Email from Oct 23, 2005\r\nHello All,\r\n\r\nThings here move slowly. That\'s true no matter how much effort you put into them. Situations like this teach a person patience. I spent the week doing \"windshield surveys\" to prepare for assessment teams. Things get better as you go east. Passcagoula and Ocean Springs are very different from B.S.L. In those towns the historic structures are either gone or they are in great shape for the most part. Thirty-five miles makes a big difference. Restaurants are opening and things are largely getting back to \"normal.\" Pass Christian and Bay St. Louis are a real mess by comparison. Almost everything has at least some damage. Nothing is open except one gas station. It always has a line about twenty people long at the cash register.\r\n\r\nSaturday in Ocean Springs we had another public meeting. About fifty people in dire straits looking for answers. It\'s one of the hardest parts of this job because I don\'t have very many answers. No matter how hardened you become it still gets to you. I spoke with a woman in her eighties whose house had been in the family for 90 years. She has no flood insurance and no source of resources that would enable her to save her house. TO add insult to injury, a bunch of well-meaning Baptist volunteers from Georgia came in to clean up their house. To deal with the mold problem they simply cut out the interior walls from the water line down. Problem is that under the drywall was perfectly good 100 year old bead board - irreplaceable. They just ripped it out and carted it away. The photos she showed me almost brought tears to my eyes.\r\n\r\nIt looks like I\'m going to be moving soon. Scott and Annie MacDonald have a travel trailer that they\'re going to let me use. We\'ve been trying to figure out how to connect it to their house\'s sewer system but I\'m not hopeful having examined their house\'s plumbing. It\'s not actually their house, Scott had renovated it for the owner and when Scott and Annie\'s house in Pass Christian was completely destroyed the owner invited them to clean it up and move in. As they were wiped out they decided the only thing to do was help other folks which they have been doing ever since the storm. It\'s their form of therapy. They housed the assessment team we had here last week among other things. Scott is a carpenter and seemingly all over town fixing and cleaning, sometimes for pay and sometimes for free. He has a deal with the local porta-potty guy as he has them at a number of construction sites and he thinks that if we can\'t get the trailer hooked to the sewer he may just get the porta-potty guy to come over on his rounds and suck the holding tank dry. In the meantime I remain sleeping on the floor of the Historical Society offices.\r\n\r\nThe weather is turning cooler which means that the rainy season is not too far away. It hasn\'t rained here since the hurricane and everything is dry and dusty. That\'s the good news and the bad news. It\'s good in that the damaged structures haven\'t suffered from rain damage - the bad news is that fire is an ever present danger. Last week IH-10 was shut down because a spark from a welder\'s torch started a grass fire near the\r\nhighway and the smoke reduced visibility to zero. Saturday there was\r\nstill some smoke and the highway east of Gulfport reeked of burning vegetation.\r\n\r\nI took today\'s photo on the way back from Passcagoula on Friday. It is one of the Navy\'s LST landing ships (there are lots of naval vessels around Passcagoula - it\'s the home of the Ingalls Shipyard where many of them are built) which violated one of the three rules of seamanship (1. Keep the water on the outside; 2. Keep the people on the inside; 3. Keep the boat off the land.).\r\n\r\nWhen I transfered my address book to my laptop everything got a bit scrambled so some of you may not have received my first two emails. Let me know if you want me to send them. I spent an hour this morning trying to get it straightened out. Mozilla Thunderbird\'s import function could probably use some tweaking (sounds better than operator error!). Be well.\r\n\r\n73\r\n\r\nL.