Rita weakens to a Tropical Depression

In Pascagoula, the buildings are destroyed, because they are inhabitable due to four feet or more of flood waters. They are all going to have to be razed! It is exactly the same results as if nothing was left but a slab.

Those images do show complete destruction...did you use the zoom feature to look at the details?

Because my brother was in charge of rescues in the western part of the county, I know there was a great deal of hurricane planning done in Jackson County (by the way the county with the least number of deaths along the MS coast). I think it was more planning than was done by the other two counties. Harrison County did not have a mandatory evac and was not very proactive in asking people to leave the coastline; they did have the highest number of fatalities so far, but that may also be because they have the highest population.

Do you know that ATV in the western part of the county saved 23 lives before the surge hit? That's 23 people that didn't have to die from storm surge. That is a poor county and they didn't have to spend money on those vehicles; they had a long-term plan to save lives and it worked.

The police that had to swim out of the station were in BSL, I believe, in Hancock County. That is also the county where the EOC almost didn't make it. However they were in a building 30 feet above sea level. The surge there was 30 feet with waves on top of the surge, and ate away one of the walls of the building.

The EOCs across the MS Gulf Coast did set up according to the surge forecast (which was 18-22 feet, higher locally). In Jackson County they did not anticipate the max surge, being so far from the eyewall - and remember the original track was to go to the west of NOLA. There was really no way they could anticipate an 18 foot surge there; the EOC, at 13 feet of elevation, was felt to be out of the area of danger. Remember that "locally" turned out to be 90 miles to the east of the center of the eyewall (Ocean Springs had a surge higher than 22 feet). This had never happened in any other storm, and I don't believe that NHC warnings specifically anticipated this. The western deployment area in Jackson County was felt to be safe at 25 feet and I don't think they anticipated a 26-foot surge there.

Vehicles were not safe regardless of whether they were in the surge area or not. All glass was blown out of vehicles due to the wind whether they were flooded or not.

Also in Jackson County the upper part of the county, where they might have "pulled back" to, did not have any buildings to pull back to. That is totally rural up there; all the public buildings are on the coastline, and no one really travels to the back county unless they live there. In fact, so much of that county is water, that by "pulling back" to the rural area, they would have probably been surrounded by water and trapped, and unable to get to the populated areas to be of any service.

There are only a couple of roads, all rural, out of that county to the north. The only interstate, I-10, runs along the coast to Mobile, in AL, or to Biloxi, in Harrison County. Even parts of I-10 were flooded after the storm in Jackson County, and impassable. All the local roads into and out of the county were initially flooded somewhere during the surge.

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Katrina's Surge: http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/Katrinas_surge_contents.asp

Edited by Margie (Mon Sep 26 2005 05:34 PM)

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