Visiting the Mississippi Coast

Last week, I traveled to the Mississippi Gulf Coast on business. I truly was amazed and humbled by what I saw. I saw the damage from Hurricane Ivan on the Alabama Gulf Coast last July and August as we covered Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina. There was still extensive damage evident there, but nothing to prepare me for what I saw on the Mississippi Coast.

You saw some signs of the Hurricane through Mobile and along I-10, but the wind damage was mostly limited to trees and outdoor signs. As I drove down I-110 into Biloxi, plenty of blue roof s were still evident. But when you dropped off 110 into Highway 90, it was a different world. The destruction along the beach is indescribable. Quite a bit of debris has been removed, but that does not hide the fact that everything back to the surge line is virtually scoured away.

Just west of Biloxi, I came upon the hotel that Brian Peters and I stayed in with the ABC crew on the Saturday night before the hurricane. It was the Comfort Suites on Beach Blvd., directly across from the ocean, at an elevation of about 14 feet. We knew that it would not be safe with the expected storm surge. We had a second floor room on the east side of the building, about two or three rooms from the ocean. I stopped and looked at the building. Both floors were completely swept through by the storm surge. All of the walls and framing were gone. Only the concrete walls that separated the rooms were left. That meant that the storm surge was probably on the order of thirty feet there. Can you imagine that? Katrina was the Category Three hurricane with the Category Five storm surge.