noway
12-20-2005, 07:15 PM
I spent the day today all over the mississippi gulf coast.. I have never cried like that before in my life.. Seriously, if you haven't been down there its so sad.. I know we had it bad here but oh my gosh.. I really dont see how people know where thier houses used to be. It was so sad seeing people living in tents and all the FEMA trailers set up on slabs. A Family had a Xmas tree set up outside their FEMA Trailer with a nativity scene next to it on a concrete slab with their address on a tree. I really broke down and felt sorry for them. Im kinda rambling but I do have a little heart and think of other things than what I normaly post. I wish I could do something for the people on the mississippi gulf coast.
MSQueen
12-20-2005, 11:24 PM
Noway,
I have thought many times that I probably wouldn't be able to handle it if I went down to the Coast. It would probably be too much. I feel the same away about stray cats and dogs at the animal shelters. I feel that there is so much to be done, and that I am only one person and can't possibly do enough. It physically hurts my heart. I have looked at many of the photographs on WLOX's website of places on the Coast, and after also watching the special on WLOX about the before and after, I was left with such a hollow feeling for those people. I don't really know how to describe it other than it just seems to be too overwhelming. Yes, we were all extremely lucky here in the Pine Belt compared to the devastation on the Coast, and I am extremely thankful for that. I will continue to say a prayer for all of those folks on the Coast and in New Orleans.
Wayward
12-20-2005, 11:55 PM
I spent the day today all over the mississippi gulf coast.. I have never cried like that before in my life.. Seriously, if you haven't been down there its so sad.. I know we had it bad here but oh my gosh.. I really dont see how people know where thier houses used to be. It was so sad seeing people living in tents and all the FEMA trailers set up on slabs. A Family had a Xmas tree set up outside their FEMA Trailer with a nativity scene next to it on a concrete slab with their address on a tree. I really broke down and felt sorry for them. Im kinda rambling but I do have a little heart and think of other things than what I normaly post. I wish I could do something for the people on the mississippi gulf coast.
Yep. It has to be seen. No pictures, description, or conversation can even remotely describe the extent of the damage.
Wayward
fuzzis
12-21-2005, 12:07 AM
I sent an email out to a list-serv that I'm on, asking folks to contact their elected officials, to remind them that Katrina happened on the MS Gulf Coast and that folks there are suffering and need support. Anytime the subject of Katrina and New Orleans comes up, I remind people that it wasn't just New Orleans and that the folks on the coast, for the most part, didn't have the "luxury" (not the right word, but I can't think of the one I want right now) of relocating so they've been living with it since Katrina hit.
fuzzis
noway
12-21-2005, 12:16 AM
Three things today..coming down 603 in waveland it looked pretty bad kinda like hattiesburg then we crossed the rrx and nothing there, concrete steps and that was it... furniture up in trees, peoples clothes in trees.. second thing seeing the president casino sitting on top of the Holiday Inn.. 3rd thing that small fema trailer on the concrete slab with the xmas tree out front.... just killed me. We drove from waveland on hwy 90 to biloxi, I cried and wanted to get out and help people clean up.. This is 4 months later. Mississippi is still ahead of LA and after seeing both states The mississippi gulf coast is worse..
sackett22
12-21-2005, 01:05 AM
My wife and I went down to Gulfport a few weeks ago to see what there was. At that time 90 was only opened part of the way through Gulfport. Did anyone see the sign: Blvd of Broken Dreams. It was horrible down there. Almost like a nuclear bomb went off and destroyed it all, whole trees sitting out in the water, building that have stood for decades gone without anything but a slab to show they were there.
noway
12-21-2005, 01:52 AM
Okay last one.. My gallery section is not working so I will post all the pictures in my gallery after aaron gets it fixed.. This is the Hwy 90 bridge in Long Beach (i think) closed
noway
12-21-2005, 02:55 AM
I have a question.. Why are we spending millions of dollars in IRAQ and people are living in tents and tin cans? I might be late on this topic but after what I saw today Im like wth? I realize it cant happen over night but good grief lets help these people its been 4 months. I saw gene taylor quoted this week talking about a guy paying 5 dollars for a shower because fema hasn't delivered his trailer...and gene made a phone call and the trailer was delivered. Gene also said he is tired of doing FEMA'S JOB..
Sorry for all the posts but that was an experience today...
Monkey
12-21-2005, 10:43 PM
Noway I'm wondering the same thing. We still have Americans living in tents (NOT TRAILERS) in tents months after the hurricane, and yet it seems like more efforts are being made in Iraq than for our own American citizens. I haven't been to the coast since my parents moved in July. That's where I grew up and I just don't think I could face going down there. Everyone else in my family has been and says it's like nothing they have ever seen. The people on the coast definitely do have a positive spirit though. All of our friends seem to remain positive. It definitely makes you stop and think how fortunate we were. . . even with the difficulties here in Hattiesburg.
