Katrina's aftermath

Bush Pledges to Expedite Aid to Gulf Region; Day of Prayer Is Set

"The government is going to be with you for the long haul," Mr. Bush said in a brief speech at the White House as he and Vice President Dick Cheney tried to counter charges that their administration had reacted slowly and ineffectively to the crisis. The president said that Sept. 16, next Friday, would be designated a national day of prayer and remembrance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08cnd-bush.html

also http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4227974.stm

and more:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=katrina+day+of+prayer&btnG=Search+News

I also love the new Republican song: "Let's Not Point Fingers (It's The Mayor's Fault)"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9255741/

Though it's a bit... unexpected to have this small story at the top of the MSN news bar.

© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.wwltv.com/local/stories/091904ccktWWLIvanFlaws.132602486.html

I'm going to Houston on business next week, and I think I got the *last* hotel room in the city. Everything is full up, which I think is a good sign.

In the parking lot outside the hangar sits George Lainart, a police officer from Georgia, who has led a flotilla of nine airboats over land to try to pitch in with the rescue. But his crew has been on the bench for two days, waiting for FEMA to assign them a mission. After making serial inquiries, Lainart is climbing out of his skin, and I later find out that his team circumvented FEMA altogether, got down to New Orleans, and stayed busy for five days straight. Though he shredded his hull by running over asphalt, cars, fire hydrants, and other debris, his crew saved nearly 800 people.

"FEMA was holding up everything, they didn't have a clue," complains Lainart. "They were an absolute roadblock, nobody was getting anywhere with those idiots. Everybody just started doing their own missions." While opinions on the ground differ wildly as to who deserves the most generous serving of blame pie among George W. Bush, Louisiana's governor, and New Orleans' mayor, everyone I speak with agrees that FEMA officials should spend their afterlives in the hottest part of Hell without any water breaks.

The longer Brown stays...

"Mike Chertoff made those decisions and I certainly support him," Cheney told reporters at the Austin convention center, which is housing about 1,500 evacuees. Some have called for Brown to be fired, but Cheney deferred to Chertoff.

also:

Cheney said the evacuees he spoke to in Texas on Saturday did not raise concerns about the FEMA shake-up but detailed their stories of escaping the devastation.

"Not one of them mentioned any of it," Cheney said in response to a question. "They're all very thankful where they find themselves right now."

Pat Robertson on Sunday said...“By choosing an avowed lesbian for this
national event, these Hollywood elites have clearly invited God’s
wrath,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” on Sunday. “Is it any surprise
that the Almighty chose to strike at Miss Degeneres’ hometown?”

Robertson also noted that the last time Degeneres hosted the Emmys, in
2001, the September 11 terrorism attacks took place shortly before the
ceremony.

Where is Saladin's army when you need them?

http://datelinehollywood.com/archives/2005/09/05/robertson-blames-hurricane-on-choice-of-ellen-deneres-to-host-emmys/

there are six of us staying in a one bedroom house right now, but we plan to rent a bigger place soon and splitting the rent (possibly more than 6 ways as there are a couple more of our friends considering moving out here). the only problem is that the landlords around here are heartless bastards who will charge 50 dollars per night per person for anyone who spends the night at their properties who aren't signed on to the lease. one even said "we can't have all of new orleans just moving in here. this is a respectable community"

SO... if anyone has any leads on good jobs please drop me an email. i'll be checking my email here at the public library fairly regularly. this is probably a stretch, but if anyone knows a way a brother can get into Foley Arts in this town, let me know. I'm a lot more qualified/interested in starting that line of work than grip/electrician (though please, if you've got any leads there, let me know).

and if i get wheels/employment i'll need to know some cool clubs/bars/shows/whatever to check out so drop me some names plz.

