Katrina home page
Waveland and Bay St. Louis were directly in the path of the hurricane, and the damage they suffered was the worst we saw anywhere. All over town, boats had been deposited on dry land and cars had been dumped in the water. And the fancy homes along Beach Boulevard had been so thoroughly destroyed that it was actually less heart-wrenching than some of the other stuff we saw: they didn't even look like homes any more, just scattered debris. But looking closely through the wreckage, there were lots of sad details, such as the clipping Megan found of an article about a woman's lily garden (at the bottom of this page).
The woman to the right had an amazing story. She rode out the storm inside the building behind her, with her husband and brother. (This business is next door to the Goodwill where Gloria worked.) They watched the roofs come off buildings nearby, and then they watched the water flow past "like a river rushing down the street" — about two feet of water flowed through here, far from the ocean. They lost some windows when the storm first hit, then boarded them up during the lull as the eye of the hurricane passed over, and then waited out the second battering from the trailing edge of the hurricane. It probably wasn't a very wise decision to stay, but they got away with it this time.
The Bay St. Louis bridge on highway 90 was completely destroyed by the storm surge, as shown here. This bridge connects Pass Christian to the Waveland and Bay St. Louis areas.
The other photos below show some of the damage we saw in this area. The thing that the pictures can't convey (at least from ground level) is the magnitude of it all. There was mile after mile of this stuff.
