Miss. man weathers Katrina inside shack

GULFPORT, Miss. – Just yards from the barracks where Colleen Crockett and Louis McZorn weathered the winds and stinging rain of Hurricane Katrina, McZorn’s co-worker, Constable Al Brown, was hunkered down in a small guard shack praying that nothing would be hurled through the windows during the nearly 40 hours he was inside.

Brown, assistant shift supervisor of security at the Combat Readiness Training Center, and Constable Ron Lindsey watched as Katrina bore down on the base, uprooting trees and ripping roofs from buildings.

It was like watching a horror movie, Brown said.

“I was sitting there watching every pine tree just snap like toothpicks,” he said Tuesday. “The rain, hitting against your face, felt like bee stings.”

In the midst of the storm, Brown was forced to leave the small structure, where incoming drivers are checked for identification, to close an 8-foot-tall steel exit gate. Seconds after he braved the 145-mph winds, the gate was ripped from the concrete and flung across the road just as Brown made it back inside, he said.

At one point, he and Lindsey darted from the guard shack to a nearby barracks until the whipping winds forced them to stay inside the shack.

Meanwhile, 5 feet of water was flooding Brown’s home in Gulfport. He later would discover that some of his friends drowned in neighboring Biloxi, as waves nearly 40 feet high rushed in and out, over and over again, sucking people, trees and buildings into the gulf.

After the waves receded, the desperation set in, he said. People’s homes were looted even while they were inside, and a man in Biloxi shot his sister over a bag of ice, Brown said. Thieves punched holes in gas tanks to steal fuel, while others waited in long lines at gas stations, he said.

“People were lining up around 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning to get gas,” Brown said.

Unable to return to his apartment, Brown and his other family members who lost their homes are staying with relatives, he said.

“Our whole family is on this one street,” he said, adding that his relatives always used to joke about living together on a “Brown compound” some day. “We got it now.”

As Hurricane Rita threatens to strike the area again, people here are on the edge of their seats, he said, while the horror movie that was Hurricane Katrina continues.

“Every day you want to wake up and say it’s a bad dream,” he said. “But you wake up and it’s still here.”