Katrina Tribute

I promise not to make this cheesy, but since I am certain I never shared my Gulf Coast photos with anyone last year, I thought you might be interested. As I am sure you remember, I was in Biloxi, MS, for a couple months after Hurricane Katrina hit last year on 8/29. I have lots more, but here are a few interesting photos I took:

This photo shows what a lot of the homes looked like after the storm- gutted. There was a 30 foot storm surge at the time of the hurricane. This house is actually standing only because of the huge tree behind it (see back left corner of the photo).

This photo shows what the inside of a lot of these buildings looked like - plus they all had a ton of mold. This one is the administration building of the hospital I was working at (Biloxi Regional Medical Center). After our inspection it was deemed by engineers to be "structurally unsound" so it was demolished.

At first glance you probably have no idea what this even is. It is a casino barge. Mississippi law only permitted casinos to be afloat off the coast, so this baby was on the water. If you click on the photo to make it larger you can see the slot machines and chairs. Notice that I said that the barge WAS on the water. When the storm surged, 3 casino barges actually washed up on land, crashed into other buildings, and parked on the shore.

Here you can see one of the barges in its entirety (left) and the building it crashed into. It is really hard to emphasize how huge these buildings both are. I even have some close up photos of the barge where you can see barnacles on the bottom part that was in the ocean.

This just baffled me. This was a highway that connected Biloxi with a couple other coastal towns in Mississippi. The water actually forced itself up under the highway and broke the concrete from underneath. If you look far in the distance you can see how far this road ran and can imagine all the traffic created by these situations.

Here is a close up of the concrete bridge - I was nervous standing on it although I guess at that point it was silly to be worried!

Hope you found the photos to be interesting. If you want to see more let me know and I can post them to Shutterfly. Even as much as it was not fun to be down there in the midst of the devastation, I met so many amazingly strong and spirited people that it was almost worth it. I can't believe it was one year ago already!