Two days before I was scheduled to come down to the Gulf coast as a \r\nvolunteer radio operator (I\'ve been a ham operator since I was in high \r\nschool) Peter Brink, V.P. of the National Trust for Historic \r\nPreservation called and asked me to lead the Trust\'s damage assessment & \r\nrecovery teams here. I agreed to do so on the condition that I could at \r\nleast partially fulfill my prior commitment.\r\n\r\nI arrived in Gulfport,MS on 9/11/05 after driving from Baltimore in two \r\ndays, about 1,200 miles. The next morning I was assigned to be the net \r\ncontrol operator for the Red Cross radio net that covered Hancock and \r\nHarrison counties. It\'s like being the telephone operator on a giant \r\nparty line. At that time there were still no working land lines at all \r\nand cell phones only worked if you got on or near Interstate 10. Twelve \r\nhours a day I managed the net and routed traffic to and from the Red \r\nCross Headquarters in Gulfport. For that first week I actually saw \r\nalmost nothing as I was either sleeping or working in a communications \r\ntrailer staring at a bank of radio transceivers.\r\n\r\nI slept on the floor of a R.C. shelter in a grade school and ate shelter \r\nfood and the occasional MRE. (They\'re better than C-rations.) I had it \r\npretty good. We had toilets that flushed and the electricity was back \r\non in Gulfport so there was air conditioning at night (temps went to 95 \r\nevery day). It was just about the closest thing to the Presidential \r\nSuite you could find on the Gulf Coast. Many, many people were doing a \r\nlot worse.\r\n\r\nIt was a tremendous experience especially for a stimulus addict like \r\nmyself. The radio ops I worked with were from all over the country and \r\nthough they had disparate operating styles, experience and/or training, \r\nthe radio operation ran very smoothly. We train for this sort of thing \r\non a regular basis. (The American Radio Relay League, our nat\'l. \r\nassociation, has a new section on its web site devoted to stories \r\nwritten by hams about their Katrina experiences. See \r\nhttp://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/PublicServiceStories/?evt_id=1 )\r\n\r\nAfter my five days I retreated to find a clean place with at least \r\nreliable cell phone service. I figured Mobile but there were no rooms \r\nto be had anywhere. I drove 90 miles north to Evergreen, AL before I \r\nfound a motel room. For 36 hours I did laundry, used the cell phone and \r\ncomputer to organize the Trust\'s first volunteer team and ate two salads \r\napproximately the size of my head as well as drinking a pint of Meyers \r\nRum. I also slept in a bed.\r\n\r\nI returned to Gulfport on Monday, 9/18 and met with my team of \r\narchitects and engineers and started looking at dead buildings. Until \r\nthat time I had not gotten to the waterfronts at all. I lived through \r\nHurricane Elisha in 1983 in Houston and Galveston so I am not unfamiliar \r\nwith hurricanes, hurricane damage. I\'ve even lived through a tornado in \r\nthe Upper Midwest. What was staggering about this was the vast extent \r\nof the damage. It went from east of Mobile to almost Houma, LA. Most \r\nof Mississippi was in the eastern semicircle of the storm (in that \r\nsemicircle you have to add the speed of the storm itself to the circular \r\nwind speed - in the western half you subtract it). The damage gets \r\nworse from Mobile all the way to Bay St. Louis where I am living now. \r\nThe eye went over Bay St. Louis and the eye wall went over Pass \r\nChristian. Most of Pass Christian was wiped out. Most of Waveland was \r\nwiped out. Most of Long Beach was wiped out. That\'s wiped out as in \r\ngone, no longer in existence, looks like everything has been put through \r\na blender and strewn across acres of dead, upended live oaks gone. They \r\nall look like suburbs of Hiroshima except they don\'t glow in the dark. \r\nThe January tsunami penetrated perhaps 1,000 yards inland. The major \r\ndamage of Katrina penetrated 20 miles. It left an estimated 40 million \r\ncubic yards of debris and destroyed 65,000 buildings (and, \r\nunfortunately, counting). B.S.L. was to some extent spared because it\'s \r\non the only bluff on the Mississippi Coast. When I first came to B.S.L. \r\n18 days after the storm they were still looking for bodies, there was no \r\nelectricity and no water pressure. Broken houses littered the railroad \r\ntracks. Fifty yards of the bluff was scoured away by the storm.\r\n\r\nOne of the great frustrations of my life is that I have been unable to \r\nconvey either in words or photographs what it was (is) like. It\'s a \r\nterrible cliche and I cringe to hear it come from my lips, but you just \r\ncan\'t get it unless you\'ve actually seen it and smelled it. And seen it \r\ngo on for miles and miles and miles.\r\n\r\nAfter a week of surveying dead and dying buildings I returned to my home \r\nin Baltimore and spent ten days fulfilling some business obligations. I \r\n came back to Mississippi on Oct. 13 and have been here ever since as \r\nthe Trust\'s representative for the whole Mississippi coast. Since I\'ve \r\nbeen down here I\'ve sent a series of six emails to a bunch of my \r\nfriends, each with a photograph. (Failure obviously hasn\'t stopped me \r\nfrom trying to communicate what\'s still happening here.) They were \r\nwritten contemporaneously over the last 40 days and 40 nights.