Online Story Contribution, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Two days before I was scheduled to come down to the Gulf coast as a
volunteer radio operator (I've been a ham operator since I was in high
school) Peter Brink, V.P. of the National Trust for Historic
Preservation called and asked me to lead the Trust's damage assessment &
recovery teams here. I agreed to do so on the condition that I could at
least partially fulfill my prior commitment.
I arrived in Gulfport,MS on 9/11/05 after driving from Baltimore in two
days, about 1,200 miles. The next morning I was assigned to be the net
control operator for the Red Cross radio net that covered Hancock and
Harrison counties. It's like being the telephone operator on a giant
party line. At that time there were still no working land lines at all
and cell phones only worked if you got on or near Interstate 10. Twelve
hours a day I managed the net and routed traffic to and from the Red
Cross Headquarters in Gulfport. For that first week I actually saw
almost nothing as I was either sleeping or working in a communications
trailer staring at a bank of radio transceivers.
I slept on the floor of a R.C. shelter in a grade school and ate shelter
food and the occasional MRE. (They're better than C-rations.) I had it
pretty good. We had toilets that flushed and the electricity was back
on in Gulfport so there was air conditioning at night (temps went to 95
every day). It was just about the closest thing to the Presidential
Suite you could find on the Gulf Coast. Many, many people were doing a
lot worse.
It was a tremendous experience especially for a stimulus addict like
myself. The radio ops I worked with were from all over the country and
though they had disparate operating styles, experience and/or training,
the radio operation ran very smoothly. We train for this sort of thing
on a regular basis. (The American Radio Relay League, our nat'l.
association, has a new section on its web site devoted to stories
written by hams about their Katrina experiences. See
http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/PublicServiceStories/?evt_id=1 )
After my five days I retreated to find a clean place with at least
reliable cell phone service. I figured Mobile but there were no rooms
to be had anywhere. I drove 90 miles north to Evergreen, AL before I
found a motel room. For 36 hours I did laundry, used the cell phone and
computer to organize the Trust's first volunteer team and ate two salads
approximately the size of my head as well as drinking a pint of Meyers
Rum. I also slept in a bed.
I returned to Gulfport on Monday, 9/18 and met with my team of
architects and engineers and started looking at dead buildings. Until
that time I had not gotten to the waterfronts at all. I lived through
Hurricane Elisha in 1983 in Houston and Galveston so I am not unfamiliar
with hurricanes, hurricane damage. I've even lived through a tornado in
the Upper Midwest. What was staggering about this was the vast extent
of the damage. It went from east of Mobile to almost Houma, LA. Most
of Mississippi was in the eastern semicircle of the storm (in that
semicircle you have to add the speed of the storm itself to the circular
wind speed - in the western half you subtract it). The damage gets
worse from Mobile all the way to Bay St. Louis where I am living now.
The eye went over Bay St. Louis and the eye wall went over Pass
Christian. Most of Pass Christian was wiped out. Most of Waveland was
wiped out. Most of Long Beach was wiped out. That's wiped out as in
gone, no longer in existence, looks like everything has been put through
a blender and strewn across acres of dead, upended live oaks gone. They
all look like suburbs of Hiroshima except they don't glow in the dark.
The January tsunami penetrated perhaps 1,000 yards inland. The major
damage of Katrina penetrated 20 miles. It left an estimated 40 million
cubic yards of debris and destroyed 65,000 buildings (and,
unfortunately, counting). B.S.L. was to some extent spared because it's
on the only bluff on the Mississippi Coast. When I first came to B.S.L.
18 days after the storm they were still looking for bodies, there was no
electricity and no water pressure. Broken houses littered the railroad
tracks. Fifty yards of the bluff was scoured away by the storm.
One of the great frustrations of my life is that I have been unable to
convey either in words or photographs what it was (is) like. It's a
terrible cliche and I cringe to hear it come from my lips, but you just
can't get it unless you've actually seen it and smelled it. And seen it
go on for miles and miles and miles.
After a week of surveying dead and dying buildings I returned to my home
in Baltimore and spent ten days fulfilling some business obligations. I
came back to Mississippi on Oct. 13 and have been here ever since as
the Trust's representative for the whole Mississippi coast. Since I've
been down here I've sent a series of six emails to a bunch of my
friends, each with a photograph. (Failure obviously hasn't stopped me
from trying to communicate what's still happening here.) They were
written contemporaneously over the last 40 days and 40 nights.

Citation Information:

Louis Linden, "Online Story Contribution, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank." Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, Object #265 (November 26 2005, 12:27 pm)<http://www.hurricanearchive.org/object/265>