After Katrina, Mississippi Town Still in Need

PEARLINGTON, Miss. – "We’re still here."

Ask almost any Pearlington resident what they want the rest of the world to know about their little community on the banks of the Pearl River at the westernmost edge of Hancock County and that is what they will likely tell you.

All of Pearlington was submerged during Hurricane Katrina, a circumstance created by its close proximity to the Gulf and the river while sitting directly underneath the eye of the storm. Every building flooded and the community had an estimated average storm surge height of about 19 feet, not counting the wave action.

Before Katrina, Pearlington was isolated, a little lonely, and many locals preferred it that way. After Katrina, that made recovery difficult, to put it mildly. Now, however, an unending stream of volunteers and do-gooders from across the country _ and in some cases around the world _ coaxes the community of 1,000 or so back to its feet, ensuring its long-term survival. Still, the short-term recovery is far from done.

"If we hadn’t had those volunteers, we wouldn’t be here," said Rodrick "Rocky" Pullman, president of the Hancock County Board of Supervisors and longtime Pearlington resident. "There’s not many homes in Pearlington that were repaired that didn’t get some assistance from some type of volunteers. They’ve impacted just about every person’s life in Pearlington."

Pullman said there were about 900 homes pre-Katrina and there are about 350 habitable to almost-habitable ones now.

Pearlington is truly isolated: To the immediate west is the Pearl River and Louisiana _ it is actually closer to Slidell than Waveland; to the south is bayou and then the Gulf; the north and east are buffeted by blast zones from NASA’s Stennis Space Center.

With its ready access to wildlife-rich bayous and the Gulf, Pearlington began as a fishing community. It experienced significant growth after NASA co-opted Logtown in the 1960s on the northern end of Mississippi 607 and residents sought other quiet places to live.

Like most of small-town America, Pearlington has been experiencing struggles as its residents seek jobs in a high-tech and higher-cost world and fewer young people come back home to live and the overall population ages.

While being a small, rural community made recovery challenging, it also seemed to charm and draw volunteers as they looked for places to help after Katrina. Locals and volunteers alike told stories repeatedly in interviews the last two weeks about out-of-towners who wandered the Gulf Coast post-Katrina from New Orleans to Mobile looking to help and gravitated to Pearlington.

"The people down here are unbelievably gracious," said Wilf Wityshyn, a Canadian who is the Gulf Coast logistics coordinator for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.

PDA is one of the two major organizers of volunteer work that assist the hundreds of mostly religious groups coming to help. The other, the Pearlington Recovery Center (aka the Pearl-Mart at the old elementary school) is an ad hoc group thrown together out of semidesperation when FEMA and others pulled up stakes and left only a few months after Katrina.

Wityshyn said a healthy give-and-take relationship between locals and volunteers was quickly established after the storm. The volunteers fix homes while locals cook delicacies like fresh fish and red beans and rice to make them feel at home. Then there are the thousands of thank-you cards locals have written.

The community has a long way to go on the recovery road. There is a very small, two-week-old post office, several small churches in various states of repair, a corner store/gas station, a bar, a title and loan store, a fire station, and that’s about it. The school, C.B. Murphy Elementary, is gone. There has been talk of installing public water and sewer lines in town for years but they are yet to materialize.

So folks like Herb Ritchie and Larry Randall, two of the locals instrumental in getting the Recovery Center operating, said while Pearlington residents have and will continue to plug away on their own, they still need a lot of assistance.

"We ran this thing in the beginning on a shoestring and we’re still running it on a shoestring," Ritchie said.

The Recovery Center and PDA have a contingent of case managers putting together long-term recovery plans for locals. The debris is finally starting to disappear. Federal and state recovery grants are beginning to trickle in. Every day, the two said, things get a little better.

"We’re still here," Randall said. "We’re coming back. We need help."