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6. On the Coast
- University of Michigan Press
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CHAPTER 6 On the Coast Plaquemines Parish, August 16, 1969 That Saturday morning was a good day for ‹shing, and Luke Petrovich was offshore in his boat when he noticed an unusually large number of helicopters shuttling to and from the oil platforms. A fellow parish commissioner raised him on the radio. The latest news: a hurricane watch had been declared from Biloxi to the Florida panhandle . Luke unrolled his master chart of the Gulf. “Do you have the coordinates ?” “Twenty-four ‹ve, eighty-six zero, headed north-northwest at ten.” Luke studied the map. “That sends it straight here.” “The feds say it’s gonna turn north. Do you believe ’em?” He glanced up at the helicopters. “Nope.” It was the kind of thing that could make a rational man’s blood boil: a hurricane headed for southeastern Louisiana yet no of‹cial warning from the National Weather Service. Not that Luke was surprised by this kind of neglect from the feds. As Leander Perez had repeatedly pointed out, Washington bureaucrats got concerned about Louisiana only when they wanted to meddle in issues like school desegregation or voting rights for coloreds. Expect those bastards to do something useful for southern folk and you’ll be waiting ’til kingdom come. The lack of timely hurricane warnings was just another example. It took an of‹cial vote of three of the ‹ve commissioners to man72 date an evacuation, and Luke scheduled the necessary meeting by ship-to-shore radio. At Port Eads, he brie›y tied up and dashed into the pilot house to phone the New Orleans of‹ce of the Weather Service , asking what was up. Whatever transpired during that conversation , Luke would later decline to share any details. Despite his anger at the time, he apparently felt a need to be protective of whomever he talked to. Later, he was more sanguine. After all, that conversation turned out to be irrelevant, so why try to dredge it up more than three decades later? Luke had already learned to take his cues from the oil companies, bolstered by those petrol boys’ excellent track record for knowing what they were doing when weather threatened their rigs. He learned that they’d started tapering off production on Thursday, that everything was completely shut down by the time he reached shore, and that all of those helicopters were bringing in more than three thousand offshore workers. The rigs would be fully evacuated by Saturday afternoon—a monumental task involving hundreds of ›ights. Luke motored upriver to Pointe A La Hache and scampered over the levee to the courthouse. The decision was made with no debate. By that afternoon, deputies were cruising the parish neighborhoods, their loudspeakers blaring evacuation preparation announcements. Yet another ten hours would pass before the National Hurricane Center would declare even a hurricane watch (let alone a hurricane warning) for the region. Later, in its of‹cial report on the aftermath of the disaster, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would describe how effective this evacuation had been, with 17,800 people successfully leaving the birdsfoot delta in a timely manner in a slow-moving caravan on the single narrow two-lane road to the north. The of‹cial federal report would fail to mention, however, that this mass departure, which certainly saved thousands of lives, took place with little thanks due to the advisories from the NHC. Had the locals waited for the feds’ of‹cial hurricane warning, they would have had only four hours or less to drive as far as seventy-‹ve miles on a single clogged road, and hundreds or even thousands would have drowned in their cars when the storm-driven Mississippi River backed up and over›owed its west levee. 73 On the Coast [52.54.103.76] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:29 GMT) The Mississippi Gulf Coast Residents of coastal Mississippi didn’t have the history of evacuation experience that the folks near the mouth of the Mississippi River did, where getting out entailed a long drive north on a single road vulnerable to ›ooding. In Mississippi, the coast ran east and west for seventy -‹ve miles and spanned three counties. The main road, U.S. Highway 90, paralleled the beach from Pascagoula west through Ocean Springs, Biloxi, Gulfport, Long Beach, Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis, and Waveland. But there was also a handful of roads heading north, and coastal evacuees at least had a choice of more than...