Southern_Belle
12-27-2005, 02:13 PM
Noway, thanks for starting this thread. I don't think people do realize the devastation on the Coast, however, things are getting better. There are people that are helping from all over the country. As stated earlier, people have high spirits and I think it is because they are thankful for the things that really matter; life, family, and friends.
Monkey
12-28-2005, 06:29 PM
I had lunch with a friend of mine from the coast today. He was in town visiting family, and we got together. He lost his house and his mother did also. They are both living in FEMA trailers in Long Beach, and he told me that the spirit of those on the coast is positive. He also said that things are getting better by the day.
For us outside looking in, I think it's easy to feel sorry for people, but the most important thing is to let them know we are here for them and we will do what we can to help them rebuild their lives.
I don't think pity is what they need right now. They need our action and encouragement as they continue to rebuild their lives.
RoethlisbergerRocks
01-04-2006, 06:14 PM
I admire the people on the coast! I think that most of them should serve as an example to us! We can only imagine what it must have been like down there for the past few months. Anyone who can live and rebuild their lives after losing everything has my admiration! I thank God everyday that he is in control!!!
reality
01-05-2006, 05:47 PM
Here's a very eye-opening yet heart-wrenching email which was sent to me from a friend of a friend shortly after Christmas. This will give people an idea of the coastal area...
I just returned from a Christmas visit to my family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. For those of you not real familiar with the area, I have lived in Hattiesburg, 70 miles north of the coast, for the last 25 years, but my roots lie on the beach. The Mississippi Gulf Coast used to boast of the longest man-made beach in the world, almost 30 miles of 300 yard wide white sand, protected from the surf by a string of barrier islands several miles out. The lack of surf always prevented the area from becoming the flashy tourist destination that Florida is, but the casinos found Mississippi several years ago, during which time it experienced a boost in development and income. But at heart, it has always remained a quiet and quaint coastline with moss draped live oak trees and inhabited by generations of the immigrant fishermen who settled there from all over the world.
Enough of the history, today it is gone. From one end of the coast to another, there is complete and total devastation of everything half a mile or more inland from the beach. This is four months after the storm, and there is still debris . . . everywhere. People are still living in tents. It is so difficult to describe. In my immediate family, we count 5 houses gone, three down to the concrete slab, the others completely gutted. Family not in the surge area lost roofs, which meant they lost everything under the roof: walls, carpets, beds, couches, etc. My cousin from Chattanooga, her husband, and I, on our trip for the holidays, having no relatives left with room to put us up, were lucky enough that a friend with a FEMA trailer, let us stay there, since she was elsewhere for the holidays. Her house, as all the others in her neighborhood, gone. (Snort: FEMA trailers, my horse trailer/RV was roomier and better built. I feel so much sympathy for the 70,000 people now living in FEMA trailers).
We went to visit another friend, who lived a block from the beach in Gulfport, right off of Anniston Avenue. This friend's house was gutted, the back walls are gone, all belongings swept out of the house and away. Yet she can stand there and with all sincerity and gratitude in her voice, describe to you how very very lucky she is. No family dead, and the house is structurally sound enough to build back upon. But she lost every single item in the house, all swept out and away.
This friend, I, and my cousin, walked the debris line the two blocks from her house. 5 or 6 homes destroyed on that road, and a large chain link fence bordering a creek stopped most of the debris. Debris is still 4 and 5 feet high, and this is after the residents have been combing it for four months salvaging what they could. The older neighbors saw us, the 80 year olds coming out of their houses seeing us 50 years olds climbing the pile. "Hey I'm still looking for a such-and-such, call me if you see it". Or, "Look there, pull that out for me, that looks like Miss So-and-So's down the road, I'll hold it to see if she can fix it up." So we spent the afternoon debris-climbing, up over pieces of roofs and planks and the board walk from the beach, over sodden sofas and mattresses and through the now-dried contents of refrigerators, trying to pull and pry and salvage the rest of what is there, four months later, before the FEMA bulldozers come and rake it all away.
The signs that people post say a lot. Now understand, there are no houses. There are shells and roofs and frames here and there, but for the most part is it concrete slabs and piles of rubble. A little spray paint on a broken piece of plywood goes a long way for these people. "Blvd of Broken Dreams" claims one despondent resident along the once-grand homes that lined the beach. Perhaps a neighbor could not stand the pessimism, because a house or two down is "Hiway of Hope". Many many people spray painted "We are OK" as a signal to those that knew them that they did not perish. "Yard of the Month" on one FEMA trailer who evidently had seeded the ground around his trailer with ryegrass. My absolute favorite sign "Beam Me Up Scotty!" All road signs are gone, there are still no traffic signals on Highway 90 along the beach, it is two lanes switching from the north side to the south to make use of what portions of the road are undamaged. Most of the cross streets, they have had to spray paint the name of the road on a curb or the side of an oak tree, otherwise you would have no idea where you are. American flags fly everywhere, yard signs boasting "God Bless America" sit on empty lots aside concrete slabs and stairs that end in air.
