GULFPORT, MISS. - Dark days followed the storm.

“Katrina changed everything,” Les Ferguson Jr. told me. “I mean, it changed everything.”

We were eating at a Chili’s restaurant and talking about the disaster that ravaged the Gulf Coast five years ago.

Two days before the hurricane made landfall, the Gulfport church where Ferguson preaches signed a contract to construct a new building. The Orange Grove Church of Christ sold its former property to a car dealership next door with the understanding that members could meet in the old facility while the new one was built.

But after Katrina, construction prices skyrocketed. Even obtaining a building permit became much more difficult.