Long Drive In

Highway 90 (a road traversing the length of the entire Gulf Coast) re-opened this morning. It wasn't as bad as I thought, but it wasn't good. Gustav certainly extracted its toll on the beach.

The first (and obvious) thing to notice was the mounds of sounds on both sides of the road. I'm guessing they were about three feet high. Tons and tons of sand blown off of the beach and onto the highway. (A close look at the background shows one of our lighthouses!)

Once I actually cruised into Biloxi, the beach became littered with vast expenses of odd brown debris. Seriously, I have NO idea what that stuff is. I didn't see anything like it in Gulfport! Seaweed? Clumped up grass? It looked like tattered old ropes. Miles of it.

Certainly don't envy whomever has to clean up that mess. They've got several days (weeks) worth of work ahead of them. Hopefully some kind of mechanized unit that can be driven around the beach all day. But they don't exactly make "Cleanup The Beach After A Durricane" style lawn mowers.

Finally, almost to the office, I caught sight of some of the serious debris. Snapped a picture of a big mound of the stuff. I'm guessing it approaches eight feet high. Maybe twenty feet round, at the base? A hulking jumble off wood, pipes, boards, and metal beams mixed with tons of soggy earth.

Of course Katrina was easily 300% worse than this. Where I only saw a couple of mounds of debris from Gustav, Katrina created unbroken MILES of debris, walls of it, almost ten feet tall, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Gustav could have been much worse.

Hopefully we won't get anything worse this season.