PASS CHRISTIAN, Mississippi — Mayor Billy McDonald and his wife rode out Hurricane Katrina in their one-story, ranch-style home about a mile north of the coast.

They paced around their house for hours, watching anxiously as the storm unleashed its worst, blowing away shrubs, carrying off shingles, and toppling trees around the neighborhood. Things seemed bad, but their home was just far enough inland that it escaped serious damage.

The full extent of the destruction wasn’t clear when they finally ventured outside early in the evening, Elaine McDonald said, making their way through still-flooded streets and mounds of tree limbs and debris. It wasn’t long before they crossed paths with a seemingly dazed police officer.

“Mayor,” she recalled the officer telling her husband. “You’re the mayor of nothing now.”

It was true: Hurricane Katrina had almost wiped Pass Christian and much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast off the map. The storm had pushed a nearly 30-foot-high wall of water into the city, lifting buildings from their foundations, reducing homes to piles of rubble, and leaving dozens dead or missing. Pass Christian had no lights, no phone service, no water, and one government building — a fire department facility — left stantding.

To rebuild the city, from virtually scratch, would require a nearly unprecedented recovery effort: billions of dollars in federal funds, thousands of volunteers, and, above all, leadership.

But the storm left Mayor McDonald, who had survived many a political defeat only to rise again and again, a changed man. He was forced from City Hall several months later, his colleagues on the city council fed up with his repeated absences and inability to handle the duties critical to the survival of the town.

To move forward, they said, they had to leave Billy McDonald behind.

He died in March 2010 from what the local daily newspaper called “an extended illness.” The cause or nature of his illness has never been publicly identified by his family or the press.

But his successor, Leo “Chipper” McDermott, identified another cause. “His death certificate should say: Hurricane Katrina."