Students, faculty and staff at Mississippi State University are continuing to make trips to the Coast to help people recovering from damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, which left the Mississippi Gulf Coast ravaged more than a year ago.
The official trips stopped at the end of the fall semester, but people at the university, including many who made some initial trips last year to the Coast, have continued visiting in order to provide any help they can, associate dean of students Thomas Bourgeois said.
“People who are actually university employees are continuing to volunteer,” Bourgeois said.
Some departments within the university and organizations on campus are sponsoring trips down to the Coast. However, communities and people on the Coast are asking for people to prepare ahead of time now, Bourgeois said.
“What they’re asking for is specific needs,” he said.
People should not travel down and ask if they could do anything. The best service they could offer is calling ahead to see if and what a particular place needs help with, he said.
Debris has been completely removed from some places, and things are beginning to slow down on the Coast. That means many of those serving on the Coast are now turning to their own needs. They have helped those around them, and they now have to clean up their own property that Hurricane Katrina may have damaged, Bourgeois said.
Fred Mock, associate director of student housing, said he went down to Biloxi with a group from the university shortly after the storm hit.
“We stayed in the Coastal Research Center,” Mock said. “There were whole sections of neighborhoods that were just piles of wood.”
People were wandering around looking through rubble, struggling to salvage anything they could from the devastation, he said.
“It was kind of interesting how just a few feet made all the difference,” Mock said.
Three blocks down from some of the worst destruction, the houses would be fine. During the trip, people from the Health Center went around and attended to any people who had a need, he said.
More than a year later, Mock said the experience made such a huge impact that it is still with him today.
“The TV doesn’t do it justice,” he added.
The city of Starkville even adopted the South Mississippi town of Poplarville as a sister city in order to provide support after the small town received a great amount of damage from the storm.
Bigger cities like Gulfport and Biloxi were receiving a great amount of help, but Poplarville was not receiving many shipments of supplies, industrial engineering major Jennifer Johnson said in a news article in The Reflector last year.
“We’re about 30 miles inland, and I guess people haven’t realized that smaller cities need help, too,” she said.
Trips to the Coast and other forms of support have continued throughout the last year, and people visiting need to remember to prepare before they go down, Bourgeois added.