Also, some insider info on Katrina:

My best friend's older brother was working at Charity Hospital until the "national guard" evacuated everyone from that hellhole. I use the quotes because despite what the news claims, he was actually rescued by renegade texas wildlife and fisheries agents who lied their way past FEMA and the national guard in order to help out. until then he had been sleeping on the roof with the rats for 3 hours every night to escape the stuffy cesspool of the hospital interior. The national guard had promised help on tuesday and then on every following day but no help ever came. at one point they told him to have his worse-off patients up on the roof ready to be flown away in helicopters. the helicopters chose instead to rescue comparatively healthy medical staff from the tulane clinic next door. two of his weaker patients died from the stress of being carried up and down the stairs on a stretcher by exhausted hospital workers. He had to treat all of his patients by penlight in oppressive heat, humidity, and stink. he's safe in cincinatti now with some of his family, but he's still fatigued, malnourished, and shell-shocked.

a friend of my dad's stayed uptown during the storm and wasn't rescued until a week after the storm hit. a tree fell on his house and it flooded on monday. during the looting crisis he had to fight for his life on multiple occasions (in hand to hand combat) and during the chaos was separated from his dog Rosco. he was rescued by the coast guard only to find out that his sister and brother, his only family members, had both lost their homes to the hurricane. he might be moving out here with us for a while. we got a message from him this morning that a firefighter from gonzales LA rescued his dog and he's on his way there now for a seriously emotional reunion.

one even said "we can't have all of new orleans just moving in here. this is a respectable community"

maybe this is worth publicizing?

It's really something. Trying to rush because I'm late for work and passing a Blazer with Louisiana plates, a family inside - the wife in the passenger seat looking at a map - well, it certainly can humble ya.

It's a new running joke around here: Some car poking along in the way on the street, turning suddenly without a blinker, and we get all riled up before we see the La or Miss plates. Then all is forgiven.

The other day, a good Christian co-worker stopped himself from saying "Godddamn" by exclaiming GOD -blessLouisiana!

Seal Beach is just one town over from my old stomping grounds in Belmont Shore so if you need any ideas give me a shout.

Seal Beach is kinda out of the way, but since you're without wheels at the moment, your best bet to get around would be to take the OCTA #1 bus to the Long Beach VA hospital and switch to the Long Beach Passport A or D bus to downtown Long Beach and then you can get the Blue Line train to downtown LA or Hollywood.

They still gave me some training on how to register folks, so i might just wander in for a bit over the weekend.

The Associated Press
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho – An Idaho weatherman says Japan's Yakuza mafia used a Russian-made electromagnetic generator to cause Hurricane Katrina in a bid to avenge itself for the Hiroshima atom bomb attack — and that this technology will soon be wielded again to hit another U.S. city.

Meteorologist Scott Stevens, a nine-year veteran of KPVI-TV in Pocatello, said he was struggling to forecast weather patterns starting in 1998 when he discovered the theory on the Internet. It's now detailed on Stevens' Web site, www.weatherwars.info, the Idaho Falls Post Register reported.

Scientists discount Stevens' claims as ludicrous.

"I have been doing hurricane research for the better part of 20 years now, and there was nothing unusual to me about any of the satellite imagery of Katrina," said Rob Young, a hurricane expert at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, N.C. "It's laughable to think it could have been manmade."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002508576_webkatrinatheory20.html

cool!

"We are not saying these MREs are unfit or unsafe. We're saying they don't meet the importation standards, and they are being set aside."

that should ease some people's minds, but now that i've actually seen firsthand just how pitiful their individual aid packages are, i'm rethinking all the nice things i've said about the organization.

We've been thru so many of these things and communications technology has improved so much that we can do this all better.

but it won't. At least they're making some noise in our city up in the Pacific NW that "hey, when the Big One finally hits, we might be completely fucked."

I bought one of those shake-for-2-minutes flashlights the other day. Bring on the Seattle earthquakes, I'm prepared with my little shake-powered-LED-flashlight!

i live at the top of a hill, but ya never know.

in portland?!?!?? you're insane bro!

but yeah, i'm far more likely to die in an earthquake, or by one of our local prominent volcanoes decides to wake up again...

but ya never know.

