I grew up in Long Beach (small town just down the highway from Biloxi). It frustrates me to the core that the MS Gulf Coast was ignored because it didn't fit the narrative of poor and abused minorities.

I rode the storm out, just north of the railroad tracks for those familiar with the area. I'll never forget the next day walking outside and not being able to look down the street because it was filled with trees. I also remember blankets from peoples homes twisted and tied in the tops of trees that looked like you would need a tractor to tie them that tight.

Regardless, fuck our corrupt media, and fuck Obama.

See this rooftop on the ground? That's what it looked like everywhere. In one place where I crossed there was a huge group of roofs piled up, and you had to jump from rooftop to rooftop to move around.




Our public library flooded



The cars. The cars were everywhere. On the beach, in ditches, turned upside down and on their sides. Some were sticking up out of the gulf.



The entire coast from Waveland to Biloxi looked like this



Arbor Station apartments across the street from my aunt's house



This was an aerial after some cleanup had been done. See all of those empty slabs? I felt so sorry for the people stuck paying mortgages on a slab.



Longwood apartments. My step sister lived here during the storm.



When people actually tried to find their homes, everyone rallied. People posted flags everywhere




These were from the port of Gulfport. Some of those containers pushed further up than the surge and took down houses because of the speed they were going. There was an investigation into why the containers were not secured. Not sure what became of it.



Treasure Bay casino in Biloxi.



I walked all of the way down to the Grand Casino in Gulfport. As bad as the devastation was, I was shocked to see the casino in the middle of the highway



The President washed up too




Not the best pic, but you see all of those huge brown paper rolls? They were from the port of Gulfport as well and knocked down houses.



Old landmarks. When you went by the beach everything was gone. I remember people spray painting everything to identify their property. People who didn't want their property bulldozed would spray paint what was left as well.



The freakin' cars.





I got these pictures from the internet. All of the pictures I took were on film and it got lost. I had some really unique photos that I wish I had to share. Thanks for looking I just wanted to say fuck our shitty media and fuck Obama. He spent all day race baiting in New Orleans, a place that survived just fine until the levies broke the next day.

Amen brother. Will never forget seeing the Biloxi grand beached north of hwy 90

Glad you made it out ok.
Thanks for posting those

Indeed, the media seemed to ignore everything other than New Orleans

I've been in moms basement to long... when did this happen .......sorry OP

Really???

Serious question, how old are you?

That could explain why you don't know about Katrina ,maybe.

I still have NOAA link of the hi res aerial photo's. They still make me hold my mouth agape at the power of this storm.

TOTAL Destruction

Damn.  Hope you and yours are doing ok now.  I suspect they are, emotional toll aside.

Katrina was crazy.

WOW

I was there bro

I will never forget driving on that road (forget the name) that parallels the tracks on the south side.  I drove through a house that the corp of engineers had just pushed a dozer through to clear the road.

It was surreal looking left and right and seeing into someones home.

eta: it was a trip to see those tracks buckled and pushed up from the force of the water.

No shit, kind of like asking when was 9/11.



 

We went to Biloxi on vacation a few years ago to support the locals.  Astounding

Ah. A chinook landed in a field behind the house to drop supplies. I couldn't believe how powerful the rotors were

Yep, yall got it way worse than Orleans parish. They just had water

I worked in Biloxi after Katrina a few months.  That was the worst I have ever seen.

Yet everyone I met was good folks, a Cajun came to our hotel and cooked some crawfish gumbo.  He made it in the biggest cast iron pot I had ever seen with a boat ore for a spoon to stir it.  Didn't speak much English, his friend translated for his coonass.

That's how we do it  We took care of the workers who came to help. I was changing a tire on I-10 when the out of town electrical crews were rolling in. We all stood by and cheered them on as they drove by.

People was offering us bottled water, and I turn around and said, hey we have bottled water for you if you need it.

 

I lived in a tent for a couple of weeks on a baseball field in Gulfport before we found a hotel in D'Iberville.

I'd done some training down at Keesler before Katrina and got another TDY about 4 months after Katrina. It was a whole different world. Anything along 90 was just gone. Concrete slabs. The Sharks head place and that surf shop. All the food joints. They were just about to open a hard rock in Biloxi...don't recall whether it was washed away or just heavily damaged. The Beau as well as Treasure Bay and the Grand. Was a very sobering experience.

