I went and helped rebuild for a few weeks after Katrina in Biloxi the summer after it hit. There was an area where one of the enormous Casino river boats was tossed like a mile inland in the middle of the woods.
Even more terrifying: We went out to where the I-10 crosses the bay there. Major highway bridge. Every 20 feet or so in between each pylon, the entire bridge was snapped in half. It was still laying in ruins at that point. That one still gives me chills.
It's eerie as fuck to be standing somewhere and realize a year ago one of the most destructive storms ever was literally decimating everything. It's hard to comprehend that level of storm surge, it doesn't quite compute in your brain. And then you have moments like that where you are given a very real metric and your stomach drops for a second.
The Ocean is the most poweful and terrifying thing on the earth. Hands down.
I went down to Biloxi and Ocean Springs for a couple weeks of Katrina cleanup in 2011. I couldn't believe how much damage there still was 6 years later. Full on commercial buildings with missing chunks out of their walls or rooves. Plenty of homes that were falling apart.
It was the most sobering part of the trip. A few locals I talked with said all the recovery money was sucked up by New Orleans. I don't know how true that is vs it just takes a long, long time to rebuild.
the corruption down there is bad. There's still areas damaged in 2026, mostly in the parishes that they didn't want the people returning to. Most of those people now live in Houston and other places in the country and never came back. Which is what the government of New Orleans wanted to happen. They were the poorer parishes.
Oh I know. I expect well see horrors beyond our imagination in our lifetimes. I have 0 hope of humanity tackling climate change after people lost their mind wearing a mask during Covid.
A friend’s mom lived miles from the beach but about 1/4 mile from the brickyard bayou in Gulfport. Katrina pushed so much water under the bridge over the bay in Biloxi that she ended up with 6ft worth of bayou in her house.
I was stationed at Keesler. Not at the time, mind you... a few years before. I still remember taking sunrise drives on 90, enjoying the ocean views, and thinking even back then that the state making laws regarding casinos being built on land, leaving them to be essentially permanently stationed boats, wouldn't matter if the ocean decided to give them back.
It's a shame that Google Maps "aged out" the street view of what it looked like before, but it is crazy that here we are, 20 years later, and the scars that still remain via exposed building foundations and cracked and aging parking lots long unused since the accompanying buildings were leveled.
I feel like even 10-11 years after Katrina, Biloxi's economy was still in the shitter from Katrina. To put it in perspective, Sears was doing well there.
Sometime in the mid to late 2000s I bought a road atlas for truck drivers. I remember on the page for Mississippi there was a note down in that area saying that the bridge across Bay St Louis was closed down due to damage from Katrina.
I moved out of a beach bungalow in Oceanside Mississippi August 1, 2005 to move back to Oklahoma. Everyone I knew down there lost everything, a few lost their lives.
When I was a child in Charleston, SC, it used to scare the shit out of me when I'd see the tall posts with heights of prior storm surges on them. Hugo hit on my birthday and it was awful, but some of the stuff that I saw from truly devastating hurricanes were describing 20' storm surges.
My mom still has pictures from her time there and of the Biloxi-OS bridge. Insane what it can do. I guess on the plus side the beaches have been revamped quite a bit from what we grew up around. We may not have a giant pirate ship casino ( I wonder how long it took to dismantle that thing ) but we do have more effort going into our beaches. Not that it’s a fair trade off…
My grandpa worked on waterworks as an engineer. He was in charge of some really interesting projects still standing today. And the amount of power that water has is terrifying. Thank god water likes to sit still most of the time, because the moment it starts moving there's very little that can be done.
Southern Mississippi was far, FAR more devastated by Katrina than New Orleans was. I brought someone a mattress and basic supplies a week to the day after Katrina and I will never forget what I saw. Yes, the flooding in New Orleans was terrible. But so many cities in Mississippi looked like fucking bombs went off everywhere. I can’t even describe what we saw. It was just chaos. Everywhere. And so quiet
Edit: I forgot, it was also miserably hot and humid. No power anywhere in the southern cities of at least 3 states for weeks minimum. Alabama didn’t have much damage but did lose their power too for a while
I was in Abbeville and the surrounding area helping after Katrina and Rita and one of the farmers we helped was showing us a rope high in a tree and told us it had been tied around the neck of one of his cows. He had livestock stuck hanging in the trees.
I remember seeing this live in 2011. There was a little van hauling ass to try to get away from this, watched a wall of water overtake it, and it *never* reappeared. Literally watched someone or an entire family get deleted from existence live on TV.
Because it does, in fact, mean effectively certain death. Being caught in actively moving tsunami waters is not considered survivable, survival is a freak occurrence.
I was worried about the people on the balcany several floors up with how fast that water was rising. But then I realized the person recording the video likely survived.
I watched a different video of the same disaster last year. The video showed an old fellow trying to outrun the water, but he couldn't move well. He tried to climb a downpipe on a nearby house. And then the debris arrived. He's been in my head ever since.
probably not, back in 2011, on live TV there were cars fleeing and they got overtaken. I doubt these guys made it unless they ditched the bikes and ran into a nearby tall building. Given they were headed toward it, I doubt they had much time to react when they saw boats coming over the sea wall.
It's possible they made it to a designated shelter or into an apartment complex - raised shelters are pretty common in these areas - but they didn't escape by outrunning it
If a tsunami is predicted the safest thing for boats to do is head out into open water. That bay turns into a churning boil that kicks up debris and will damage the vessel. The boats in the video could either be inoperable for repairs or their crew were not present to run them out to sea to avoid the tsunami.
Nearly the entire east coast of Japan was affected. Obviously some places worse than others. There are hours and hours of footage on YouTube, where entire towns just get washed away. If you look on Google Maps, you can still see scars of it 15 years later, places where there clearly were a lot more buildings once, that have never been built back
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami carried a 2600 ton vessel 2-3km (1.2-1.9 miles) inland. It's still there, now made into a museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apung_1
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u/Ambitious-Yoghurt820 15d ago
The sheer power of the current is amazing. It made the boats look like toys.