One of the more sobering experiences of my professional career was Katrina.
At the time of Katrina, I was working with an excess property business. And, because of my role as Chief Data Monkey, combined with my extracurricular interests of storm-watching, mapping, and general geekery, I ended up in the position of doing our very first assessments of how expensive Katrina was going to be to us, since our adjusters couldn’t easily access the affected areas, and since I’m comfortable doing “before and after” comparisons with aerial photography.
So that’s how it came to be that for a couple of weeks after Katrina, I sat in front of a couple of computers, with a list of locations and their addresses (and statements of values, attachment points, and limits), one web browser opened to Google Maps, and another browser accessing the aerial photos the National Hurricane Center was making available.
One of the “easiest”, yet grimmest, accounts to do this for involved a number of religious properties in southern Mississippi. All I had to do was look up a few churches on/near US 90, see that they were no longer there, to reach the conclusion that our attachment and limits had been blown through.
So, it is with some interest that I encountered this article at the Sun Herald, discussing how church reconstruction efforts are faring:
Up, down and around the Mississippi Coast rebuilding lags, no more certainly than along U.S. 90, aka Beach Boulevard, the scenic drive.
Notably absent are many of the churches that once dotted this thoroughfare. Evidence of them either has been hauled away or is overgrown. Some areas, mostly west of Gulfport but a couple of pockets in Biloxi, too, are so changed as to make locating even the site of a razed church - or business or historic home - impossible. On a recent drive the breadth of 90 in Harrison County, we couldn’t find where St. Patrick Episcopal Church had stood in Long Beach.[...]
What of the others?
Three days and dozens of phone calls later, we know a little bit, enough perhaps to inspire secular rebuilders. The clergymen with whom we spoke are enthusiastic but stoic - about moving slowly, being thorough, being deliberate. As one of them said, using the carpenter’s mantra: Measure twice, cut once.
Although things will never be exactly the same, and progress is painfully slow…at least there is some progress being made.