ashthomas//blog: Katrina's wake

ashthomas//blog

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Katrina's wake

My wife and I sit here in safety while on the other side of the world, members of our family and our friends are in a disaster zone. Unable to contact them, we don't know if they are alive or safe, we don't know if their homes are still standing. My wife's parents are with her brother in Baton Rouge, since they wisely fled their home in Wiggins, MS a few days ago. Friends of ours decided to stay, however, and we have no way of contacting them to see how they are. Wiggins is just north of Biloxi and Gulfport, where Katrina hit shore, and we don't how bad the damage is there. I have been searching news articles for mentions of the town.

From the LA Times:

In Wiggins, Miss., a hill community 20 miles north of Gulfport, Olene Walters, 56, one of the town's holdouts, ventured out into the winds and returned in shock.

The storm had stripped the roof off her beauty parlor and pulverized the Lake-A-Way RV Campgrounds she owns five miles outside of town.

Snapped pines, oaks and pecan trees littered the highways, she said. "I stuck it out and now I'm wondering why," she said.

Hopefully telephone lines will be up again soon, and we can stop worrying about Clay and Veronica. They have a reasonably new house that seemed quite solid. We should know by tomorrow.

Even if everyone is safe, the towns are going to take a long time to rebuild. It is hard to believe that the places where I was sightseeing less than a year ago may not be there. I am particularly worried about the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library
on the Gulf Coast and the D-Day Museum in New Orleans.

New Orleans will never be the same again. From the AP:

A full day after the Big Easy thought it had escaped Katrina's full fury, two levees broke and spilled water into the streets on Tuesday, swamping an estimated 80 percent of the bowl-shaped, below-sea-level city, inundating miles and miles of homes and rendering much of New Orleans uninhabitable for weeks or months.

"We are looking at 12 to 16 weeks before people can come in," Mayor Ray Nagin said.

Less than a year ago, we were there, and it is all under water now. I have been looking through our photos of our visit to New Orleans and wondering if I'll ever see it again.

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