I heard on the news just this morning that approx 75% of the whites on N. O. and 65% of the black had vehicles according to the last cencus. I blamed everyone at the time because I thought no one cared enough to provide transportation for the poor etc. to get out of harms way but now I find that most of them choose to stay. This doesn't take any of the responsibility off the local officials that did not provide any transportation for those who did not have a way out. I can't help but feel some would have left if they could.

People become to laid back about their safety because they have not experienced things like hurricanes etc. Living in Florida all my live I have seen and been through many. I do not and will not stay if anything more than a cat 2 is coming through. I live in Okeechobee, Fl. and we too have a levy that sourrounds Lake Okeechobee and almost everyone knows this levy will not hold should a Cat 3 stall over the lake. Anyone living near the lake who doesnot evacuate puts their lives in danger and in the hands of GOD.

FlMoonshadow

Fl. Native

I doubt many families evacuated the city using all the vehicles in their household. This is just one reason why you're talking crazy talk.

it's possible some people carpooled. there was probably a lot of traffic getting out of the city.

1. There were many many people who stayed because the choose to stay.

2. There were people forced to stay who had no way out because there was no transportation provided for them.

GONE WITH THE SURGE
by PETER J. BOYER
An always anomalous section of the South prepares to reinvent itself.
Issue of 2005-09-26
Posted 2005-09-19

Mississippi is among the red states, which supported President Bush in the last election, and the Mississippi coast, which is where I grew up was the most pro-Bush region of the state. When Bush visited Biloxi, on the Friday after Hurricane Katrina, he was greeted warmly by friendly politicians, including the state’s two United States senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who are Republicans; and Governor Haley Barbour, an old friend, who was the head of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Barbour thanked Bush for coming, and, as the President picked his way along streets littered with the splinters of destroyed houses, he encountered hurricane victims who actually seemed glad to see him. One man assured Bush that he had survived Hurricane Camille, in 1969, “and we’ll go through this storm.” New Orleans was Bush’s next stop, and he seemed almost to dread having to leave Mississippi, for all its wreckage. “You know, there’s a lot of sadness, of course,” he told reporters. “But there’s also a spirit here in Mississippi that is uplifting.

My guess is that the President could sense in Biloxi, Gulfport, and other coastal towns something of Midland, Texas, a boom-and-bust oil town that, unlike New Orleans, was forever reinventing itself, with an eye on the next big deal and, more important, a capacity for finding opportunity in misfortune. In Midland, disaster is an oil bust; on the coast, it’s a direct hit from a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Now the coast has endured two in thirty-six years.

In a place where hurricanes are the local calamity, one might expect history to have a tenuous grip. On the coast of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the past was a treasured, if superficial, asset — an adornment more than a way of life. The coastline was strikingly beautiful, not only for its stark white beaches but also for its fine old houses, many of them painstakingly maintained antebellum structures, situated along the twenty-five miles of beachfront between Pass Christian and Biloxi. These were summer homes, built by Delta planters and wealthy New Orleans merchants and their successors, and they lent the coastal Highway 90 an aspect of elegance, like a grand esplanade. The best known of them was Beauvoir, a building in the raised cottage style, which was the final residence of Jefferson Davis. After Davis’s death, it was operated as a home for Confederate veterans, and in the nineteen-fifties it became a museum.

Beneath the coast’s moonlight-and-magnolias veneer was a restive spirit that reflected both a heterogeneous population and the fevered ambition that occasionally seizes small-time tourist centers. By the fate of geography, the coast had its own sociology, unbound by the feudal arrangements that locked much of the rest of Mississippi into its melancholy past. The alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta fostered an agrarian culture of fabulous wealth and aristocratic conceits, which depended upon the labor of slaves and, later, of freed blacks effectively consigned to indenture. The soil in the southern portion of the state, from the piney woods down to the coastal plain, was sandy, meagre stuff, incapable of growing much more than scrub. Nor were there vast marshes, like those which sustain the rice plantations of lowland Carolina, or cane fields, as in Louisiana. Although Mississippi has been a black-majority state through most of its history, blacks are distinctly a minority in the south, particularly along the Gulf Coast.

