five years ago

… and I still remember it like it was yesterday, even if, as Pistolero points out, parts of it are being intentionally forgotten. Rather than just ramble about, as I often do, I will just share what few pictures I took of the post-Katrina disaster – though these were taken about two weeks after the storm itself. Captions for the images will come before them.

This was my apartment complex in Ocean Springs – a series of buildings with garages underneath, two stories of apartments above, and a marina in the U the buildings describe. That blueish structure in the bottom of the U was a dockside convenience store / gas station about half a mile down the road from the complex, and was deposited there by the storm:

Another view of the same convenience store, showing some of the damages inflicted to the apartments – note the docks folded up on the ground, the suitcoat still hanging in a closet, and the X’s from the disaster response teams noting whether people were found:

The counterpoint of the boats lined up semi-neatly in the parking lot caught my eye:

The water rose to about midway up the second story of the complex; thankfully, my apartment was on the third story, but you could see where those same boats in the previous picture bounced off the building during the storm:

For reference, my apartments were right about where that “A” marker is – I understand they are condos now, though I have no idea how much or what repairs were done to them:

This was the Interstate 10 bridge across the marshes to the northwest of Pascagoula – more specifically, that destroyed span was the northern side – a barge had cut loose from its moorings and repeatedly smashed against the bridge during the storm:

As we drove around, these trucks were everywhere – open-topped semi rigs with mechanical manipulator arms between the cabs and the trailers. They would drive down the road, grabbing up piles of debris that people had piled on the kerb:

Of course, all that debris had to end up somehwere:

These pictures do not do the piles justice… this particular grass field was easily half a mile long and a quarter deep, and was about 75% covered with about 20 feet of trash:

Entire houses, clothing, food, trees, cars, train cars, semi rigs, buildings, and Lord alone knows what else was in these piles:

We drove past about five separate areas slowly being filled in with the waste, but I have no idea how many total there were:

Looking back, I sincerely wish I had taken more pictures than I did… but, at the time, we were helping people out and getting what we could packed up and moved out, and it seemed rather… insensitive… to be standing around taking pictures of people’s lives entirely and completely destroyed. And the smell… it was everywhere, and even after spending three or so days in it, you never quite got used to it…

Which is pretty much the point of this post – New Orleans was pretty much flattened by the storm, as cities built under the sea level tend to be when waves come along, but they are far from the only people who are still recovering from the disaster. The entire Gulf Coast from about Mobile, Alabama to about Corpus Christie, Texas was affected by the storm, and it is probably fair to say that far more people outside of New Orleans were displaced, rendered homeless, injured, and killed than in the city, despite the media’s seemingly unending focus on that particular urban area – I wish more people would remember that.