By Hook or by Crook, Surviving Storm

Along the way, he says, "We were passing FEMA trucks along the side of the road."

Once Evans had provisioned Turkey Creek, he linked up with the Good Deeds Community Center in North Gulfport, an informal distribution center where volunteer Rose Johnson has been serving meals and doling out supplies daily. They began shuttling supplies to neighboring towns. They sent food to Long Beach and lent a chain saw to firefighters, who used it to cut a man out of his house.

"Poor people know how to survive," Evans says. "These are low-income African Americans. We certainly weren't a jackpot tax base. But we've been here for 139 years, and been through one Reconstruction. This community is about as up-on-our-feet as anyone. We're not running around looking around for something to eat and drink."

Prepared for Storm

In Ocean Springs, Mayor Moran slept on the floor of City Hall for 12 days.

A charming oceanfront bedroom community of 17,500, Ocean Springs was cut off from Biloxi by a knocked-out bridge and was virtually incommunicado for the better part of a week. Apart from a brief assessment visit by a FEMA medical strike team, Moran and her 40 police officers, 25 firefighters and 40 public works employees were alone for five days before they received any response from outside.

"We knew we would be on our own for 72 hours, but after five days, totally exhausted, we were just left saying, 'Where's the relief? Where's the cavalry?' " she says.

Finally, help came in the form of two tractor-trailers of supplies -- from New Life Community Church in Chicago. An interfaith alliance of 15 churches in Ocean Springs had arranged for the delivery. The trucks carried water, diapers, cleaning supplies, dry food and used clothes. When the drivers said they couldn't unload without a secure place to put the supplies, Moran ordered the locks cut on a county warehouse.

Next, she broke into her own public works building "to hijack a forklift." She also had staff members break into a fish-and-tackle shop to get waders. They left an invoice.

Moran, 49, felt Ocean Springs had done all it could to prepare for Katrina. She is an experienced public official with a master's degree in economic development from Georgetown University. She interned for Lott and served as Mississippi's economic development representative in Europe for several years, before returning home to Ocean Springs to run for mayor as a Democrat. She took office July 4.

"We tried," Moran says. "We had our radios. We know how to fill out the FEMA reimbursement forms. We know what we're supposed to do. We were as well-organized as we could be for a small town facing something of this magnitude."

Moran was so organized that before the storm came, she notified FEMA that she had readied a building, a former Kmart, for its workers to occupy. But apart from a brief visit from a medical strike team, she didn't hear from FEMA until a week after the storm.

Moran has improvised. She enlisted the City Council to form an emergency operations center. She established phone lines and staffed them 24 hours a day -- with workers from the water and sewer departments. The planning director has been unloading trucks, and the parks director brought a casket that had floated out of a graveyard breached by the tides to his office for safekeeping.