The people of the coast were formed by the maritime influences of the Gulf: first, when the French made Biloxi the capital of eighteenth-century French Louisiana (before New Orleans); and, later, when the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm. The warm waters of the Gulf, rich in oysters, shrimp, and marketable fish — snapper, Spanish mackerel, speckled trout — supplied a seafood industry based in Biloxi that boomed in the early part of the last century, with the arrival of railroad refrigeration. Canneries and seafood factories sprang up all along Biloxi’s waterfront, and the demand for labor was met by Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War, and by Cajuns, forced from Louisiana by failures of the sugarcane crop. The new workers inhabited a world that was more Steinbeck than Faulkner. They lived in shotgun houses provided by the companies that owned both the boats, which were crewed by the men, and the canneries, which were worked by the women and children. These Biloxians lived in neighborhoods like Point Cadet, the edge of land that curled into the Back Bay, and developed a culture, and even a manner of speech — a clipped sort of Cajunized Southern English — that was unique.

The coast’s fishing industry, along with its tourism ambitions, shaped a population that was diverse, and ever open to the next big prospect. A new development boom or foolproof tourism strategy was always on the way, and in the meantime the impulses of the present were generously indulged. The Mississippi coast of my youth was constantly being “cleaned up” by crusading authorities, politicians (backed by church groups) who would raid the night clubs and underground casinos and make a show of dumping slots and pinball machines into the Back Bay. Yet eventually the gracious highway would once again bear the interested back to the Peacock Club and other vice and clip joints. Our psychic tides were pulled equally by New Orleans and the Bible Belt. We had Catholics and revellers, and a Mardi Gras celebration that was older than the one in New Orleans, but we inhabited a state that was ruled by Southern Baptist mores.

The last once-in-a-lifetime storm to strike the Mississippi coast was Hurricane Camille, which came ashore at Pass Christian the night of August 17, 1969 — Woodstock weekend for the rest of America. Camille, still the strongest recorded hurricane to strike the continental Unite States, bore hundred-and-ninety-mile-per-hour winds and dropped swarms of tornados all along the coast and for miles inland. Camille was, for anyone who lived through it, the gauge by which all other storms are measured. I remember Camille, though, as something of an adventure partly because I missed the worst part of it. My father and I were returning home to Gulfport from California, and didn’t arrive until the day after the storm. Coming into town from the north on Highway 49, we were stopped just outside Gulfport at a military checkpoint, established to keep all but local residents out of the area. Inside the perimeter, I saw scenes of such wreckage, a sort of perfect disorder, that they remain in my mind’s eye still. Freighters had been tossed over Highway 90, snakes dropped from the trees, making you flinch when you saw a downed wire and there were even carcasses of dead cows that had apparently blown in from Cat Island, one of the barrier islands to the south. More than hundred and forty people had been killed on the coast, and scores more inland. I was in high school then, and helped with the cleanup some, ill-advisedly taking up a chainsaw, but mostly my friends and I took advantage of the extended summer vacation (and were annoyed that water skiing in the bayou was banned). The Federal Emergency Management Administration did not yet exist, although I’m fairly certain that Senators John Stennis and James Eastland managed to direct a decent portion of the federal budget Mississippi’s way. President Nixon came to town for what seemed like five minutes, and, the next thing I knew, it was New Year’s Day and Ole Miss was playing Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl (Archie Manning’s Rebels 27, Razorbacks 22). What I mainly remember is an overriding sense that we were a community that lived in hurricane alley, and that Camille was an extreme example of an indigenous feature.

