Katrina aerial photos

I just came across the best aerial photos of post-hurricane Bay St. Louis and Waveland, MS, that I've seen. It's a set of 66 photographs taken on Friday, September 2, 2005, which was Day Five after the hurricane. The first picture was taken at Bayou Caddy, at the far western end of the beach road in Hancock County; you can tell because of the distinctive water tower. The photo sequence proceeds generally eastward through the towns of Clermont Harbor, Waveland, and Bay St. Louis, then heads north up the Bay of Saint Louis to the Jourdan River.

The pictures speak for themselves, which is a good thing, because, looking at most of them, I'm hard-pressed to identify what I'm seeing. I lived there for nine years (almost to the day; I moved there on September 3, 1996) and had visited there often for several years prior to that. Yet I can click on any of the photos, and while it looks familiar, I can't tell what was there before. I've tried to find the pictures that show where certain friends' homes were, and I can't figure it out. The only exception is the historical "Olde Town" area of Bay St. Louis, which is located up on a bluff (this is the area where I lived.) Although it suffered extensive damage, most of the buildings remained standing and so can be identified.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much what Bay St. Louis-Waveland still looks like today, April 1, 2006, seven months after the hurricane. Although much of the rubble has been cleared away, most of the destroyed homes and other structures have not been rebuilt.

What is really interesting is that on separate occasions during the past two weeks, I have mentioned to people here in Portland that I'm originally from New Orleans. They asked whether I was there at the time of the hurricane, and when I told them, no, I was living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, they responded, that's good, you were OK then, because it didn't flood there. I had to explain to them that the Mississippi Gulf Coast was wiped out.

Note: these aerial photos are part of the Hurricane Katrina Aerial Impact Reconnaissance Assessment conducted by the Duke University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines (PSDS). Aerial photographs of several other locations along the Gulf Coast may also be found at their website.

Edited in 2009: The original link to these photos does not work because the PSDS Image Library been moved to another site. Here's the current working link. To get to the series of images I've mentioned, click on "Katrina" in the menu bar. On the page that gives you, open the dropdown "Options" menu located to the upper right of the photoshow, and choose "Album Thumbnails View". The Waveland-Bay St. Louis images begin with Image no. IMG_0574.JPG.

Comments

[Kathy]

Wow. Thanks for posting that link. We were just talking yesterday about how badly we wanted to really know what was going on down on the Alabama & Mississippi coasts. We are only about 250 miles north in AL, but haven't ventured down since our visit which ended up being the weekend before Katrina. I did lots of volunteer work in shelters immediately after, but I struggle to figure out what I can be doing now. It's making me more than a little bit crazy, knowing that all that suffering continues just a little south of us. There are so many people who would like to DO SOMETHING. I am at a loss to figure out what. What I actually said yesterday was, "I'm tired of digging around for information and talking about doing something. Let's get in the car, go down there, and SEE WHAT WE CAN DO and then DO IT."

[Kitty]

Hi, Kathy, thanks for posting again. You posted a while back about wanting to discuss the relief efforts from the "survivors' point of view, but I'm just now getting my head clear enough to be able to talk about it.

I just talked tonight with a friend of mine back in Bay St. Louis. I'm getting ready to write a blog entry about some of the things she said, but she did say that people are still coming from all over the country to help. A lot of students are spending their spring break working on the Coast or in New Orleans. From what I read on the Internet, many of them are finding it to be a life-changing experience. (That's gotten to be kind of a cliched expression, but in this case it's true.)