Some Gustav Aftermath With a Local Perspective

We’ll start first in Hancock County. JR Welsh reports the facts for the Sun Herald, I’ll add some perspective.

Along the Bay of St. Louis, pounding surf further eroded the coastline along Beach Boulevard, and piers were taken out by the unruly waves. The surge was estimated at 6 to 8 feet.

There was also a high tide around 1:00PM which added to the total water. Growing up I saw “Gustav” many times. As Mr Welsh reports low lying areas were hit hard. The surprise to me was seeing DeRussy Motors flooded on WLOX.

In Pearlington, “the initial assessment is not going to be good,” said Hancock County Supervisor Rocky Pullman, whose district includes the isolated area. Some homes flooded, and “there may very well have been water-well contamination” in the area, which still has no public water system, he added.

Pearlington is a great spot for fish camps, it is very low on the east side of the Pearl River mouth. Katrina previously wiped it clean.

Officials feared that water and sewer infrastructure in the south county, already pummeled by Katrina, again suffered damage.

Beach road was largely torn up ongoing infrastructure repairs when Gustav hit. The south of CSX tracks west side of Waveland is largely done and most likely did not flood. My lot did not flood.

Trees and power lines were felled. Fallen trees blocked several major thoroughfares, including Nicholson and Central avenues in Waveland.

Typical Hurricane aftermath.

Cars were lost to high water, and homes in neighborhoods off the Jourdan River – including Shoreline Park – suffered flood damage that was feared to be extensive.

I’m scratching my head on that one, the ppl that live in those areas have flooded many times and know to get their cars out. The houses that survived Katrina were generally raised as are all the new houses. Most likely newbies.

Along the beach in Waveland, several Mississippi cottages were inundated by the storm surge.

There are several V zones in Waveland such as the end of Coleman Avenue and nearby streets.  All the new construction is raised, well above yesterday’s waterline.

Don Hammack filed the Harrison County damage story for the Sun Herald and again the aftermath of Gustav was nothing we haven’t seen many times before:

Mississippi Power said late Monday afternoon that 17,600 customers were without power, including 8,000 in Gulfport. Trucks and helicopters headed out to start evaluating the damage. That work and the beginnings of repairing the electrical network was to stop at 10 p.m.

At 5:30 a.m., the company’s own crews will be joined by 300 additional workers, with another 1,000 from around the country joining at midmorning. They won’t be able to estimate when all power would be turned back on until the damage assessment was done.

Cindy Duvall, Mississippi Power spokesman, said the company was unsure how accurate their numbers were for those left without power. She said the large numbers of evacuated homes mean large numbers of unreported outages, so that figure could rise.

The story quotes several local politicians who sum up the situation in Harrison County well:

District 4 Supervisor William Martin said the first thing he checks in these situations is Turkey Creek.

“I’m kinda surprised,” he said. “We’re not seeing as much water there as I had expected.”

He said some neighborhoods in his district prone to street flooding got that.

District 2 Supervisor Kim Savant said Brickyard Bayou and Bayou Bernard were well out of their banks. They had seen a lot of trees down, but realized that the pruning job Katrina did made post-Gustav work easier.

Supervisor Connie Rockco said she had people in her District 5 that were trapped in their flooded neighborhoods – or trapped out.

“Our biggest problem is people adhering to the curfew,” she said.

Biloxi Mayor A.J. Holloway said the city’s water and sewer systems had survived well as of early afternoon. Water in low-lying areas prevented him from doing drive-by inspections of the Isle of Capri or the Palace, but he said outside of about 3 to 4 feet of water in the first floor of the Hard Rock Casino, the others appeared in good shape.

“I think the big story,” Holloway said, “is that there is no big story.”

It is worth noting Highway 90 is closed due to debris cleanup.

In Jackson County the impacts were much less than the West side as Margaret Baker reports:

Jackson County Emergency Operations Center Director Butch Loper said the county fared well compared to their neighbors to the west, especially in Harrison and Hancock counties where the higher surge was reported.

Still, Loper said, there were some problems related to contraflow that would have to be corrected.

The contraflow agreement with Louisiana, Loper said, is meant to close all eastbound traffic from Interstate 55 and 59, but that didn’t happen shortly after neighboring New Orleans evacuated.

