Rita and Perdido Key
Kidnapped Major Dad and forced him to drive the car while I snapped.
With the dunes all lost during Ivan, the sand has it’s way with the main drag.
The Perdido section of Gulf Islands National Seashore was open…
…but the sand was moving at face shredding speed…
…and the water was churned brown and dangerous.
There used to be 15 foot high dunes here and you couldn’t see the Gulf from the park road.
Now you can sit in the car and snap away, it’s been that flattened.
And no matter where you look…
~ from the chunks missing out of buildings and blue roofs in the first picture, to this sentinel at the gates of the park ~
…everywhere are reminders of Ivan.
Life | Mr. Bingley | 
September 24, 2005 3:37 pm
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Nasty stuff, THS. Glad you made it through that.
Oh, me too JeffS, thanks. The folks down the road have no idea what they’re in for, rebuilding wise. We’re an itty-bitty place and look at us a year later ~ a lot of it still looks like it was only a month ago.
Yep. We got hit by Charley – and we are still rebuilding (and I’m in Lee County – Charlotte County, just north, was the worst hit). There’s still a ‘FEMA city’ up there.
Kathy, there was a really good NYT article last Sunday about one of the BIG FEMA cities down by ya’ll. They’re telling those people they need to be out by February, like they’re telling our folks March is the cut-off. But where the hell are they supposed to go? There is no housing available for these folks anymore. One of the stories here is a woman who’s a single parent, had a $450/mth apartment and had to move out because the ceilings in the building collapsed. They’ve renovated her apartment and the others in the complex, but now the rents start at $1100/mth. How on earth are they supposed to swing that? What lower end apartments buildings weren’t fixed up have been razed, so there is no where for these folks. It was the same story in the Times article. The one girl’s husband had left because he couldn’t stand the strain of living in the trailer park, so she’s lost his meager income. She puts the bar code tags on the shelves at Wal-Mart for $7 hr., her former $400+/mth apartment has gone hi-end ~ what are these people AND their communities going to do? The guys down the road from us have NO CLUE what they’re in for. (The Times said Port Charlotte authorities were sending teams west of us, to try to give them some sort of heads up.)