Tag: Mississippi Gulf Coast

It’s impossible to be on the Mississippi Gulf Coast without talking about Katrina. Locals talk about before “the storm” and after. They all have stories — about a teacher who sought refuge in a school and the water line reached 5 1/2 feet and fish were swimming in the classroom, about the military memorabilia that ended up in another person’s yard and the owner couldn’t be tracked down, about homes needing to be gutted. The immediate impact of the widespread evacuations and decisions to start over elsewhere meant that in one school of 620 students, only 120 were back when it re-opened.

Today, nearly 12 years later, the number of households and jobs along the Mississippi Gulf Coast exceed those of before Katrina.

They’re still rebuilding in some spots. You see the occasional empty lot where a home once stood, and most buildings on the beach are no longer allowed. But while I saw plenty of homes and other buildings close to the water on stilts, I was surprised by how many are not.

I heard that it was to do with where FEMA sets the flood zone, that if you don’t need mortgage insurance you can do as you please, even that insurance rates are coming down because new homes are being built better — hurricane-proof windows, reinforced frames and such. That may keep the wind from blowing off the roof or picking up the home and throwing it down somewhere else, but let me know how works out when the next big one comes and there’s widespread flooding.

On the other hand, this 500-year-old oak, the “Friendship Oak”  at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast campus with its 155-foot canopy, survived Katrina but lost a piece in a more recent storm.

Thursday was spent along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The beaches were gorgeous — and empty. Maybe when there’s this much sun and sand, it’s just no big deal. And it was a workday. Still, wherever rowdy spring breakers go, it wasn’t here.

But the wind! We were biking west to east. That would have been great on Wednesday, when we would have flown along thanks to a tailwind. But we got a headwind. The locals say there is always wind (and that it can change direction during the day). Now maybe they were trying to make us feel good, but even they said it was stronger than normal. Fortunately we rode a few blocks inland for much of the morning, from Waveland to Long Beach. I think the wind picked up after lunch, when we took the beach path from Long Beach to the Biloxi lighthouse. I persisted. But it was slow going! And it killed my legs.

Arlen died too. Shark got him:

So what’s the beach path like? Think concrete sidewalk, not planks like parts of the Jersey Shore. Sometimes the path is wide, but other times it’s no wider than a sidewalk. A recipe for constant conflict with people coming on and off the beach (or even the benches on the far side of the wide version), I thought. But a local claimed no, that it’s pretty empty.

Why the wildly inconsistent widths, even in the same town? It seems to be tied to how they chose to spend post-Katrina money.

Take the road instead? There was a section with what’s essentially an access road, and that was fine. But otherwise you’re talking two lanes in each direction and 50 mph. No thanks.

So the beach path might work when you have a tailwind, assuming it’s not so crowded that you can’t bike. Better would be to complement it with a signposted on-road option using quiet, family-friendly roads a bit inland (and maybe past some other businesses?) for when you’re going in the “wrong” direction.