Asking around, I was told that even after the Red Cross, the National Guard, and FEMA had arrived, Tricia Bliler was the person to talk to. This turned out to be true, but it appeared to be a source of some discomfort for government officials who were deliberating what to do about her unauthorized shelter.

At the time, Bliler—a diminutive, attractive woman—was 32 years old. Before Katrina’s 30-foot tidal surge and 120-mph winds devastated Bay St. Louis, she’d eked out a living waiting tables and spent almost all of her time within four or five square blocks of what is locally known as Old Town. Immediately after the storm, she found herself unexpectedly in charge of … basically, all of it.

After they climbed in the school window, Bliler says, she and her friends found a barbecue grill and started cooking food from her refrigerator that would otherwise have spoiled. As other survivors began emerging from their houses, they saw her cooking, realized that they, too, had food that was going to spoil, and added theirs to the mix. Then the fire chief showed up, and he asked if she had heard about the chaos in New Orleans. She told him she had, on her battery-powered radio. “Then you know it’s flooding and it’s about to get bad,” he said, and advised her to make use of the stockpiles of food in the school cafeteria—which was then still locked up—for her rapidly expanding group of refugees.

So they broke into the cafeteria, and when they saw how much food was there, he said, “Don’t tell anyone, or you’ll cause a riot,” Bliler recalls. Bliler cooked on the wood-fired grill well into the night. “People kept coming. It was like the fishes and the loaves,” she says. “A boy came who hadn’t had any food, and when I gave him something he cried. And it just went from there. It just kept getting bigger.”

She went through a lone bus parked outside and retrieved the first aid kits that she knew were kept under the seats, which was a good thing because afterward someone hot-wired and stole the bus. “The next day ambulances started dropping people off at the school,” she says. “It just started happening on its own. I remember one day, around dark-thirty, I had this feeling like I was outside my body, watching everything. I had the feeling that everything that’s ever happened to me, all the jobs that didn’t work out, all the triples and doubles and hard work and the babysitting drunks, all the failed relationships, was preparing me for this. It was building up to this.”

A week later, she was cooking 300 meals a day for a growing tribe of storm victims who had lost everything and for whom no official relief had yet come. At one point, she noticed a girl signing in and recognized her as the daughter of Andy Grass, the cook at the Good Life bar. “I said, ‘Tell him to get his ass down here,’ and she did, and he came and brought another cook and Bonnie, another waitress there.”