Communities briefly halted new beachfront construction, until more rigorous codes were adopted, and then the coast leaned into reconstruction and, eventually, recovered, actually living up to the local boosters’ vow to raise up a community that was “better than ever!” The annual hurricane seasons came and went, bringing some minor storms and a few frights, but, like coastal people everywhere, locals mostly chose to stay put and ride the storm out. I’ve long since left the coast, the last member of my family to go, although I still consider it home. I’d hoped to visit next month, to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of Jacob Guice, a retired lawyer and the patriarch of one of the region’s most respected families. On Sunday, August 28th, as Katrina grew (briefly) to a Category 5 hurricane, I learned that Jacob and his wife, Jo, had evacuated to Birmingham. Four days later, I left for the coast, detouring through Birmingham, where I was joined by Jacob’s son Billy Guice, who currently runs the family law firm, in Biloxi. We loaded an S.U.V. with a generator and thirty-five gallons of spare gasoline, and headed south.

Billy’s brother-in-law, Charles Clark, had shown us aerial photographs of the coast that he had downloaded from a government Web site. Judging from the computer images, the Guices’ family home, a Mediterranean villa in Ocean Springs, on the Bay of Biloxi, appeared to have survived. The house belonging to Danny Guice, Jacob’s brother and a former mayor of Biloxi, wasn’t where it was supposed to be; no structure at all was visible on his property. The photographs didn’t reveal the fate of Billy’s law office or his new home on the water in Ocean Springs, which he had built according to the strictest specifications of the hurricane code.

As we approached the coast, thirty or forty miles above Mobile on Interstate 65, we began to see indications of the recent passage of a huge storm, just as my father and I had as we came into Gulfport in the summer of 1969: pine trees felled in clumps and bent at opposite angles, billboards stripped clean of their ads, and road signs twisted backward. Closer to Mississippi, we saw marquee ads promoting coming attractions at the casino resorts on the coast (Merle Haggard, Meat Loaf, Wayne Newton).

The casinos were built after Camille, and were made possible, in part, by a slump in one of the principal local industries, shrimping Beginning in the late nineteen-seventies, there had been an influx of Vietnamese, mostly boat people and other refugees. The area was naturall suited to the newcomers, who found a familiar climate and familiar work — fishing. They took jobs in the seafood factories that many of th traditional Biloxians had abandoned, but when they began to run their own boats they were seen as unwelcome competition. The Vietnames worked unheard-of hours at an astonishing pace, many living with their families on their boats, and they employed fishing methods that cause locals to worry that the shrimp beds were being overharvested. Most of the Vietnamese also received some government assistance as part of federal resettlement program, fuelling the notion that they were being granted an unfair advantage. There were some confrontations, and a few incidents (though nothing like the violence that erupted among fishermen on the Texas coast), but by the end of the eighties the Vietnamese had become an accepted part of the community. They moved into the shotgun homes of the Point and Back Bay, and opened restaurants alon Howard Avenue on the east end of town, and the shrimp industry remained central to the coast’s identity. In the late eighties, however competition from shrimp farms in Asia depressed market prices, and the local economy clearly needed a boost.

The casinos that followed were an unmistakable indication of the coast’s willingness to distinguish its particular character from the state’s Bible Belt mores. In the past decade and a half, gambling has transformed the area, mainly through the seemingly quixotic efforts of a man named Rick Carter, who is a client of Billy’s and was a schoolmate of mine in Gulfport. After an early career in the clothing business, Carter and two partners, Terry Green and William (Si) Redd, a Nevada slot-machine tycoon, bought a small forty-year-old cruise ship and renamed it the Pride of Mississippi, in the hope of conducting “cruises to nowhere” — gambling excursions into international waters beyond the Mississippi Sound. In 1989, the men persuaded the Mississippi legislature to allow gambling on boats cruising along the shore. It had been an audacious quest, given that Mississippi’s politics were (and are) so deeply influenced by religious conservatives. (Mississippi was the last state to vote to repeal Prohibition, in 1966, and some counties are still dry.) Lottery initiatives were regularly defeated. In the late eighties, though, the unemployment rate was high, and prospects for a turnaround in shrimping and the other principal industry, timber, were low.

