View of Mississippi from a contractor

I work for an equipment company that makes, repairs, sells truck equipment. Dump trucks, flat beds, cranes, bucket, utility, trucks, etc.

They were swamped from orders when the storm hit the gulf and had to cancel attending a few shows and made my life, job difficult and backed up.

Anyway, called one of many contractors to follow up with their needs/interest. He was on a cell phone in the middle of no where repairing phone cables. He said it looked like a bomb went off and the area he was in was covered in 35ft of water, then 15ft and now dry. 35ft is about as high as a 3 story building or top of a telephone pole. He said nothing was there but foundations from where buildings use to be. He said the news doesnt do the place justice as far as the damage is concerned. He said he saw no buildings no where, it was all flat and level.

Man, hard to believe 35ft of water covering somewhere that is suppose to be above sea level.

35 feet sounds a bit extreme but...

A Car and Driver guy has/had a house in Miss. Water was bubling up into the second floor at the worst of it. That would have been 20 feet or so above sea level.

My mother in law has gone down to Mississippi twice and New Orleans once to help medically. She took many pics each time and some of the destruction is hard to imagine and we were in Houston during Hurricane Alicia and we lived on Galveston Island.

35 feet is hard to imagine and a bit hard to believe in a spread out area but there was a three story orphanage in Galveston during the flood in 1900 and it was completely covered by the flood. They say the entire island was covered in at least 20 feet of water and every single building was damaged. But it's an island... surrounded by water... Just 20 to 35 feet seems more fathomable on an island.

Another interesting tidbit about the 1900 Galveston flood was the number is usually quoted at about 8,000 but I've read that at least 1,000 of those were from looters after townsfolk and law enforcement were ordered to shoot to kill on the spot.

I know Katrina displaced so many and the dollar level was incalculably high, but the Galveston hurricane and flood is still the worst non-war disaster in US history, in numbers of lives.

I have a friend who went down thinking he was going to be in charge on the Salvation Army's Ham Radio comms - what he ended up was in charge of ALL their communications. He brough back pictures and stories. He was down ther 4-6 weeks or so, but MOST of that time was spent in Jackson MS, on the "civilization" side of the coms links, but Jeff is one to go visit his teams

For the hams in the bunch - he was a BIT skeptical RE Winlink before he went down - NOW he says "it's CRITICAL", and sings nothing but the praises of the guys from Texas who came in and setup the Winlink