While we knew in August 2008 this post would go down as one of our best ever we continue to be humbled by the high quality traffic it receives literally from across the world to this day, mostly from Universities and think tanks but also from governments, both domestic and foreign. It has certainly worn well with time because it has gotten more traffic each year since it was published in August 2008 with almost half the total views coming this year and it is one of our top 10 posts in terms of page views. Though the insurance battles for coverage are largely over, 5 years after Katrina and a massive oil spill later, it still remains not what you see but what you don’t here on the post Katrina coast. ~ Sop November 4, 2010
Not what you see but what you don’t…the post-Katrina coast (published August 11, 2008)
For someone who can be a real “chatty Cathy,” I sat quietly with my camera in my lap as Sop drove me down Beach Boulevard – the first time I’ve done that on the post-Katrina coast and the road still isn’t completely open, it’s just no longer blocked.
Before the storm, there wasn’t a prettier stretch of highway in America. I’m convinced of that. With the Gulf on one side and one beautiful home after another on the other, it was a sight to behold.
The Gulf side is as beautiful as ever; but, not so the other where all that remains of many of those beautiful homes is a drive way and an otherwise vacant, weed-filled lot.
By the time we headed into the Bay-Waveland area, I’d seen more slabs that I could count and was feeling like an empty lot myself, the experience was so draining.
What made it so draining and me so sad was how much those vacant lots looked like those I saw right after the storm almost three years ago.
If this slab was the place I once called home, I can only imagine that I would have been overwhelmingly sad; leading me to believe that the empty lots on the Coast leave others empty and sad – depression is the clinical term.
According to cognitive-behavioral psychologists, depression in humans may be similar to learned helplessness in other animals, who remain in unpleasant situations over which they’d initially had no control.
Once we began to eat, meet, and greet, it wasn’t possible to be sad; and I bounced back and took these pictures the next day. However, others on the Coast are having more than the just a brief depressing experience like my encounter with the empty lots. WLOX, Biloxi television, ran a related story the day before I arrived. Continue reading “From the archives – and why we”