The following year, a Natchez legislator proposed a bill that would allow gambling cruises on riverboats along the Mississippi. Then began one of the legendary episodes in Mississippi back-room politics. Sonny Meredith, a state representative who was a powerful committee chairman, concluded that, if gambling cruises would be an economic benefit to river towns, then gambling boats that operated while docked in a town — his own Delta city of Greenville, for example — would be even better. Meredith changed the language in the bill, secured its passage by obscuring the changes, and sent the legislation on to the state senate. Gambling opponents had more than enough votes to kill the bill. But State Senator Tommy Gollott, an old up-from-the-Point Biloxi pol, reportedly persuaded ten Delta senators to absent themselves from the vote (most of them claiming a sudden stomach ailment), and the measure passed. Within months, dockside gambling had found its way to the coast as well.

Rick Carter’s small-boat operation went in and out of bankruptcy, was sold and bought back, and was eventually named the Copa Casino, and docked at the port of Gulfport. Meanwhile, other gaming interests, including big players from Nevada, realized that there was nothing in the state statutes limiting the size of a gambling boat, and they began to construct casinos on huge barges, docking them in semi-permanent positions and building parking structures, theatres, and hotels that were essentially part of the boat. By 2002, there were a dozen casinos on the coast, and Carter’s Copa was the only boat in the conventional sense. Cramped and dimly lit, the Copa was prized by the locals for its liberal slot machines and raffish ambience, but Carter and his partners eventually yielded to market pressures and moved the Copa’s operations to a behemoth barge.

The rise of the gaming industry in Mississippi has been perceived as both a benefit and a bane. The presence of a fleet of huge, neon-lit floating casinos presented an obvious, if ill-considered, complication in the event of a big storm. I remember hearing of various contingency plans (including moving the boats into the Mississippi River or taking them out into the Gulf and sinking them), but the governing policy essentially amounted to mooring them tight and hoping for the best. The casinos also made for an incongruity to the drive along Highway 90, with gracious homes on the north side of the road and the likes of mammoth faux pirate ships parked to the south. Yet the casinos have been an economic boon, paying taxes that account for close to ten per cent of the entire state budget — $335 million in 2005, and that figure does not include revenue from associated businesses, such as hotels and restaurants. Mississippi was long accustomed to last place in most economic and social indicators, but in the five years between 1992 and 1997 its service industries led the nation in revenue growth and job creation. Upward of fifty thousand jobs were created by the gambling industry, bringing a wave of immigration from Mexico and the Caribbean. Biloxi’s school district, which occasionally was so financially strained that students had to share textbooks, now receives additional revenues of six million dollars a year, has a new, state-of-the-art high school and a new football stadium, and provides two sets of books for each student (one set for home, one for the classroom).

Billy and I saw a number of fishing boats as we entered Mississippi, some of them safely moored in back waterways, some wrecked an beached. On the Interstate 10 bridge over the Pascagoula River, the eastbound lanes were closed, because a barge had slipped its moorings an slammed into the concrete-and-steel pilings supporting the bridge. Ocean Springs was a few miles ahead. On the trip down, I’d asked Bill whether his view of life on the coast had been shaped by surviving Camille. Billy was twenty-two, about to begin his first year at Tulane La School, when Camille hit. His grandfather W. L. Guice, a lawyer active in Democratic politics who was a friend of F.D.R.’s and seconded hi nomination in 1932, had lived in a beachfront home that was swept away by the storm. The old man, a widower, survived, and moved in wit one of his children, but his family felt that after Camille he gave up. “He didn’t ever start to rebuild,” Billy recalled. “He sort of took to his bed and started the dying process. It just took him three years to get there
“For me, I think, personally, if you lived through Camille you realize it’s just all stuff, you know?” he said. “So all I’ve got this time is a little more stuff.”

