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.