The Ranger Online

Issue date: 5/18/06 Section: J School Travels

Media Credit: Amber Whittaker Michael Petro, stock broker for Edward Jones Investments, sits in front of where his 116-year-old home and guest house used to stand.

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.

Continued...

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