IN KATRINA'S WAKE Scenes From the Disaster Area
A message on Shirley Lott's roof alerted FEMA crews, who discovered hundreds of residents stranded in White Cypress Lakes, Miss.
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Crisis Draws a Community Closer
WHITE CYPRESS LAKES, Miss. -- On any ordinary day, it takes the residents here at least half an hour to get to the nearest grocery store. But that's why they chose to live out in the country, enveloped by towering loblolly pines and sycamores, their homes barely visible from the roads that wind through a series of subdivisions with only one way in and out.
Their bucolic, isolated life, 40 miles from Mississippi's Gulf Coast, turned ugly the day Hurricane Katrina struck. While coastal communities suffered the wrath of Katrina's storm surge, these 300 to 500 residents took the brunt of her winds.
And when the winds stopped, residents found themselves trapped by their beloved trees.
"You're out in the country, and nobody knows you're there," said Carol Catalano, who managed to drive out of her driveway and out of her subdivision on Saturday for the first time since the storm hit on Monday. "I was so depressed by this morning. I really didn't expect anyone to find me."
This community of mostly former New Orleans residents who fled the big city for the country sprung up in the 1990s. Much of its early years were spent squabbling over self-governance and the property owners association. Now, in a crisis, the members would have to bury their differences and come together.
By the weekend, Shirley Lott, John Adams and several neighbors had assembled their own emergency distribution center in one resident's private airplane hangar and had started handing out Meals-Ready-to-Eat, six-packs of bottled water and bags of ice.
They had to find diplomatic ways to impose limits on some residents who tried to claim more than a fair share of the limited supplies.
But they also found that the effort has brought them closer as a community.
"We're all talking to each other now," Adams said.
-- Sylvia Moreno
