On August 29, 2005, I was off from work. I’d covered the weekend shift at The Vicksburg Post, so that Monday I found myself at home, sitting in my living room watching what I called “Hurricane TV.” Meteorologists clung to poles on The Weather Channel, shouting into the wind as Katrina came ashore on the Mississippi-Louisiana line. I worried about friends and family closer to the Gulf Coast, but I never imagined the storm would reach us — 200 miles north of where the surge hit hardest. By that afternoon, though, trees were down across Vicksburg, power lines dangled dangerously, and the August heat quickly became unbearable without electricity.
The next morning I walked into a pitch-black newsroom — no windows, no power, no air conditioning. I was not quite two years into the job, still finding my footing. My editor pulled out a blue Mac laptop I’d never seen before, handed it to me along with a radio, and said simply, “Write what you hear.” With only a handful of headlamps to go around, I carried my assignment outside. I sat on a bench in the eerie post-storm air, typing public radio reports of storm surges swallowing homes, people clinging to trees, the death toll climbing. My stomach was in knots thinking of my friend Hallie, whose family lived for generations in a house on Highway 90, fondly known as Beach Boulevard. Days earlier, she told me they’d ride it out in North Gulfport. Now I couldn’t reach her on my little Kyocera flip phone. I feared the worst. Days later I learned she and her family survived — but their home was nothing more than a slab. A story repeated thousands of times by Coast residents.
Somehow, we still managed to print a paper that day. That moment has never left me. In the dark, working by radio and sheer determination, we put out the news because people needed it. They needed to know what was happening. They needed to hear the voices of neighbors, friends, survivors. That’s when it hit me: in the middle of disaster, storytelling isn’t just important — it’s essential.
In the weeks that followed, I wrote about children born on the day of the storm — one mother even naming her baby Katrina. I talked with a Vicksburg native recovering from a lung transplant in a New Orleans hospital when all hell broke loose there. I listened to evacuees who made it as far north as Vicksburg, huddled in churches and gyms, trying to piece together lives that would never look the same again.
Katrina taught me about survival, but more than that, it taught me about resilience — not just the Coast’s resilience, but the resilience of people everywhere who show up for each other when everything else falls apart.
Years later, I worked alongside Sereena Henderson at Mississippi Today. She grew up on the Coast and spent middle school in a Katrina trailer. Her stories of that time always stayed with me. Today she’s membership manager at The 19th News, and I can’t help but believe those Katrina years nudged her toward a career in journalism too.
It’s hard to believe it’s been 20 years. I think back to the silent streets of Vicksburg without power, the dark newsroom lit by headlamps, the weight of that radio in my hands as I wrote down words people desperately needed. I think about friends who lost everything and families who found themselves in our community, seeking safety and hope. And I see now how those moments shaped me, gave me a deep respect for resilience, and made me believe so deeply in the power of storytelling.
That belief is at the heart of LFVC and The Sip Collective. It’s why I created Amplify — to carry forward the voices of resilience, to connect communities through stories, and to remind us all how powerful it is to be heard. Katrina at 20 is about honoring survival, remembering what we endured, and recognizing how storytelling helps us carry each other forward.
