ON AUGUST 29, 2005, at about 5:00 a.m. I awoke from a restless sleep and checked the Internet for the latest location of "the storm" In just a few hours Katrina had grown to something beyond anything I had ever seen in my many years of living through prior hurricanes along the Mississippi Gulf coast. Worse yet, there was no potential for this hurricane to lose much strength or track away from the community of my childhood, Gulfport, Mississippi.

I stared, mesmerized in the early morning solitude, at the radar image which was repeatedly displaying the map motion of this powerful force spinning toward us. Over and over again the image flickered, leaving no doubt where this huge storm took aim. And it occurred to me that, as I sat there on the ground in Biloxi, Mississippi, looking at information brought to me from the calm safety of a weather satellite above the fray, I was also looking at Biloxi going under Hurricane Katrina's ravaging blades.

After a few moments of this contemplation I found myself trying in futility to imagine Katrina projecting away from a direct hit in Mississippi. But each time I tried to impose some more hopeful track, rationality would intervene and make me realize that something perhaps never experienced was bearing down on us. Clearly, there was nothing more anyone could do. So I just hoped that the past few days of preparation would be enough.