Brian Adam has spent a lot of long nights in the Hancock County emergency operations center, where he managed response efforts for the Mississippi county as Hurricane Francine roared ashore Wednesday in neighboring Louisiana.
In 2005, the center operated out of an old bowling alley in the town of Bay St. Louis, right next to the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. Adam and his colleagues — who call him “Hooty” — watched as Hurricane Katrina, a powerful Category 4 that killed more than 200 people in Mississippi, flattened vast swathes of the state’s coastline.
The lashing wind and rain from Katrina was followed by storm surge. Nearly 28 feet of it. Water seeped into the building. Then it started to rise, not stopping until it reached their knees. “We really thought that we were all going to be gone,” Mr. Adam said.
That was his last time working in the old bowling alley.
The operations center bounced around for a while, from a church to a vocational center to a small house, until the county built a permanent one about a decade after Katrina — a squat, stucco building some 15 miles from the Gulf.
This one is built to survive, with reinforced concrete walls angled to withstand winds, and a warren of offices and conference rooms arranged around a kitchen designed to cook for a crowd. During major storms, dozens of people crowd into the center’s “war room,” where a massive radar graphic is displayed in front of four rows of computer monitors.
As Francine approached shore on Wednesday, the center hosted about 50 people, including dispatchers, emergency services workers, a health official, a volunteer fire chief and a Hancock County inmate who cooked meals. A menu, printed on Mr. Adam’s letterhead and stuck to a fridge in the kitchen, listed red beans and rice for lunch, hamburgers and fries for dinner, and eggs and biscuits for breakfast on Thursday.
The center has showers and, crucially for a multiday operation, a dormitory. After dinner on Wednesday, some dispatchers were preparing to sleep on cots and air mattresses. Others set up sleeping bags on the floors.
“I’m ready for it to be over,” said Gabrielle Marshall, 29, a dispatcher who brushed her teeth before 8 p.m. She was hoping to get some rest before her next shift started at 5:30 a.m.
Some people at the center, including Mr. Adam, who has been the county’s emergency director since 2003, said they don’t sleep during storms. By 10 p.m., he had been awake for nearly 24 hours, and he was yawning at the desk in his office. He told his staff that it was time to head out to see how bad the flooding was.
One of his monitors displayed the height of storm surge in the county. It was shy of five feet — a far cry from Katrina. But it showed that the water was rising.
The post Inside a Storm Center Rebuilt After Hurricane Katrina’s Destruction appeared first on New York Times.