I was amazed that Jeff Davis's house was still standing, albeit significantly damaged.

Meanwhile, Keesler itself got up to like 15' or so in the old BX/commasary. It was literally situated in a bowl

Yep, can't tell you how many gallons of Jamba I cooked or linemen I fed. I'll never give anyone that does that work any grief. The ones that came down here after the storm WORKED THEIR ASS OFF. After something like this, hope is measured in air conditioning and electricity flowing. When the red lights started working again we knew we had turned the corner. Hard to believe it's been 10 years. I'll drink to that.

I work at Stennis and we served as a marshalling point for some of the mil relief. I can't remember, but I think they said about 1.5 million MRE's went through our warehouse. We had groups of employees that went out to help strip sheetrock, etc and rebuild their houses. Everyone just kind of powered-through and kept MOVING, cleaning up, rebuilding,etc. I was thouroughly inspired by their grit and determination.

A friend said when the Police opened up the local Wal-Mart for people to get food, some low-life's were stealing jewelry. I saw a sign in Pearl River, La. that originally said "We shoot Looters" - they later crossed out one letter O in shoot... A co-worker was in a FEMA trailer and woke up freezing in the middle of winter. Thieves stole his propane bottles.

Some people really, really should be just gound up into dog food, seriously.


And thanks to eveyone that came here to help. I also helped feed lineman crews that worked in my area- a neighbor had a large freezer FULL of chicken, hotdogs, shrimp, etc which he gave me to cook in addition to what we had on-hand. I gave one lineman some BBQ chicken and a Coke and told him "I hope you like it", he said "I've been eating potted meat for the last 5 days". They were regulars around our house for about a week then moved into another area.

Interesting, I was just up the road in Poplarville.

I was stationed at CBC Gulfport then. I was back in Maine on leave the week before Katrina hit the coast, i rushed home as soon as they showed the track going between Mobile and Gulfport. I got home the day before Katrina made landfall, rode the storm out in my house.





I was lucky, my house was in Lizana, didn't have to worry about flooding but the winds sure did kick the shit out of us. Many of the guys that worked for me lost everything.





I'm so sick and tired of the media focusing on New Orleans. The rest of the Gulf Coast suffered worse damage but there wasn't the drama of tens of thousands of the FSA crying for handouts, instead the locals banded together, started picking up the pieces and got busy rebuilding.

 

My great uncle lived in River Ridge,LA and was visiting his sister(my grandmother) when she hit.
We were all watching as much TV as we could along with me surfing the net trying to dig up any more info I could find.
Late the next day he got a call from his neighbors telling him that his house was OK and that most of them moved into it as his house was on the high spot of the neighborhood and was dry unlike theirs.

He was stuck in Michigan till spring and had to buy all new clothes as all he had was summer clothes.
My dad and I got in there before they opened it up to non Leo/emergency crews and made sure his house was OK and we grabbed some of his belongings he wanted to make sure we're safe.

Most of his neighbors were old folk and we had to put my uncle on speaker phone so he could tell them that we were family and it was OK and we weren't going to loot the place.

I will never forget the smell.
A few months later my mom and sister went down there with their church group to help clean up.

Sadly my great uncle passed away and my dad has been down there on and off cleaning the house out and getting it ready for sale.
It was offered to me to move into but Im not sure if I want to live down there.


So if anyone is wanting a house in river ridge near the airport let me know,I only know of two deaths that occurred in it. My great grandmother who was a wonderful woman and my great uncle who was an amazing man.

You just hit the nail on the head OP, and that's exactly why you were somewhat "ignored" my the MSM.  Unlike some areas, you guys got pounded by the storm, woke up the following morning and got busy trying to make the best of a bad situation.  Your mayor wasn't on national TV pissing and moaning about when the feds were going to "get off their asses and come help", you guys just hunkered down and got busy.  Much the same way as north Alabama did when the tornados rolled through in April of 2011, we just put on our big boy pants and got to work.

Strangely enough, it's a testament to your determination and work ethic that you were ignored by the MSM.  Be proud.  

