ectoblog.com

Moved primarily by the “Katrina Disaster”, and the hurricanes that followed in her wake, it became clear to Slim that the field effects of his existing Harmonizers cannot handle the intensity of the dynamics that feed into these severe weather patterns.

How would Slim respond? With the Storm Chaser. If only, if only we’d had one of these last year.

Preliminary field tests indicate that the ‘Storm Chaser’ modifies the intensity of these anomalous ‘Super Storms’ and in some cases, stops them dead in their tracks.

It’s been tested! And it’s on sale, too! $2400. How can I afford not to get one?

I try to stay north of the tracks these days, so I can pretend everything’s normal. I did make an error a couple days ago by driving on 90 between Broad and Menge, I did err.

I remember when I was a kid, in 1975, I moved to Markham in LB. It was six years after Camille, and half the street was still missing. Our house withstood the storm, but three houses down it was rubble. Slowly, over years, one house after another sprouted from the debris. I remember it; one day we could play in the rubble, with the bricks and rusted pipes and weathered little men from boardgames, the next day workers were raising trusses. Slowly houses appeared down from us, closer to the beach. Slowly the rubble gave way to lawns and lincoln continentals. It was just the way it was when I was a kid. Things got better.

It’s all rubble again. My house, the wooden house that stood through Camille, is gone. I can see the little parquet rectangles that made the floor scattered everywhere. Just like I could see little parquet rectangles of dead houses in 1975, scattered in quiet little ghost-lots south of my house, in 1975.

Funny; one of the things I have to do in order to make Blogger work with my site provider is to publish to Blogspot first, then save the page, strip out all mention of “blogspot.com,” and publish it on mach∏.com via Frontpage. Idiotic, I know.

The last post should have read “Go to mach∏.blogspot.com for future updates,” since it would’ve been a lot quicker. My automated stripper took “blogspot.” out of that, though, rendering the entire post meaningless and absurd.

It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. I’m putting this blog back to bed again because I’m tired of it. I may post new Katrina pics from time to time, and even a message or two, but don’t count on it.

We have a reliable generator now, intermittent phone service, and we may even get real power again next week. We have plumbing; we ate Domino’s pizza about an hour ago. Life’s returning to normal, sort of, except for all the new shit.

Rubble in the streets. A dead coastline. The stink. Helicopters in the air. Moving over so a tank can clatter by. “I shoot looters” signs.

That’s all new shit.

After this for awhile, go to mach∏.blogspot.com for word updates; it’s quicker, and we have to conserve generator gas. Pictures will still go to mach∏.com.

Not much to say; just look at the pictures.

Since we need the generator for the fridge, the next update will be this evening sometime.

The coast to a couple hundred yards inland is absolutely smashed. Who knows how many people are still buried in the rubble. I didn’t think anyone would try to ride it out down there, but judging from my brother’s neighborhood, many people did. Whoever did is buried under garbage.

Pass Christian is smashed even farther inland. We had to pick our way around power lines and houses in the streets to go see how my mom’s and other brother’s places fared. North Street is impassable, although they are starting to clear it. Their subdivision had 20 feet of water, more or less. They won’t be living there for months, if the house and apartment can ever be rehabilitated.

Okay, a quick update: we have a dialtone, but we can’t dial out. DSL is up (amazing). Our neighbor is letting us share his generator (he’s amazing), it usually runs the fridge, but I’m using it now for the computer. It’ll mostly run the fridge.

Long Beach halfway down from the tracks is trashed. Obliterated. We don’t hear anything from the Pass or Bay St Louis or Waveland; just rumors of bodies being taken out. Tony and I went to his house on Ford Street south of the tracks in Gulfport near the Long Beach line; his house is standing, but had 4 feet of water in it during the surge. Inside it looks like somebody put water in it, shook it, and let it settle. Five houses closer to the beach, there’s nothing but rubble, rotting chicken from some ship that got trashed in the Gulfport harbor, and what looks like bags of flour everywhere. Probably not heroin, there’s too much of it. Crowley truck containers are everywhere. Dead cats, dead dogs; we couldn’t make it to the beach, although we tried, but some people did and said there were dead things everywhere. Dead seals and dolphins from Marine Life.

The street parallel to Woodward (a north-south road), a couple hundred yards from Tony’s house, has a 200 yard barge sitting on it and where a house used to be. I didn’t notice it at first, even though I was looking right at it. It’s simply too enormous and out of place to register right away. We talked to an older couple who rode out the storm 2 or 3 houses up from where no houses are anymore; they said they had to retreat to the attic at the height of it. They looked pretty beat up. They plan on staying.

We have a line on water now; the Guard is distributing it at Quarles Elementary. We have plumbing; we lost some trees, a few shingles, and had a little water damage. We were lucky. Half our subdivision was under water on the 28th. We weren’t.

Our dog Buddy died at 10pm on the 28th, after the storm. He was an old dog. He hadn’t drunk any water for 3 days; we had no medicine for him except for some Tylenol we injected with a syringe into his colon. Didn’t do a damn bit of good. He was a good dog.

We’re lucky.

The wind’s whipping outside. We’ve got hours and hours of this stuff to look forward to. It’s still dark; I’ll take a picture or two when it gets a little lighter. Still not much debris in the yard or the street, but the eye wall won’t be near here for another nine hours or so if it keeps its present speed.

I doubt we’ll have power two or three hours from now.

Going to sleep. The storm’s not due here for a few hours. I’ll update in the morning if I can.

Some squall bands, nothing major. It’s gotten dark, so I won’t have any new pics until the morning, provided we still have power. We’re watching WLOX.com; they have a live feed on their site.

The blog was done a few weeks ago, but I’m resurrecting it for the storm. The “before” pictures are here. The “after” pictures might be awhile. This picture is from a friend of mine; it’s the Camille memorial at the Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Biloxi. Maybe it won’t become necessary to construct a new memorial. We live in a brick house, in Long Beach, on some of the highest land in Harrison County, which isn’t saying much. A little over two miles from the beach. We’ll have some relatives over, and our sheriff neighbor and his family are riding the storm out in the house next to the house next to us. Misery loves company.

This neighborhood (the older part) came through Camille okay, and we’re hoping for more of the same. Best case, the storm becomes somebody else’s problem, and the “after” pictures look the same as the “before” pictures. That wouldn’t hurt my feelings at all.

Regardless, I’ll update this thing intermittently for as long as the power holds out. Our neighborhood’s power lines are underground, but the same can’t be said for the lines that feed into our neighborhood.

Good times, good times.