We found a bizarre pocket of cell phone reception at the edge of a washed out bridge in Bay St. Louis, Miss. Cell phone reception is almost as cherished as gas in these parts. Even with no power and running water, news of this place spread fast.
A nasty sludge of marsh mud, oil and sewage covers much of the ground. The most sure-footed trucks slide around like they are on ice. The glop could easily suck loose-fitting boots right off a foot. When the muck dries, it cracks and looks like the rubber from a 30-year-old car tire.
We are camped out in the parking lot of a nearly-destroyed motel on the edge of town.
There’s a sign in the motel’s second floor indicating the height of Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge, higher than the roof of our rented RV.
The land is a vast and flat network of rivers, swamps and marshes. When Katrina hit and rivers rose, the devastation sprawled for miles, like when a glass of milk spills on a kitchen table. Several feet of water was reported 15 miles away at the airport.
Debris is everywhere.
At first it looked like dozens of cars were parked along side a road, as if for a sale or a celebration.
Then we saw a Chevrolet pickup resting on top of a Ford sedan. Then we saw a Jeep turned over in a ditch, a Honda sitting in the middle of a crushed mobile home. It was more common to see huge boats resting in yards or along the road than on the water.
We finally reached what seems to be the epicenter of the storm. Several storm survivors talked about the calm eye of the storm lasting 20 minutes, followed by the second savage pounding as the back half of the storm moved through.
In hurricanes Charley and Frances, residents who were in the middle of the storms talked about the gradual re-strengthening of the storm after the eye wall moved by. Katrina wasn’t that way, toggling from serene to torrential in mere moments.
“It was the most eerie feeling of my life,” said Allen Smith, 21.
Authorities are still recovering bodies, using high-tech locators and cadaver dogs. They are quick to correct that it is no longer a search and rescue mission. Now it’s just searching.
Immediately after the storm, authorities didn’t want to waste time recovering bodies when there was a chance others could be saved. Rescue teams marked bodies of the dead with global-positioning tracking beacons and now are returning to retrieve the bodies.
Authorities believe there are at least 40 or so of these bodies that still need to be recovered, and many more are missing. They’ve recovered life jackets in power lines. Authorities don’t know if they broke free from a storm-hijacked boat, or were once attached to people captured by rising water.
We’ve run into countless Florida law enforcement authorities, including sheriff deputies from Polk and Orange counties. About 100 members of the Florida Highway Patrol are aiding in the effort, working 10-day rotations at a time.
We met up with a couple members of the highway patrol from Miami. They said Katrina is far worse than Hurricane Andrew, which roared through south Florida in 1992 and became the gold standard for storm destruction.
According to people here, Katrina is the new gold standard.