Close to home: CNN reporter Kathleen Koch was faced with the most personal assignment of her career when Hurricane Katrina ripped through her beloved Bay Saint Louis.

Perhaps more than most other journalists, CNN correspondent Kathleen Koch knew from the start that Hurricane Katrina was to be feared. Even as she boarded a plane bound for the Gulf Coast on the day before the storm made landfall, her mind was flooded by childhood memories of feverishly tossing treasured belongings into her family's station wagon and fleeing their beachfront Bay Saint Louis home as hurricane after hurricane approached.

"My mom and dad would pack us all up--five kids, two dogs, and everything you could carry that was important to you in this world," Koch recalled three weeks after Katrina left her indelible mark on Bay Saint Louis and the entire Mississippi coast. "We did that many times. We didn't want to mess around with hurricanes."

Katrina wasn't the first big storm Koch had encountered professionally, either. After covering such major events as the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2002 Washington, D.C.-area sniper shootings, and last year's presidential campaign during 14 years with CNN, she had been part of the cable network's team that reported on the deadly hurricanes that struck Florida in 2004. But no amount of journalistic experience or personal awareness could gird Koch for what she encountered when she left the Mobile, Alabama, hotel where she and her crew rode out Katrina's landfall and re-entered the town she still thinks of as home.

"When the storm was over, we bolted west," Koch said. After reporting from Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pass Christian, "I finally made it to Bay Saint Louis on Thursday and was in no way prepared for what I saw."

What she saw was a town that bore no resemblance to the idyllic place where she had grown up. The degree of devastation was "inconceivable," she recalled. Instead of asking her to do a standard report in such extraordinary circumstances, her CNN producer simply turned the camera on Koch as she made her way down debris-filled streets and sought information on friends and loved ones. She visited her old high school, damaged but still standing and serving as a shelter, and stopped at the spots where both her family's former ice cream shop and their Beach Boulevard home had once stood. Both were completely demolished by the driving winds and rushing waters of Katrina.

"It was interesting--when we moved to Bay Saint Louis a few years after [Hurricane] Camille, in '73, underneath one of the big old oak trees in the backyard was this pile of bricks," Koch recalled. "I said, 'Mommy, what's that?' ... She said, 'That's what's left of the house that was here before Camille hit.' And now there's a new pile of bricks in the yard."

Though most of Koch's family moved away from the Mississippi coast years ago, her parents had held onto the house until just last year, when they decided to sell because they felt the risk of a hurricane was too great. "My mom just said, 'I can't take it anymore. I can't take the hurricane anxiety.'" The action turned out to be a fortuitous one, but even so, seeing her former home destroyed was still "very painful" for Koch.

And so, as the camera followed, she carefully picked out seven bricks from the home's rubble--one for each member of her family. They were all that was left. "Bricks and memories," she said on the air. "Good memories."

Separating her personal feelings from her professional duties would prove challenging for Koch during what she called "the worst week of my life." "As a reporter, you try to have that degree of separation," she said. "Obviously, you don't want to fall apart on the air and lose your composure--and I didn't. But it's hard to describe what it's like when the rubble that you're walking through is your hometown and the cement slab that you're standing on is all that's left of the home you grew up in, when the people walking shell-shocked down the street who have nothing but the clothes on their backs and the shoes on their feet are the people you went to high school with.

"In some ways, it was very hard to do--really gut-wrenching," Koch said. "But in hindsight, it helped me maintain my composure and deal with it better because I was working. I couldn't just crumble ... I had to keep on going."

More than her own personal losses, Koch said she was moved by the straggles of those she met and the desire to help in some small way. "I didn't want it to sound like 'poor little old me,' because compared to so many of my fellow Mississippians, I'm incredibly fortunate," Koch said. "But what was so palpable and so painful was that feeling of utter powerlessness. The need around you was so great, and you wanted to do so much and you could do so little. In every effort you made, you felt like an ant trying to move a mountain."

When the camera stopped rolling after 12- to 19-hour workdays, Koch and her crew didn't rest. Instead, they searched for friends and family members of people they had met, and they loaded a Wal-Mart shopping cart with supplies for a shelter in the local elementary school. They even rescued an injured dog and took him to an Ocean Springs animal hospital. "It made us feel like we were helping," Koch said.

Most remarkable, she noted, was her observation that, even in the earliest days after the storm, so many Bay residents were "incredibly positive, incredibly upbeat. The survivor spirit reigns in Bay Saint Louis."

That display of courage leaves no question in Koch's mind that residents will not rest until their town is rebuilt. There's a feeling here, she said, that "you are a member of a family and that you are surrounded by people who know and love you. I think that was what was so different when we moved to Mississippi ... We were just embraced by this place.

"That is the kind of spirit that will help sustain the coast and help it to come back, because when a whole family is devastated, the whole family pulls together and they help one another out," she said. "Like the Three Musketeers, right? 'All for one and one for all.'"

After a week covering Katrina, Koch returned to the Clarksville, Maryland, home she shares with husband Rick McNaney and daughters Kaitlyn, 14, and Kara, 11. But her next trip to the Bay was already being planned. CNN has assigned her to work on a documentary focusing on the town's long-term rebuilding efforts, so she'll return here over a period of a year or more to chart residents' progress. Koch said she is excited about the opportunity to witness a more uplifting side of the tragic Katrina story. "I'm used to doing two-and-a-half- or three-minute stories," she said. "It'll be interesting to track something for a period of time like this and watch the story evolve."

Meanwhile, she will hold onto her fond memories of the coast--of serving as president of the senior class at Bay High, of performing in a local production of "Fiddler on the Roof," of returning home for weekends during her college years at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, and of getting her start in television at Biloxi's WLOX. She's glad she was able to be a part of CNN's coverage of the storm in the place she knows so well.

"Hopefully, I helped tell Mississippi's story in a way that people really could feel it--could feel the pain and could feel the loss and could feel how special this place was and what it meant to the people who love it."