Blew my mind when i saw Long Beach in GD. Born and raised there...was a FF/EMT for the city for awhile there till i went to work for my FIL's environmental business and moved, still in MS It was good to see that the house i was raised in on W Rail Road was still there. She went through Camile and made it through the new bitch also. I remember floundering with pop's the year after and it was so weird. Wasn't the same place that made Time Magazine for top 10 places to cruze in America, panning the light and seeing toilets and stoves all sorts of things a year after in the spots i have fished since a kid.  He had moved to a house on Back Bay in Woolmarket after my mom died a couple of years before Katrina and Lost everything. He just put the rebuilt house up for sale because the new wife has finally had enough of threats and is gonna try to move to Wiggins, closer to the camp and away from the beach. Been drinking, long story short, that is still home and will always be

Hey! I'm from Ocean Springs! Still have family down there who rode it out. I thought there'd be a silver lining to the storm and all the damned gambling boats would be destroyed, but they just let 'em rebuild that damned cancer on land.

Heh. Normal behavior for all those crazy souls down there with French last names!

LOL...the only reason LB never got one because Glen, our mayor at the time, did not get the payoff he was looking for so development got DENIED. I was a FF at the time and wife was a teacher, the pay raise would have helped a ton but it wasn't worth it. The bad part is we still got the crime increase with nothing to show for it.

When Katrina hit I was dating a girl in Biloxi. I was living in New Orleans. I played hell trying to get in touch with her with all the phones being down. When I was finally lucky enough to find enough gas to reach her I got a mile from her home and hit a police road block. They were only letting residents in. I lied and thank God they let me in.


  Once I got in and saw what happened to Biloxi I couldn't believe it. I describe it to everyone as looking like Hiroshima after the bomb. I remember people living in tents up to a year afterwards too, all while being put on the back burner to New Orleans both politically and publicly.

I was down there a few months after it happened and it still looked like a war zone. I had been there many times before the storm and it was weird trying to figure out where things used to be.

TX took Ike very seriously after seeing the devastation Katrina brought.  It took us almost 21 hours to evacuate from south of Houston to the Austin area.  Lots of cars were running out of gas (luckily I had a trailer full of motorcycles to rob gas from) and some pets were asphyxiating from sitting in traffic.  Those times bring out the best in some people, and the worst in others.  

I'm glad you guys made it through, and I know it's only a matter of time before the Houston area gets a big one.  I'm just happy to be back in TX in case that happens while my father is out of country for work.

I am breaking OPSEC here, but I am also a native and lifelong resident of Long Beach, MS.

I know exactly what you are feeling right now.

Glad to find a fellow Long Beach ARFCOMER, sad to see we both went through the same shit.

We need to talk.

Good thread, thanks for sharing.

We took in some of the Katrina refugees from N.O. for a while in College Station when I was a fish in the Corps.  It was an eye opening experience working with those folks.

You're a bald faced liar. I knew Glenn very well and he was a religious man. That was the only reason he opposed dockside gambling. You know he just passed away and his family posts on here? Before you spew stupidity and lies why don't you think twice?


You realize Glenn supported a ballot initiative to let the people of Long Beach decide? Did you know that the PEOPLE VOTED and defeated the measure? Again, I know his family posts here and you owe them an apology for your bullshit.

I was on vacation in Biloxi the first week of August and it was a pretty nice place. Down by all the casinos you could tell where there use to be other buildings and that land hadn't been developed since Katrina.

I tracked down some pictures of the during and after that I had on my computer.

BX/PX


Random Parking Lot on Base


I think this was lodging


Neighborhood off base



Blurry picture but there used to be a stripmall there. Only a couple shells remained


One of the many groups that went out very shortly after to help out

I now only have a slab in Long Beach. It is was South of the railroad. I kept my sailboat in Long Beach Marina for years, my BIL lost his sailboat, His ended up on the North side of HWY 90.  We had moved to the Pensacola area 2 years before the
storm and I lost my sailboat to Ivan then about a year later our house in Long Beach to Katrina. We were renting the Long Beach house out. The renters were not there during the storm. A bunch of in-laws stayed with us during the storm and after due to not much working back in Long Beach.

Was a bad year span for us...Ivan (lost boat and house damage), went through the eye of Dennis (house damage) then Katrina (lost Long Beach house) but it was much worse for some.

We never rebuilt the house in Long Beach.

Looks like a character from a Batman movie.

I'm at the North end of the state and had no damage, but I have relatives who live in Biloxi in a cinder block house that survived Camille.  It made it through Katrina as well but with damage both times.  My relatives fled before the storm but have returned.