The family’s first concern, expressed in hushed conversations in Birmingham, was for Jacob and Jo’s old stucco house on the bay. The worry was that losing his home might hasten the end for Jake, as it had for his father. For all of us, that house was a kind of symbol for the comeback after Camille. When the Guices bought the place, after the storm, it was in an advanced state of disrepair. But the house was solidly built, and behind it was a long, rickety pier that stretched out into the bay. Each evening after leaving the office, Jake, without bothering to loosen his tie, would head straight to the pier with his fishing gear. He had joined the Marines after graduating from Yale Law, in 1939, and had come back from the war with only one eye. He didn’t like to acknowledge it, but his balance was sometimes unsteady, and Jo worried that one day he would walk right off the pier into the bay.

Now the pier was gone, along with the boathouse where Jake kept his gear. Miraculously, the house was relatively unscathed. A few of the heavy Spanish tiles were missing from the roof, some trees were down, and the live oaks were brown, as if they’d been scorched.
In the neighborhood where Billy lived, though, nearly every home was either completely destroyed or so badly damaged that it might as well have been destroyed. As we crept along the cluttered road toward the point of land where he’d built his house, the trees were filled with the detritus of the storm, plastic bags and fragments of clothing, even a chair. The pines, each bearing a broad gash about twenty-five feet above the ground, described the course of the storm surge as it pushed through, slashing the trees with debris. It was apparent that most of the damage had been caused by water. Survivors who had stayed or made their way back had painted messages on the big plywood sheets they’d nailed over their windows before the storm. The messages gave street addresses and insurance-policy numbers—“We R OK. 6612 Riviera. State Farm Insurance”—and many described missing dogs.

Billy’s house was gone. All that remained was the foundation, portions of the frame, and a swimming pool. As we picked our way through the rubble, Billy conducted a tour of the place, in a tone approaching dispassion: “This was the garage. Over there was a guest house.” After such a storm, few objects retain their familiar form, and the eye reflexively darts to those that somehow appear as they should. We found a bottle of Chardonnay standing upright, still intact, just a couple of feet from a huge chunk of granite countertop that had been lifted and tossed from some distance away. “All this was glass,” Billy said, gesturing to what had been his living-room windows, which, overlooking the bay, had afforded an unobstructed view of the casinos on the far shore. “There were decks around there, and it was all glass. And everything had that same view, and at night you had this rainbow of colors.”

Billy’s truck was smashed, and his small sailboat was nowhere to be seen. Before we left, he pointed out one of the precautions he’d taken against a storm: the hurricane straps still attached to the frame of his former guest house. The straps survived; the roof they were supposed to hold down was spread somewhere over Jackson County.

Our next stop was Biloxi, where the roads were covered with sand and a trooper with his search dog walked amid the rubble of what appeared to have been a motel. Some streets were blocked by debris, making long, crooked work of what had been a straightforward drive to Billy’s law office downtown, in a building on Water Street — so named, Billy said, after an inundation from a storm in the middle of the last century. As I drove, looking for the street, Billy suddenly said, “Stop here.”

“Aren’t we going to try to find the office?” I asked. The area was torn up, and I had no idea where we were.

“There it is,” he said. We were at the building’s entrance, facing away from the Gulf, and there had been so much damage that we couldn’t enter. We walked around to the Gulf side, and saw there would be no problem entering — the building’s entire rear wall was gone. The place, like all of what had been downtown Biloxi, had the sickly-sweet smell of waterlogged rot and death. But Billy seemed pleased. “Structurally, it looks O.K.,” he said. An air-conditioning unit the size of a meat truck had fallen from the roof of a sixteen-story building next door. A small parking garage had been swept away, leaving a hole with several smashed cars in it. Billy ventured into his office building and returned with a Presidential portrait inscribed to his grandfather by F.D.R.

