only a block from the beach and at some point in time figured
he should maybe go see if his friend, David, was at his mother and
father’s house, about four miles inland. Hearing that this was going to be
a big storm, he thought it would be a good idea to get away from the
beach, just in case. When he eventually got to his friend’s house, David
was getting ready for the storm, taping up the windows and deciding to
ride it out alone. His parents had already gone to Florida. Sometime
during the day, Dane had remembered his father telling him how people had
died during Hurricane Camille (August 17th, 1969) because they
had no way of getting out of their attics, so he retrieved an ax and a
maul and some other tools…just in case. (Dane St. Pe-photo
right)
The house had
a huge fireplace on the south side at its highest peak. It was one of the
round top chimneys, so Eugene slid the diaper bag and cell phones into the
side of the chimney. They all sat behind it as the wind picked up and
started to howl from the opposite direction. None of them had ever heard
wind like that in their lives. They couldn’t see them, but there was no
doubt about what was now headed their way - tornadoes. Now scared beyond
comprehension, the group huddled together for dear life.
saw: damaged trees, collapsed houses, mobile homes in the road. They
made their way down to the store and saw dogs stranded on the roof of the
school. There was a lady who had been bed ridden in the house across the
street from the store. They checked on her and found her dead. “We
thought that this was the most horrible thing we had ever experienced.
Little did we know, it would get much worse.” When they finally got back
to the Winnebago, they settled in for the long, dreary night ahead.
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