A report from the MS-LA AP editors meeting

You will want to read this! It is a report from the Mississippi-Louisiana Associated Press Managing Editors yearly meeting. This appeared on the PicayuneItem.com.

"A child’s tire swing made from a thick rope and a worn out tire still hangs from the branch of a wounded live oak behind the pile of rubble that once was a home.

The view from the 11th floor of the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino in Biloxi looking south towards U.S. 90 and beyond towards the Mississippi Sound reveals a patchwork of piles of rubble, homes with blue roofs and homes that appear to be waiting for a demolition crew.

Also in view are dozens of live oak trees showing only a few green leaves on their remaining branches. Where once there was canopy of trees through which only small portions of homes could be seen, now everything is laid bare.

My favorite part:

"Friday morning we boarded the bus for our eye-opening trip along the Gulf Coast. This was the first time I had seen what had taken place east of the Bay of St. Louis. Everything has been in a time-warp since the storm and I literally have not had the time to get along that portion of the Coast. I couldn’t imagine anything as bad as what happened to Bay St. Louis, Waveland and Pearlington.

The damage was truly catastrophic here as well, though. All those beautiful antebellum and antebellum-like homes along the Coast were demolished or were turned into shattered shells of what they once had been. Katrina had done to these homes, including Beauvoir, what all the previous storms along the Coast had been unable to do."