Category 5: The Story of Camille, Lessons Unlearned from America's Most Violent Hurricane

Epilogue

Epilogue A hundred miles north of Camille’s landfall, ten-year-old evacuee Richard Rose awoke to a brilliant Monday morning, the air sweet with Orleans jasmine. As he dashed outside to meet the neighborhood kids, and his eighteen-year-old brother Don headed to Gulfport to check on their dad, the rest of the family stewed indoors in a brew of mounting worry. Late that day, a call came in on a police line. Richard will never forget his sister’s piercing shriek. “Daddy’s dead!” The days that followed merged into a blur. The funeral home, the closed casket, Mother mistakenly spraying her hair with underarm deodorant, the mess at their Gulfport home, the chaos at Dad’s business , their temporary stay with relatives who had a generator. Although nobody explained much to Richard about what had happened , eventually someone did admit to him that his dog Mickey had drowned in the garage. Even as Richard grew older, the Rose family didn’t discuss the tragedy. It was years later that he learned that his dad’s body had been found naked in a chimney. Don had identi‹ed him by a ring and a scar from a bullet wound sustained in World War II. In 1989, at age twenty-nine, Richard was elected to the Gulfport City Council—the youngest person ever to serve on that body. In 1997, toward the end of his fourth term, he undertook a reevaluation of his life. He enrolled in graduate school, earned a master’s degree in public administration, and changed careers. For the next three years he worked on a FEMA project while spearheading an effort to obtain funding for a memorial to the thirteen people from Gulfport, including his dad, who died during Camille. In 2002, Richard was invited to speak at the dedication of another Camille memorial—this time in Biloxi. He told the audience, 237 As a ten year old, I stood near my father’s closed cof‹n at Lang Funeral Home in Gulfport. I asked myself a question whose answer I believed I knew, but could not con‹rm . . . Is there any reason anyone should die in a hurricane? In July 2004, he accepted the city manager’s position in D’Iberville, a town on the north shore of the Back Bay of Biloxi. His ‹rst priority after taking on those responsibilities was to develop a hurricane response plan. Barely a year later, the wisdom of Richard’s foresight was af‹rmed by Hurricane Katrina. Although portions of the emergency plan were still a work-in-progress, the evacuation went smoothly, city hall was boarded up and became functional again shortly after the storm, and utilities and city water were soon restored. Unfortunately, 60 percent of D’Iberville’s homes were destroyed, and even Richard’s own home, although located ‹ve miles upstream along the Biloxi River and perched on pilings fourteen feet high, was ›ooded to a depth of ‹ve feet. The part of the new emergency plan that turned out to be weakest was the expectation of prompt federal aid. A full three weeks after the disaster, the feds had still not provided any temporary housing assistance for the local victims. Mary Ann Gerlach’s copious interviews with news reporters catapulted her tragic tale of the hurricane party into an urban legend. She made news again in January 1981, when she was arrested for murder. Although there were no eyewitnesses and the evidence was purely circumstantial , the state contended that Mary Ann had pumped ‹ve shots from a .357 magnum pistol into her thirteenth ex-husband, Lawrence A. Keitzer. Mary Ann steadfastly insisted that she remembered nothing at all about the shooting. Her legal defense was straightforward: Her ordeal in surviving the destruction of the Richelieu during Hurricane Camille had rendered her legally insane. For good measure, her attorney tacked on a second somewhat contradictory plea: self-defense. On January 28, 1982, following an eight-day trial, a Harrison County jury found Mary Ann Gerlach guilty of murder. It wasn’t that the jury was insensitive to the long-term effects of disaster-related trauma; after all, each of them had also been affected CATEGORY 5 238 by Camille’s horrors. To accept a defense of inner turmoil and confusion as a legitimate excuse for sociopathic behavior, however, the jury would have likewise been excusing Camille’s countless other walking...