 "Photo: Amber Whittaker")
GULFPORT, MISS. - Four front porch steps lead to an empty dirt lot. A makeshift living room with a Christmas tree, two chairs and a stone bench surround a fireplace made of foundation piers. To the right, a swimming pool is covered with debris.
"We remodeled just a little," Michael Petro, stock broker for Edward Jones Investments, said, gesturing to where his 116-year-old home and guest house used to stand.
Brand new camping trailers and a Ford F-250 truck are the Petro family's new living arrangements. A shed, containing the kitchen, laundry room, storage and any other functions rests behind the lot. Petro said it's the new trend, called modular living.
"It's a lot more fun to have to go outside to go to the refrigerator," he said.
Petro, a native of Gulfport, Miss., faced the force of Hurricane Katrina first-hand, swimming for three hours in a tidal surge from the Gulf of Mexico.
The family didn't plan to stay behind, but his twin stepdaughters didn't come home until 8 p.m. Sunday night. Determining it was too late to leave and the roads nearly impassable, the family decided to wait until Monday morning to evacuate.
"If we would have gotten a block over the tracks, we would have been OK," he said.
At 5 a.m. Monday morning, an alarm indicating a power outage woke Petro.
He got out of bed to wake his son, Shawn, in the guest house to tell him they were leaving immediately. As the two were heading back to the house, there was enough light to just barely see the beach. Water covered U.S. Highway 90, 500 feet from his house.
French doors on the back of the house flew open with a gust of wind, so Petro started nailing them shut. The nailing woke his wife, Andie, and three stepdaughters, so Petro told them to get dressed.
The family heard a "horrendous sound" at about 6:15 a.m., Petro said. What Petro thinks was a tornado knocked a 6,000-square-foot house into the neighboring houses causing a chain reaction. The reaction knocked over the Petro residence, forcing the house off its piers and causing a wall to fall out and block the driveway. The family spent the next few hours bringing things inside.
At 9 a.m., water started spurting out of the air conditioning vents two feet into the air, causing water to be chest deep downstairs in four to five minutes, Petro said.
Thirteen-year-old Samantha, cut herself attempting to get upstairs. Petro's wife insisted Samantha needed a Band-Aid, so Petro broke into the bathroom. As he was going back to the spiral staircase, he looked out the hall window and saw a wall of water hit the house. Petro grabbed the middle post of the staircase and was washed upstairs.
He moved stuff away from the dormers in the attic and tore cords off lamps and wrapped them around everyone. He wrote names and phone numbers on everyone's arms for identification after the storm.
"I really didn't expect us to get out of here," he said, tearing up.
The Petro family climbed onto the roof, but Andie Petro and the family dog, Copper, started sliding off. Michael Petro let go with one hand and grabbed the two.
In an effort to catch his falling wife, Petro put his dog through the dormer of the house. He didn't realize he was putting Copper underneath a piece of floating furniture.
Shawn Petro, 30, performed CPR on Copper to revive him. "He's scared to death of water now," Michael Petro said.
A 30-foot tidal surge with 130-145 mph winds washed Petro and his wife off the roof, but Petro pushed his wife back up onto the edge of the roof. This effort enabled Samantha to grab her mother.
"I don't know how she did it," Petro said. "She walked down the roof, grabbed her momma and pulled her back up."
Petro's house is about 23 feet above sea level and now the water was 20 feet deep.
Petro ended up under water.
"At one point, I thought I was heading out to sea because all you could see was the top of these oak trees, and there was not a leaf on them, me floating and nothing but the Gulf of Mexico," he said.
Petro ended up in a magnolia tree and had to climb down as the water receded.
He climbed on a piece of floating wall, but his shoelaces kept catching on things.
"I remember praying, 'OK God, if you would just let me tie my shoes," he said. "I don't want a lot, just let me tie my shoes right now.'"
Petro swam to a porch down the street. Then a piece of plywood knocked him through a glass door and slammed him into a bedroom door. The imprint of his head is still in the bedroom door. For the first time in three hours, he was out of the storm.
"It was like heaven," he said. "The wind wasn't hitting me; the rain wasn't hitting me. I was up to my chest in water, but it felt pretty good."
Freezing and stripped to shorts and boots, he saw "the most beautiful white extra-large shirt" and jacket in the hall closet, he said.
He hollered for help for about two hours until he saw his son on a roof top nearby. His son told him a man in his attic opened the window just in time to see the girls. The man let them inside for refuge and everyone was safe. So Petro sat on a floating bed until the water receded enough for his wife to walk across an 8-foot pile of debris at 4:30 p.m.
The girls were freezing so Petro went back to the closet for more jackets.
He found a floating cabinet drawer from his own house and a dry marker in the man's kitchen. He wrote a note apologizing for breaking the door and taking clothes on the back of the drawer.
"I felt so bad having to go in that man's closet and take stuff," Petro said. "I'm glad to say we were able to wash it and return it to him."
At 5:30 p.m., his wife cleared a path to a friend's house. Three men carried Petro and his son to their home. Petro's artificial hip, a result of a car accident, was pulled out of place. Shawn Petro's foot was smashed.
With the family back together, they started super gluing cuts.
Now back home for four months, Petro plans to rebuild and have a new home by Thanksgiving next year. "We're not going to let the little stuff slow us down," he said. "I miss my house. It's funny how you can misplace your old home."
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