Report from Biloxi: “Not a Pretty Sight for Miles and Miles”

With their building unsafe to enter, workers at Holy Guardian Angels child care center in Biloxi set up chairs for a meeting beneath nearly leafless live oaks. The center previously served 63 children. (Denise Cox) Click on photo for larger view.

The front wall and parts of the roof of the Holy Guardian Angels building are gone. (Denise Cox) Click on photo for larger view.

In Biloxi, “Preschool Paradise Welcomes You.” (Denise Cox) Click on photo for larger view.

Mold is growing across the floor of the Lil Dumplin’s child care center in D’Iberville. The center previously was licensed to serve up to 86 children. (Denise Cox) Click on photo for larger view.

At the Kare It Patch Child Care Center in Gulfport, water-tossed furnishings …

… and waterlogged enrollment records. (Denise Cox) Click on photos for larger views.

Almost a month after the hurricane, Biloxi’s streets are still desolate and partly flooded. (Denise Cox) Click on photo for larger view.

SEPT. 29, 2005 | The sign on the brick and frame house says "Preschool Paradise Welcomes You," but Hurricane Katrina shoved or sucked the building sideways, off its foundation and onto the adjoining property.

Almost a month since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the wreckage in Harrison and Hancock Counties of Mississippi is still nearly unbelievable. It is as if a war was waged there. As Denise Cox puts it, "There is not a pretty sight or smell to be found for miles and miles."

Cox was part of a survey team from the Mississippi State University Early Childhood Institute (ECI) that assessed damage to licensed child care facilities in Hancock and Harrison Counties on the Mississippi Gulf Coast last week. Along with detailed notes about structural damage and interviews with child care proprietors who could be found, the team members summarized their findings in code: "Green" for little or no damage; "yellow" for significant damage; "red" for unable to reopen at this time.

“Black” was for centers that could not be contacted—or located.

Their findings were not good. The combination of wind and surging gulf waters had caused far greater devastation than either weather force alone. Some centers were nothing but rubble. In others, a thick black mold covered what was left of the floors.

Along with Cox, JoAnn Thomas of ECI; Susan Ross of Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut; and Becky Trask of the Gulf Coast Child Care Resource and Referral Agency spent several nights in a tent city erected by Chevron at Pascagoula, Miss. Ross had flown to Mississippi to volunteer for ECI’s hurricane response effort. Trask’s agency had lost its quarters in Biloxi when the storm destroyed Moore Community House.

The survey was hot, uncomfortable, and grueling. Here and there, the team made heartbreaking discoveries: folding chairs in rows on an asphalt parking lot, with a few toys arranged nearby for an open-air preschool class; a small box of toys that had been flung into a tree; a man standing in apparent stupefaction in the ruin of his house, who said he found a corpse there when he first returned home.

"It has been an unreal experience, but our physical exhaustion is nothing compared to the psychological exhaustion that the people of the Gulf Coast are facing every day," Thomas said.

The ECI survey team made hundreds of photographs, a few of which appear here, but Cox commented, "These pictures do not do justice to the ruins left behind."

The Rural Early Childhood Atlas will use the ECI research to produce maps of damage to the early care and education infrastructure in Harrison and Hancock Counties and to calculate the percentages of lost, at-risk, and available licensed child care slots there. Those maps and calculations will be available soon.

 

Updated 04/03/2006