Allowing the additional eastbound traffic, Loper said, caused fuel supplies to drop drastically and law enforcement officials had to start using their reserve supply during the storm.

In addition, Loper said the Mississippi Department of Transportation failed to let Jackson County law enforcement officials know that they’d set the traffic lights to caution signals, causing further problems when the contraflow traffic hit U.S. 90.

Not surprisingly MDOT appears the weak link in the state’s Disaster Plan. That is not surprising given they are a 3 man political fiefdom that is run largely free from public accountability.

I also have two stories from the Times Picayune centered on the areas hard hit by Katrina. We start off in St Tammany and the T-P damage report:

As Hurricane Gustav sloshed and slogged and bulled his way through St. Tammany Parish on Monday, he tried his best to impress.

He smacked coastal homes and roads south of Slidellas he passed by with a sneer.

He flooded the Mandeville lakefront, extending the reach of floodwaters block by block past Lakeshore Drive as the afternoon wore on.

He grabbed hold of the lower Tchefuncte River and shook it like a maraca until it spilled over its banks into Madisonville.

He juked through neighborhoods from one end of the parish to another, selectively toppling just enough pine trees onto utility lines to cause widespread power outages.

But in the end, he was a loudmouth bully without street cred, a superstorm wannabe who didn’t have game. When he finally got out of St. Tammany’s face, wary residents and authorities could see the big picture: for all his bluster, Gustav was no Katrina.

After a late-afternoon inspection tour, St. Tammany Parish President reported, “I feel a lot more comfortable, as I rode and looked, that the damage assessment to private property appears to be minimal.”

Davis asked evacuated residents to wait until Wednesday to return home, because Slidell was left without water or sewage treatment service, the extent of water and sewer service in Mandeville was undetermined and many areas throughout the parish don’t have power.

“We are asking all of our residents to give us Tuesday to make these major repairs and assessments,” Davis said.

Storm surge averaged 6 to 7 feet across most of the Lake Pontchartrain shoreline in St. Tammany, perhaps slightly higher in the Mandeville and Madisonville areas, Davis said.

About 45,000 households in the parish were left without power, Davis said. Parish workers’ priority Tuesday will be cutting fallen trees away from power lines so the utility workers can make their assessments.

Next up is the report on the new floodgates at the 17th Street and London Ave. canals. Sheila Grissett has the story for the Times Picayune:

The floodgates at the 17th Street and London Avenue canals remained closed Tuesday morning, waiting for the water level in Lake Pontchartrain to drop.

It was the maiden run for massive flood gates and temporary stations the Army Corps of Engineers built after Hurricane Katrina breached floodwalls on both canals and caused catastrophic flooding.

At 17th Street, along the border of New Orleans and East Jefferson, the temporary corps pump stations are continuing this morning to help the New Orleans Sewerage & Water Board drain the canal of rainwater.

At London Avenue, the gates are still closed, but the corps pumps are no longer running because there’s no excess water in the canal, said Col. Jeff Bedey, the corps Hurricane Protection Office chief who had responsibility for building the stations and gates on all three outfall canals, including the Orleans Avenue Canal.

“The pumps ran all night long,” Bedey said Tuesday morning. “But the lake is still at 4 (feet), so the structures remain in place.”

Finally we find out Plaquemines parish had a very close call:

Plaquemines Parish officials dashed across the Mississippi River late Monday in a desperate effort to stem an overtopped levee standing between a surging canal and a Braithwaite subdivision.

Storm surge blowing in from Hurricane Gustav pushed water to the brink of the eight-foot levee, which protects a community of some 200 people in the Braithwaite Park subdivision — not all of whom had left ahead of the storm, officials said.

Their efforts appeared to be working: By late Monday night the water level had begun to fall slightly and water running over the levee had slowed to a trickle. But authorities planned to stay with the levee all night.

The mad scramble to bolster the levee was the biggest drama in a day that largely spared Plaquemines Parish, which as late as Sunday had expected to take the brunt of the storm and suffer Hurricane Katrina-like flooding.

Katrina Ground Zero was largely spared the wrath of Gustav. Cleanup will kick into high gear when the rain departs.