We didn't have the drama of New Orleans.  Our people are resilient and hard working--we had done this before with Camille.  

What I find amazing is the contrast between the Mississippi gulf coast clean up and reconstruction and New Orleans's clean up and reconstruction.  It should be required study for urban planners.

I was living in the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, MS when Camille hit.

I evacuated (because I had just bought a new Chevelle SS 396 and didn't want it to get water).

Before and after (mine was the ground floor apartment in the top right corner of the apartment complex):



From the ground:

I was in D'Iberville when it went down. Caught a ride to Biloxi to check on people the destruction was incredible.

I wish I'd had a camera then.

I remember being in Gulfport and Long Beach a couple months afterwards, and not being able to tell which city I was in because all the landmarks were gone.

I was helping my brother in law try to sort through some of the rubble in the vicinity of his parents' house, I think it was on 23rd St. or thereabouts.  Well, the upper story of a two story house that had been on 2nd or 3rd St. was sitting about where his parents' house had been-----he told me that that house (the one from 2nd or 3rd,) had been on the market for a while.  I asked because the homeowner appeared to have located the "for sale" sign, or another like it, which listed the realty company and realtor, and had placed it by the upper story with a note saying "Now half off!" on it.

I live in the central part of the state and have been visiting the coast since I was a kid. I've got some friends/fishing buddies from Long Beach. We were floundering a few weeks ago and there are still bricks and concrete blocks in the water right off the beach.

It is amazing to me the sheer size and power of this storm. We were 200 miles inland and had strong tropical storm force winds for about 12 hours. All electricity was out and trees were down everywhere. I spent the rest of the week trying to find enough gas to get to work every day (had a full tank at the start of the storm).  My sister lived in LA on the northshore we found out they had a large oak tree lying in the attic. They had gone to Memphis to find a hotel with electricity. They were able to get two 55 gal drums and fill them with gas. My dad and I loaded up chainsaws, tools, and supplies and followed them down there on Friday after the storm. We cut what we could out, tarped the rest and managed to get in touch with a tree company who could bring a crane the next day.

Not very many people had made it back to town yet and it was eerily quiet. We could see KC130 tankers refueling Blackhawks for the rescues on the other side of the lake.  Of course NOLA gets most of the attention because of the helplessness of the majority of the residents. Not everybody there was like that. I know of one guy who went back to his (dry) home and went out to start rescuing people in small boats.

I have no Katrina story but have always found this to be a hell of a read.   http://lonestar-mvpa.org/events/2005/05_Katrina.htm

Good read.

I lived in Hattiesberg MS at the time and stayed there for the storm. All of my family lived just south in two small towns in Louisiana. It was a very interesting few weeks. Our house was literally covered by 45' pine trees on three sides and sat on the top of a hill. Due to the trees, we stayed in the closet in the middle our our house for roughly 11 hours while the store came over us. I remember this like it just happened yesterday. After a few hours in the closet, the storm basically stopped in our area. Myself and my family decided to leave the closest and go outside to see how everything looked. As soon as we opened that closest door and began walking down the hall way, you could see it. Water was everywhere. We had water all over the front of our house and this was not from flooding. It was all from the amount of rain coming down. It pooled by our front door and the wind was literally blowing it inside.
We moved outside next and saw most of our neighbors doing the same as we were doing. The people across the street from us came running over to check and make sure we were OK. We were a little confused by why they were so worried until they showed us. One of the pine trees on the left side of our home snapped off about mid way, roughly 20'-26' long, and flew over the top of our home and landed on the right side of the house. It never hit our home but they could not tell when it happened if it had or not. Anyways, while we were all looking around for a rough guess of 10-15 minuets, we started to hear the sounds of high winds and the tops of trees snapping off. We all were outside, standing in the middle of the eye of Katrina talking thinking the storm was over Tornado's starting taking trees tops out around us and we all ran back inside for a few more hours.
We ended up not having power for a little over a week, a co-workers father in law was shot in the head over a bag of ice in a parking lot and my family just south of us in Louisiana did not have power for 3 weeks. It was interesting seeing National Guard units driving and flying around everywhere. We really lucked up in Hattiesberg compared to how bad it was all around us. Its a time that I will not forget.