Above:A 360-degree photo shows a rusted boat and other wreckage at Bayou Caddy, a port west of Waveland. (John Brecher / MSNBC.com)
About this project
In the coming months, MSNBC.com will focus its coverage of the Hurricane Katrina recovery on two cities on the hard-hit Mississippi coast.
Though Bay St. Louis and Waveland are far from the media spotlight on New Orleans, the intertwined fates of the people, businesses and institutions in these towns tell the story of an entire region's struggle to recover from the most destructive storm in U.S. history.
While my dad, mom, two sisters and I were at Zulu (a traditional Mardi Gras parade) we all got hungry.
Across the street was a Popeye's chicken and biscuit house. The line was all the way out the door! The place was packed to the brim with people. You hade to get in line get your receipt and about an hour later they would call your number on the receipt.
Marcella Archibeque is spitting mad that she can't obliterate her own bit of Gulf Coast history; she wants her historic shotgun cottage scraped off the face of the earth and sent to the big trash heap where other architectural victims of hurricane Katrina have gone.
But it's exactly because this shotgun style home -- or what is left of it -- is designated as "historic" that she's having trouble getting it bulldozed by the Army Corps of Engineers.
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Six months after back-to-back-to-back hurricanes lashed the Mississippi Gulf Coast and southern Florida, the Small Business Administration says it has been processing and approving low-cost disaster loans at a record pace for tens of thousands of hurricane victims.
But those figures carry little weight with critics who say that even a record pace isn’t fast enough given the scope of the natural disaster, or with victims left wondering why their application has been denied or, worse, if it has gotten lost in some bureaucrat's computer.
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- Tish Williams is sitting on a ticking time-bomb, and she couldn't be happier.
As executive director of the Hancock County Chamber of Commerce, Williams has been an unrelenting advocate for the business community, pushing and prodding and helping grease the wheels of a devastated economy in just about every way you can imagine. But until now, any business she approached, any deal she proposed, crashed into the one question on everyone's mind: How many people are living in the county and its two incorporated cities, Bay St. Louis and Waveland?
WAVELAND, Miss. -- Mardi Gras preparations by the Krewe of Nereids are usually a closely guarded secret, with the elaborate decorations and themes for the organization's flotilla of floats hidden inside a 80-by-100 foot "den" at the tail end of Birch Street.
Not this year, though. Though the physical address remains the same, only the den's concrete slab remains.
WAVELAND, Miss. -- You never really dwell on what a precious commodity choice is, until you don't have it anymore. And for the people here in Waveland and neighboring Bay St. Louis, choice has been in short supply for everything from a place to sleep to a place to buy food.
But choice has come back -- snuck in really -- here at the Waveland Market, which is nothing more than a series of three Quonset huts made from tent material just up the road from Waveland's temporary trailer-park City Hall complex.
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