Personal Perspective of a Hurricane

[DrLeftover]

From 2005



As some people on this forum may not have a good grasp of what terms like Storm Surge mean, I offer this-

Let's put the damage from

Hurricane Katrina in perspective.

©05 The Media Desk

http://themediadesk.com​

The photo below is from July of this year (2005), taken near Pascagoula, Mississippi, after Tropical Storm Cindy came through. In this photo, you are looking almost due North, Bayou Heron, Grand Bay, and the Gulf are behind the camera. During Cindy the water where these people are standing was about three feet deep. Look at the hood of the car behind the piling, you can see marsh grass that had been washed up onto it.

It is at the house on the Bayou owned by Mrs. Desk's father. (the taller man standing just left of center facing the camera). The site is just barely above the normal high tide level of the Bayou and about a mile from the Gulf of Mexico. The house itself had survived Camille and George and several other storms, including Dennis earlier this year, that had made landfall in this area.

[On a map, New Orleans is about sixty miles South West across Mississippi Sound]

The man in the white shirt in the center of the photo is her brother, Jimmy.

Jimmy is about six feet tall.

Compare his height to the piling behind him. It would be about eleven feet to the top of the piling.

That would make the floor of the house on the pilings about twelve feet above normal high tide.

During Katrina this area experienced a storm surge of over 20 feet.

The water was over the roof of the house.

Jimmy and his father found part of the kitchen floor in the woods in the background. The rest of the house is still missing.

They did not rebuild.



Thank you

http://themediadesk.com/newfiles3/katrina.htm