We made it as far as Pass Christian when we just could not stand to see anymore. The Pass is gone. The debris there is still building high. There is nothing left. Make no mistake, the people there are still living in a disaster zone with no facilities.
The mind-numbing thing is that this destruction went from one end of the coast to the other. From Waveland to Gautier. This thing was a 250 mile wide tornado with a tsunami in the middle of it. I lived on the Coast through Camille in '69, have been living Katrina-aftermath in Hattiesburg (which got hit hard in it's own right), have talked daily to my family on the coast since Katrina, and even with all that, I was unprepared for the depth of the loss. For days, I have been looking for a word, for THE word, that describes all of this. There has got to be a word in the English language that sums this up. I have tried them all on, from the ones the newscasters used in the beginning: catastrophic, devastated, mind-boggling, war zone, bombed out, desolation, isolation . . . none of those does it.
The only word I can come up with that begins to describe it, is a very simple little word. “Gone”Everything is gone. Just plain gone. Gone as in absent, went away, bye bye, just plain gone. The coast as we knew it, is GONE.
They say if you fly over close to the beach that you can see hundreds of cars underwater along the entire 27 miles of beach. There is an entire HOUSE underwater three miles SOUTH of Ship Island. Ship Island is 12 miles out. South means the house had to float over the island to get where it is.
Humor sustains the soul however. My friend Patrice lives north of Bayou Bernard. Their house is a two-level, all living quarters being upstairs and the lower floor garage and rec room. As the water began to rise, her husband, a tug boat captain, well familiar with weather, kept saying, "Oh, it will never get high enough to flood our upstairs." Four feet, five feet, they are watching their possessions and everyone else's float out of the ground floor. Six feet, inching higher, the house is shaking, he still maintains, it will not rise into our home. When the water began bubbling up through the carpet under their feet, he looks at Patrice and says "Oh, shit, get a towel!". Like a towel is going to stop it! They ended up with a foot of water in their second floor. She said they finally opened the front door and the back door and just watched it all float thru, theirs, the neighbors, who evers. Grabbed what they could. But the "Oh shit, get a towel" has to be the understatement of the year!
Another story: Some folks were in a home on the beach. The water was coming, they could see it coming, Mama decides it is time to evacuate. She shepherds the six people out of the house, four of them children. They are going to all get into her brand new SUV. She opens the car door, herds them all in, and right before she gets in, the wind rips the door right off of the car and it goes flying away. They drove away anyway, doorless, made it over the railroad tracks. The tracks being the high ground that stopped the surge from one end of the coast to the other.
Not all was humor. Two old ladies, the water came up. One old lady could not hold on to her friend. She ended up floating around the ceiling, water still rising. Managed to rip off the vent in the ceiling, got her head into it. The water leveled out right below her lower lip, this is with her head in the ceiling vent. It began to subside after that. She lost her friend. Her friends son found her in a shelter days after the storm, he had lost his mother but he took her away and out of there. After that story, I quit listening to the tragic stories. Reached my limit. Had already seen enough markings spray painted on houses trees and curbs to understand where people died. I started walking away from conversations where the stories were too tragic, too sad.
Make no mistake, there are still people living in tents, there are still places untouched by rebuilding crews or FEMA bulldozers. There are still bodies being found. And all you hear on the national media is New Orleans. Of course I understand that New Orleans is decimated, that there is a very very large area of the 9th ward gone, still no power, many thousands of people who will never have a home again, but Katrina did not hit New Orleans. N.O. was on the west and non-lethal side of the storm. N.O. got no wind. N.O. had a breach of a man-made levy complicated by man-made failures in their preparedness plans and man-made issues with aftermath decisions. The disaster in New Orleans could have been avoided, that is the sad thing there.
Well, I have exhausted myself here just trying to capture it all in words. It is too big, too widespread, and too . . . gone . . . for me to do an adequate job trying to explain it. Look at the pictures all you want, but the true depth and breadth of the loss does not come through in photos or videos or in words. It is going to take years to just clean it up. A significant loss, a terrible human tragedy. I feel so helpless. My cousin and I cried the entire time we were down there. Her husband, being a man, just put up with our sniveling. Then when we weren't paying attention, he slipped off and donated blood. I think I will do the same. Can't just sit and cry, gotta do something to try to make it better.
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