Katrina home page
After all the coverage of looting in New Orleans, we were a bit surprised to see the convenience store above, open to the skies, with beer (and other products) still on the shelves nearly a week after the hurricane struck. The fact it was conveniently located right across the street from a military checkpoint probably helped, of course. But I think it's also worth noting that we never saw a single incident of looting, or even a person behaving in a selfish or anti-social manner. Everyone we saw was treating others with respect, and that includes the relief workers as well as the victims. Even the police and military personnel who told us "no" so many times (when we were trying to get into restricted areas) did so with respect and a sense of humor.
There had been some looting in this area before the law enforcement and military people arrived in large numbers, and we saw many signs that were intended to intimidate potential looters. But apparently most of the assholes in this part of the world are concentrated in New Orleans.
During the days the power was still off, we drove to Mobile each day to get gas for the generators and other supplies. The gas lines in Mobile were very short (sometimes non-existent), but the gas lines in Gulfport were hours long. The left lane of eastbound I-10 was set aside for emergency vehicles, and we were passed on Tuesday by a convoy of police vehicles from New York.
Wal-Mart has been widely praised for getting supplies to the stricken areas faster than the federal government did, and we got nearly all of our supplies from Wal-Mart. We stopped at Wal-Marts in Atlanta (before 5:00am!) and Birmingham with Jamal and Marsha on the way down to Gulfport, and then Megan and I made some trips to the Wal-Marts in Mobile for additional supplies later. The Wal-Mart in Gulfport was closed for about a week, but when it re-opened there were dozens of trucks full of supplies in the parking lot, ready for immediate sale. The new Wal-Mart in Pass Christian was destroyed, and its parking lot was used as a morgue. As of this writing (9/12), Pass Christian has among the highest body counts with 78 confirmed dead out of a population of 6,000.
Speaking of confirmed dead, I finally found out (after we returned) how the symbols work that search and rescue teams put on the outside of structures they have searched. We saw these symbols on houses and buildings everywhere, with the sole exception of the houses in Marsha's yard. (Were they so smashed up that they didn't bother searching them for survivors?)
The symbols on the right, from an apartment in Gloria's complex, show how it works. When they enter a structure to search for survivors, they put a slash on the building (usually in orange spray paint) with the date to the right of it and some type of identification for the search team on the left. Then they "cross the X" on the way out of the structure, writing body counts at the bottom and other hazards to the right. (That way, if they get in trouble and never come back out, another crew can tell which building they're stuck in because the X isn't crossed.)
In the apartment shown here, two of Gloria's neighbors died, a woman and her daughter who apparently tried to ride out the storm at home. The V with a line through it is also a symbol used to indicated the presence of deceased victims, whereas a V with no line through it means survivors were found.
Below are a few more miscellaneous images we found interesting.
