I received a call Thursday morning from Greg Raimondo with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District. He has a simple message. Thursday was the fifth anniversary of the crest of 2011 spring Mississippi River flood passing through Vicksburg.

Five years. It hasn’t seemed that long. I guess that’s because in January we were reminded of the 2011 flood as city workers began extending the flood wall at City Front and laying a sandbag wall around the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad Depot on Levee Street in anticipation of a 50-foot-plus flood that would again threaten the building, which in 2011 served as a symbol of the flood.

Greg’s call set me to thinking and remembering just what happened to this area in the spring of 2011.

I arrived at The Post on May 11, 2011, if I remember correctly, right at the height of the flood. The next week, photographer David Jackson and I were in an airboat with two Mississippi Wildlife Fisheries & Parks agents skimming over Mississippi 465 up to the Steele Bayou Control Structure and a bit beyond. I remember seeing the tops of chimneys and vent pipes marking the location of homes that have since been torn down and removed under a Federal Emergency Management/Mississippi Emergency Management Agency buyout program the following year.

There was my trip to Chotard Landing, where I toured the resort area with owner Jerry Johnson as a he pointed out homes and cabins with several feet of water in them despite being about 15 feet or higher off the ground.

There were the calls from relatives watching coverage of the flood on television and asking it we were OK and if we were going to be flooded.

And there was my post flood tour of the Kings community, observing the flood damage and talking with the residents as they were trying to recover and put their lives back together. As a Katrina survivor whose house in Pascagoula took more than 4 feet of water that destroyed practically everything we owned, I could sympathize with the people I interviewed, and as I walked through Kings and nearby Ford Subdivision, the sights and the smell of wet wood and mold brought back the painful memories of my own family’s plight six years earlier as we cleaned up, tried to recover our lives and get back to normal.

In my many years as a reporter, I’ve covered many things and seen the good and bad in people. But covering the 2011 flood and later our flood in January, brought back memories of my own brush with disaster, and I believe I’ve discussed both in previous columns. Those memories are paired with memories of how resilient and resourceful people managed to get out of their predicament and moved on with their lives.

And those are the memories I prefer to keep.

 

John Surratt is a staff writer for The Vicksburg Post. You may reach him at john.surratt@vicksburgpost.com.