The National Weather Service added coastal Mississippi to its hurricane watch at 4 p.m. Saturday, Harrison County emergency managers strongly urged evacuation, but they did not order mandatory evacuations until 24 hours later. Siegel and fellow employee Paula Carrigan said they were already moving records and equipment from the marine park.Īt 1 p.m. Marine Life was open for business the next day, a Saturday. Weather reports indicated on the Friday before Katrina that the storm would hit west of Mississippi. I recall evacuating for only three hurricanes, and only one involved moving some of the dolphins and sea lions to hotel swimming pools.”

“We had successfully coped with a number of storms and hurricanes since 1981. “Evacuation was not necessitated for every hurricane or tropical storm that entered the Gulf of Mexico,” he said. Solangi, who started work at Marine Life in 1981, said evacuation plans hinged on weather forecasts. He was just very fond of them.”Īn account in The New York Times in 1985 indicates 21 dolphins were evacuated for Hurricane Elena to swimming pools in three inland motels, much to the delight of guests. Don was very adamant about taking care of the animals. “That was always our protocol,” Rogers said. Jacobs bought Marine Life when it reopened after Camille, in 1971. Rogers said the park had to bring a truck to Gulfport and pull the dolphin from the two-story tank through one of the shattered windows. The Florida park had a dolphin leased to Marine Life when Hurricane Betsy hit in 1965, said Peter Rogers, who worked for Jacobs and is the executor of his estate. After managing Marine Life, the entrepreneur had moved to Sarasota, Fla., and opened a theme park there in 1964. Jacobs had some experience with hurricanes and dolphins. Solangi said six dolphins were evacuated to inland motel swimming pools, but the tank seemed the safest place for the eight dolphins left behind. In sworn pretrial testimony, Jacobs, who died in 2011, said people in the marine mammal industry were asking him after the hurricane why the animals were left at Marine Life in the first place. The claims and counterclaims included the future of the park’s dolphins, beloved by South Mississippians who had worked at the park as teenagers, or visited as children, then as parents and grandparents. Years of litigation ensued after Katrina between the company’s owner, Don Jacobs, and its former president and CEO, Moby Solangi, who was running the park when Katrina hit but was later fired. Faint rings in the grass are the only reminder of the tanks and pools where the dolphins swam.Īt 49, Marine Life was one of the oldest aquatic parks in the country, and it showed even before Katrina finished it off.

The property sits vacant today, a decade after Katrina. Marine Life reopened two years after Camille. Camille, a much smaller but stronger hurricane, packed a 24-foot surge. Thirty-six years earlier, three of eight dolphins left in the tank were still there after Hurricane Camille, a Sun Herald account said. Katrina packed a surge of at least 28 feet, topping the tank. They’re back in their original home in the Gulf.’” “I got out of the tank and I go, ‘Look, they’re not in there. And I looked under every piece of debris. He said in a recent interview: “I climbed into the tank, climbed down the debris, would hold my breath in the water where you couldn’t see anything and, using my hands, for about an hour I probed every inch of the bottom of that pool, fully expecting to find all the dolphin carcasses in there.

Siegel climbed the debris to the top of the tank and peered into the noxious, muddy water below. Katrina’s storm surge had knocked down the steel beams supporting the metal roof, which lay in tatters twisted over and around a 20-foot-tall tank where the dolphins had been left.

Marine life oceanarium gulfport