Take a fancy dress party, mix it with a 50th birthday celebration and throw in a surprise wedding and you’ve got yourself quite a weekend.
But add Hurricane Katrina to the mix and you’re suddenly faced with disaster, and as we see now, death.
Cayman Islands resident Jim Robertson and his new bride Susan Wilson were literally having the time of their lives the last weekend in August when Katrina decided to slam the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The couple left Grand Cayman 22 August to travel to Jim’s home in Diamondhead, which is a bedroom community off Interstate 10 near the Gulf of Mexico.
On Thursday guests began arriving from Cayman, the UK and the US. They were being put up at Beau Rivage, Biloxi’s top-notch casino and resort.
The plan was for Susan and Jim to celebrate his 50th birthday that weekend with 50 of their closest friends.
‘It was beautiful,’ said Jim from a hotel room in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he and Susan evacuated following Katrina. ‘It was a fancy dress party.’
Part way through the birthday bash, Jim was taken out of the room and outside to his awaiting wedding. ‘I had no idea,’ he said.
‘I thought they were going to surprise me with dancers or something. I was led up the aisle and standing there seeing Susan’s two sons dressed as Uncle Sam and a beer can and her daughter dressed as Cleopatra.
‘It was a bit hard to believe this was my wedding. Susan had on her veil. She was dressed as Scarlett and I was Rhett Butler.
‘It was just beautiful; very emotional. And I said yes. We just had a great time.’
Susan had every detail worked out, from the limousines that picked up guests to dinner at Mary Mahoney’s, a world-renowned restaurant in Biloxi famous for Mrs. Mahoney’s bourbon bread pudding.
‘We took all these people from England and Grand Cayman and showed them just what the Gulf Coast had to offer,’ he said.
The couple even had plans to take their crew of friends to New Orleans for a dinner cruise and trek down Bourbon Street.
But threats of Katrina nixed those plans.
Management at Beau Rivage had to make the hard decision Saturday to evacuate and send their guests to safer grounds.
‘The evening they decided to evacuate, we knew it was going to be serious,’ Jim said.
Sunday found 19 of the crew on a bus headed to Jim’s Diamondhead home.
It was also the time that Jim’s new-found knowledge from experiences with Hurricane Ivan in Grand Cayman last September kicked in.
He convinced the bus driver to stop at a Super Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies, food and water.
His crew of 19 went back to the bus with six shopping carts filled with supplies, from batteries to inflatable beds.
‘We were very, very well prepared for what we thought was going to be a minor hit,’ he said.
He dispatched Susan’s sons to Home Depot to load up on plywood and tools to secure the house.
‘We prepared as best we could and even acquired a generator,’ he said.
The hard decision had to be made: whether to keep all 19 people together, or divide them in groups, pile them in available vehicles and send them on their way in hopes of beating the storm.
‘It was a choice of getting caught on the highway during the storm or hunkering down in a house we knew was pretty secure and on a high spot,’ he said. ‘We made the decision to keep together. No one wanted to split up. It was not an easy call.’
As they plywood went over the windows, Jim made sure there were peep holes to look outside, mainly to watch for tornadoes, which are so prevalent in the southern states during and after hurricanes.
They watched as a huge tree in Jim’s backyard came down, barely missing the house.
They watched as trees in the front of the house fell, taking with them power lines
Electric companies do not typically shut down power in the event of a storm like Caribbean Utilities Company does in the Cayman Islands.
With the lines down in the front yard, Jim said he could breathe a little easier, knowing the lines would now be dead and not a shock hazard.
As Katrina settled in the crew got to work and panic was kept at a minimum.
‘At one point it did feel like the roof was going to go,’ he said. ‘Somehow our house held together.’
The roughest part of the storm lasted about eight hours.
‘We thought the calm was just the storm passing and the winds shifting, but in retrospect it was the eye going over us,’ he said.
To keep order and calm each person in the house was given a specific chore.
‘They were just such a good group,’ he said.
During the storm a squirrel latched on to a window screen. ‘People were so worried about the squirrel it took their minds off their own fears,’
The squirrel had two babies; one died and Jim and his crew rescued the second. It’s doing well and has been turned over to the Clarksdale Humane Society.
After the storm passed Jim and his two new step-sons ventured outside to inspect the damage.
Armed with a chainsaw and pickup truck, he and the boys made their way to Jim’s parent’s home, which was undamaged. His parents had evacuated to Jackson, Mississippi.
‘To our surprise just a few houses down from us, a couple had seven feet of water and they barely survived,’ he said. ‘We didn’t realize how bad the storm was.’
A quick trip out to the interstate gave a hint to just how bad the storm had been. Condominiums were gone; only their pilings remained.
Debris hung 25 to 30 feet in trees, testimony to the storm’s surge.
Back at the Diamondhead house, Jim and Susan used their Ivan lessons and got things in gear.
They had a gas grill and a pool filled with water. They knew to disconnect the gutter for showers and how to best employ plastic bottles for the task.
‘We knew the water heater had water in it and we knew what the pool could do for us. We knew how to use the bleach and how to deal with toilets,’ he said.
They didn’t have to rough it for too long.
Jim’s father and other relatives showed up in the middle of the night with a Suburban and 80 gallons of gas. They filled the pickup and six or seven people piled into the bed of the truck. The others nestled in to the Suburban for the long trek from Diamondhead in the South to Clarksdale in the north.
‘Interstate 10 was passable,’ he said. ‘It was getting through the neighbours’ yards and ditches to get the heck out of there,’ he said. ‘Everything was closed. There was no gas stations, no food from Diamondhead, to Jackson to Greenwood.’
The trip took about six hours. Clarksdale is about 400 miles north of Diamondhead.
In Clarksdale they were greeted with warm, Southern hospitality from free meals at the Expo Center to reduced hotel rates.
As for the negative remarks being made about rescue efforts on the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans, Jim said there was some miscommunication.
‘There was so much misreporting here,’ he said. ‘There was some great leadership and some poor leadership. It was a feeling that you were on your own. It’s something we have to tackle in the future.’
Just as Ivan didn’t seem real as it was lashing Grand Cayman, Katrina didn’t seem real as she was slamming the coast, Jim said.
‘Grand Cayman didn’t seem real, but honestly, this is home and to see and know these people; you just don’t expect it. It’s a disaster of proportions we just haven’t seen before.’
He fears the death tolls have been under-reported.
But he’s confident the Mississippi Gulf Coast and even New Orleans will rally. The casinos are already getting their employees in position to help with the cleanup and rebuilding
All-in-all, he believes Hurricane Katrina will be a healing force for those who went through Ivan.
‘Most people didn’t understand the emotional burden of the people in Grand Cayman,’ he said. ‘Now they can have empathy.’
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