We tried to make our way west on Highway 90 toward Gulfport, but we hadn’t got very far when the highway became so buckled and broken that we were obliged to turn back. Traffic — mostly locals trying to get home — was being directed by a team of officers from the state fish-and-game authority, who had been called in from counties up north. When I showed one of the officers my press pass, he offered, unbidden, the fact that “we have no body count.” Any number of dead seemed credible, as we made our way along the coast, past whole communities, such as Point Cadet, in Biloxi, that were simply no longer there, but we saw no corpses.

Even if, as initially seemed likely, New Orleans had been spared by this storm, Katrina would probably have ranked as this country’s most destructive storm ever. In the days and weeks after Camille, it was at least possible to imagine the coast eventually recovering its essential character. Although most of the historic houses along the strand were damaged by Camille, they stood; neighborhoods were recognizable. It is not so easy to imagine a return to normal now. Beauvoir is gutted. The Tullis House, an 1856 brick Greek Revival structure in Biloxi, was destroyed, as were the Gillis House, the Brielmaier House, and many more. I doubt if any high-school kids today are enjoying the disruption.

When we reached Gulfport, I spotted the First Baptist Church, which had been completed the year before Camille and had weathered it whole; now it was a wreck, run through by the surge. The old Hancock Bank Building, where my father, on his first day in town, walked in and cashed a check for a hundred dollars without any local identification, was still standing, but the last house we lived in, near downtown, was gone. The state port in Gulfport, where some of us used to get day work in the summer unloading banana boats, was demolished, the Dole container units crumpled together in a corner. One of the buildings that remained was, aptly enough, the Riemann Funeral Home; the front doors were open and there was much activity. Two refrigerated tractor-trailer units were parked out front.

Turning to leave downtown as the 6 p.m. curfew approached, we saw a casino barge sprawled across the road, like a pink beached whale. It was Rick Carter’s Copa Casino.

As we drove on, Billy was already imagining the new coast. The destruction of the port, he said, was not necessarily a bad thing. “It could be a benefit. That could be one of the things they can argue: Give us another billion dollars, and give us a real port now to help us come back. Le us dock a cruise ship here, and give the casinos a reason to stay.
There is every indication that the casinos, having established the Mississippi coast as a gambling and entertainment destination — the hard part — mean to stay. Owners have announced that they will keep paying their employees, and some have invited them back to work — on cleanup, for now. The leverage is with the casino industry — a fact to which the state’s political structure awakened when a major revenue stream suddenly stopped. Governor Barbour may soon call a special legislative session to consider allowing the industry to build fixed structures on land. Gary Loveman, the president of Harrah’s Entertainment, which owns two casinos on the coast, says the old insistence on waterway gambling was a political device that has lost its charm. “When people look back at this period and read that we decided casinos should sit in boxes that float on rivers and sit in water,” he told the local Sun Herald, “they’ll scratch their head and say, ‘What good did that do?’”

In the back neighborhoods away from the water and the downtowns, the buzz of chainsaws had been going all day, as people cleared their properties and streets. We passed a Vietnamese family that had nearly managed to clean up their yard; the mother, kneeling, sorted through fragments of household effects. Behind her, the house, missing its front and most of its roof, was barely standing. Billy’s brother Jakie was planning to build a vast trailer park to handle the anticipated influx of construction workers needing short-term housing. Billy had spent much of the day on his cell phone, contacting his employees and organizing a temporary office in Ocean Springs.

“The Gulf Coast will be coming back,” Billy said. “But nothing will be the same. The storm changed the economics of property investment. My property, I think, has some value as a potential site. Now, I think you get three or four properties, and you’ve got a helluva project.”

He was willing to turn that beautiful spot on the water into a condo site?

“I think the coast is capable of becoming interesting economically,” he said. “But it’ll never come back into something that we knew. That’s gone.”

I asked if the local communities could zone the beachfront in a way that would salvage some portion of the area’s history.

“Why zone the historical district if there’s no history left?”

Billy Guice was beginning to see all kinds of opportunities. “You do a high-rise condominium,” he said. “This storm just means you don’t have to clear off the site.”

Jeremy Scahill is a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He can be reached at jeremy(at)democracynow.org