‘Like we’d been hit by a hurricane.’ Small storm did big damage on the Coast

The floods that soaked southern Mississippi last week washed pieces of John Rogers’ Mississippi Coast neighborhood across his yard: Propane tanks, life jackets, plants from down the street.

Rogers and his neighbors are busy this week clearing sand that washed up their driveways and trying to salvage belongings left behind in flooded cars.

“Nobody expected this,” said Rogers, who lives in Jourdan River Shores in Kiln, about 15 minutes north of Bay St. Louis. But “for the most part, people are resilient. They break out the pressure washers and clean stuff up and go back to living.”

Similar stories are unfolding this week all over this waterlogged region, where the remnants of Tropical Storm Arthur drenched many communities that were already reeling from more than 30 inches of rain in the past month.

On Thursday alone, about 15 inches of rain fell between Picayune, Saucier and Wiggins, Mississippi, swamping roads, overflowing rivers and prompting precautionary evacuations after floodwaters threatened to break a major dam.

The nearby Biloxi River rose about 30 feet higher than normal — breaking a record set during heavy rainfall in 1995, according to the National Weather Service. From Perkinston to Gulfport, rescuers swept some residents away from flooded homes by boat. Others stayed indoors, waiting for the rivers to recede.

Tyler Stanfield, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Slidell, said the heavy rain that fell across the saturated landscape “just made everything much worse.” Minor flooding in May also swamped some low-lying communities near Jourdan River Shores and nearby Kiln.

“All of these successive rainfall events stacking in succession a few weeks apart, and then tacking on the biggest one yet,” Stanfield said, “can really cause some pretty extreme outcomes.”

The Jourdan River crested at 11 feet on Friday — about nine feet above normal. It was the third highest crest ever recorded, second only to Hurricane Katrina and the 1995 flood, according to the weather service.

The water, which reached as high as stop signs, receded by Monday. Some areas escaped the worst damage, but others “were hit really hard,” Rogers said.

The Jourdan River Shores neighborhood is accustomed to flooding, and most houses are built on stilts. Still, Rogers said his car flooded, and he expects it will be totaled. Mounds of sand are sitting in the middle of some streets. Water crossed Highway 603 for the first time Rogers can remember since Katrina.

This week, “it looked like we’d been hit by a hurricane,” he said.

Dolly Lee, another neighbor, spent Monday trying to track down a rental car after both of her vehicles flooded.

She has endured a challenging few days. On Friday, she packed a bag and paddled a canoe with her boyfriend through currents to reach his truck, where the water was almost up to her knees.

She has since returned home and has been busy shoveling thick sand from beneath her property and sorting through ruined belongings — electric screwdrivers, batteries, a leaf blower — that were stored beneath her house.

“The older you get, it just gets harder,” Lee said. She has been considering moving to higher ground for about a year after two decades of living on the bayou.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love it,” she said. “There just comes a point in time where you’re tired.”

Rogers, who has lived in the area for almost three decades, said he occasionally considers moving somewhere else, too. But he likes life on the river too much to leave. He could have escaped last week’s flooding on his next door neighbor’s boat. But he decided to stick it out with his beloved boxer dog, Jake.

“It is what it is,” Rogers said Monday as the neighborhood cleanup went on. “I’m sure some people will sell their properties and move out. Other people will move in. And the sun will come up tomorrow.”