Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

At 5:30 this morning I was up and driving to meet up with three friends of mine to spend the day working at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. BSL is about 60 miles east of New Orleans and directly on the coast of the Gulf. We spent the day in the hot Mississippi sun sawing down fallen trees and hauling logs to drop off points. There were about 12 of us working on the trees and we managed to clear about about 5 or 6 the entire day. The work was unbelievably difficult and I discovered that I am much whimpier than I previously thought. I have never consumed so much water in one afternoon before.

But that is not what I am going to write about. I am going to write about a sight that I have never seen before - an upclose and personal view of what an eye wall in a category 5 hurricane is capable of. I am still beating myself up for not bringing my camera.

The devastation was horrific. We drove along the beachfront road and saw concrete slabs of where whole houses used to be. Concrete stairs led up to nothing. We passed several army jeeps on the road and ran into many more soldiers in the city. Trees were torn out from their roots and crushed whatever was below them. Most of them were snapped at the middle, leaving eerie naked trunks pointing into the sky. We were informed that bodies were found caught up in the branches of the trees that were still standing.

And inland we drove, finding the remains of those beach front houses intermingled with the remains of other houses, torn and mangled in an enormous pile of rubble and wood. All of the houses were flattened, buried under their own rooftops that were the only recognizable thing that showed that what we were looking at was once a house. Wood was everywhere, splintered and snapped, littered in the street and on the sides of the road. Cars were overturned. Powerlines were twisted and wrapped around the remains of the fallen trees. And inward we continued. For another mile or so.

Garbage was everywhere. Businesses were boarded up with plywood, if they remained standing. Boats were found several miles from the coast. One was parked, strangely enough, in a Burger King drive through. Shingles on roofs were ripped off. The houses that were standing were gutted or leaning over about to fall. The huge concrete bridge that goes across the bay to the other side was completely shredded. Every piece of the bridge that was meant to sustain the weight of several tons was no longer there. All that remained were the ghost-like concrete slabs erected in the water at equal intervals. The water even ate up the asphalt we were standing on as we surveyed the coast line. Cars were picked up and slammed into houses and on top of other cars. Windows were blown out. Glass and wood and clothes and trash was everywhere. It was like an atomic bomb exploded.

We worked at a house about a mile inland. They had 5 feet of standing water in their house. That means a wave was carried onto the land that carried so much water that houses were buried up to 5 feet one mile inland. And obviously that wave stretched for miles and miles across the Gulf, most likely all the way to Mobile. Houses 3 miles away had standing water as well. Some folks told their terrible stories of having to flee to their attic as water began to rise. One couple was trapped in their attic with no way out and the water rose to their necks. Can you imagine standing there, trapped and completly helpless, with water rising and rising with no promise of ever stopping? I can't imagine being more terrified.

We saw a van that was laid down sideways in one neighborhood that belonged over a mile away. Car dealerships had cars crunched together, with several of them resting on top of each other. The horror and hero stories will keep coming. We heard a story about one man who drove a jetski through the bay during the eye of the storm to pick up some relatives and drive them back to his trailer just in time before the second eye wall hit.

I did not grow up around hurricanes. The devastation I saw today was enough to tatoo those images in my head for a good while. Some people are left with nothing. Their houses simply do not exist any more. Some only have huge trees smashed through their living rooms. The damage is astronomical. The frustration and disappointment is high. The reality of it all is a bit too real for my liking.

As we drove through the remains, none of us said a word. The sights were too consuming. And so with amazed somberness, we drove on, clueless of what to say and how to help.