Why is one South MS town still suffering after Katrina, while another surges?

On a Thursday morning, three regulars sit in cool darkness. Two shoot pool, another sips a Coors Light. The smell of cigarette smoke clings to walls and hangs in the air.

Turtle Landing Bar & Grill, tucked off U.S. 90 in Pearlington, was once lively, until Hurricane Katrina emptied the town and Louisiana closed nearby bridges.

Now, 20 years after the storm, the isolation is heavier.

“Big time,” the bar’s owner Janyne Crapeau says, perched on a bar stool.

Daylight briefly seeps in as a man comes in from fishing for bass in the bayou and takes a seat at the bar. He orders a plate of red beans and rice. Beers, at $2.50 a bottle, don’t keep Turtle Landing running. The food does. It’s the only restaurant in town.

Two decades after Katrina, Pearlington remains stranded. Unlike nearby towns that were rebuilt with the help of government aid, this one — unincorporated with no form of government — never quite gained a foothold. Its few businesses, fading population and grassy, vacant lots point to an uneven recovery along the Mississippi Coast.

Its only school was washed away and never rebuilt. There is no hospital or emergency room, forcing residents to drive elsewhere for care, including Crapeau, who was diagnosed with throat cancer and makes the 45-minute trip to Gulfport every three weeks for chemotherapy. Public buildings are scarce: a library, a community center and a volunteer fire department are all that remain.

After the storm, volunteers and church groups trickled into Pearlington while much of the aid was concentrated in other areas. Residents were faced with a choice: to rebuild or leave. Most fled to nearby towns with better outcomes.

Bay St. Louis, 17 miles away, was one of them.

Katrina battered Bay St. Louis — destroying half of the homes, blowing out the St. Louis Bay Bridge that carried U.S. 90 and flattening the population. The downtown area, once busy, was a blank slate.

Recovery was a yearslong effort sustained by an outpouring of assistance from the government, volunteers and locals who stayed. Public buildings, roadways and vital bridges were eventually repaired and replaced by federal money. By 2013, new developers were flocking to downtown as longtime business owners rebuilt.

Today, Katrina’s devastation is a ghost in most parts of Bay St. Louis. In Pearlington, it’s still there.

A storm-battered town

The two-lane road to Pearlington cuts through dense woods and bayous. The old river town boomed with newcomers in the 1960s, when NASA commandeered a swath of Hancock County and displaced nearby villages to build the Stennis Space Center.

Now the streets are quiet.

But signs of the past endure. A man wearing a faded NASA t-shirt rides a rumbling lawnmower through his yard. A Coca-Cola delivery truck pulls past sun-bleached gas pumps to deliver sweet tea at the Rockets Express convenience store.

Down the road, Elbert Walters swivels in a desk chair at his auto body and paint shop and calls himself one of the “real die-hards.” His family arrived in Pearlington six decades ago with the influx ousted by NASA. After Katrina, he rebuilt his shop with salvaged wood.

Walters wears a plaid shirt and camouflage baseball cap embroidered with the words “Amazing Grace.” He studies black-and-white photographs on his wall and considers the changes.

“All this history,” he says, “seems like it got washed away.”

Two decades after Katrina made its last landfall in Pearlington, the town has succeeded and struggled. The county installed water and sewage systems, but low elevation drove up insurance costs. Volunteers rebuilt wood homes, but neighbors moved away.

Now, the closure of several deteriorating bridges at the state line “has impacted me more than Katrina,” Crapeau says. “They ought to fix the damn highway.”

Pearlington’s story might have gone differently. Tim Kellar, a longtime county leader and former chancery clerk, said he got calls after the storm from investors as far away as California. They wanted to buy the whole town.

But most die-hards wouldn’t sell. Locals say the neighbors who have left Pearlington for higher ground are usually from somewhere else.

Speaking by phone last week from a county government office built with FEMA money, Tax Assessor Jimmie Ladner carefully described the place where he hunted and fished as a boy.

“The problem,” Ladner began, then he paused. “I hate using the term problem.”

“Part of the issue,” he said, “is the isolation.”

A town reborn

On Friday, the anniversary of Katrina, Nikki Moon sits in her Bay St. Louis home and remembers that day 20 years ago. When the storm hit, she clung to a bald oak with her Scottish Terrier and three guests from her bed-and-breakfast, Bay Town Inn.

Today, that tree still stands by the inn. Carved into its branches are two angels, one facing the water and another looking toward Beach Boulevard, lined with busy seafood restaurants and palm trees rustling in the breeze.

Even on its slower days, the town’s rebirth is unmistakable.

On the corner of Main Street and Beach Boulevard, a couple walks into Pearl Hotel with rolling luggage. A few blocks away, in Mockingbird Cafe, a group of locals sit at a table and talk about how Bay St. Louis has transformed in the last decade.

“It is a community that came back very strongly,” Moon says, “And its people are really something special.”

Several businesses, including Bay Town Inn, began reopening on Beach Boulevard in 2013. Moon had applied for a $150,000 grant from the Hancock County Chamber of Commerce, which she said gave her “the seed money” to rebuild her bed-and-breakfast. The county’s tourism office also provided funds for advertising.

“We had no roads. We had no water. We had no power,” Moon says. “Our infrastructure was starting from scratch. The city and the county had to raise the money.”

Bay St. Louis slowly came back to life, regaining its pre-Katrina identity as a quaint art colony and weekend retreat for New Orleanians.

Moon sold the inn in 2022 to Jim MacPhaille, a New Orleans developer who owns a restaurant and several other businesses in Bay St. Louis. A decade earlier, he had already seen the town’s potential.

In 2013, MacPhaille purchased two buildings on Main Street. Despite its damaged infrastructure and lack of tourism, he recognized how Bay St. Louis was “eager to get things done” as storm recovery in New Orleans lagged.

But still, “business was tough,” MacPhaille said. “Back then, they were barely making it. We had like three or four tenants roll in and out.”

In 2018, he opened two New Orleans staples — PJ’s Coffee and Creole Creamery — in his two buildings on Main Street. Today, that once-empty corridor is filled with new boutiques and restaurants. There’s little trace of the blight Katrina left behind.

Signs of hope

Even in Bay St. Louis, the story of recovery extends beyond downtown.

A few blocks away in the Depot District, new restaurants, boutiques and other businesses have opened across from the Amtrak train station, where Bay St. Louis is a stop along the Mardi Gras Service from New Orleans to Mobile. In other parts of the city, new subdivisions are emerging with houses and condos.

Bay St. Louis also keeps growing in population. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, it’s grown faster than any other city across the Mississippi Coast in the last four years. At over 11,000 people, it’s the only coastal city in the state to surpass its pre-Katrina population.

In Pearlington, the population has steadily increased in the last two decades, but is still far from its its pre-Katrina numbers. Census data from 2000 shows the population was just above 1,600. In 2020, there were 1,100 people living in Pearlington.

Despite the population shift, many locals have stayed loyal to their homes on the bayou, surrounded by marshes and oak trees that tunnel over country roads.

Crapeau says she sold Turtle Landing before the bridges closed, then the buyer backed out. She had plans to retire and step away from a restaurant that brought people together after the storm. For now, she’s still at her barstool, welcoming guests to her bar and grill.

She’s proud of what she’s built in Pearlington, pointing to a framed newspaper front page featuring Turtle Landing.

Walters is not sure he could rebuild after another storm. But he does not want to leave the quiet community where his family has lived for generations.

“It’s home,” he says. “It’s just home.”

This story was originally published September 4, 2025 at 4:00 AM.