One year after Katrina

It is hard to believe it has been a year since Katrina hit. A lot has been cleaned up here on the Mississippi coast, but there is so much that needs to be done. The biggest improvement is the tons of debris that has been hauled off. Now there are just miles and miles of empty slabs. Brad and I still go for drives to explore the coast each weekend and although we have been doing that for a year, we still stumble on places that we had not seen before and it still shocks us when we see the damage. I had planned to watch some of the Katrina shows that are all over the TV this week, but after watching just a few, I had to stop. Not because the images of the coast hurt to look at......but because Mississippi was not on any of them. Even Jim Cantore, who was here in Mississippi when the storm came ashore, did a show from New Orleans. I watched several shows that played film clips of the hurricane as it came ashore here, but the narration only talked about New Orleans.
My heart goes out to the people of New Orleans. There is no doubt that they suffered more in the aftermath of the storm, but I feel like it is important to try to get the story of the Mississippi coast out too.
One year after the storm there are cemeteries like the one in the picture, that have not been cleaned up. One year after the storm neither one of the bridges on our main roadway have been repaired. One year later 70% of the homes in my neighborhood house 2 or more families. There is a lot of good things that have happened. There is a huge building boom going on. The economy down here is growing by leaps and bounds. There are new businesses coming in every day. We will recover and we will be better than ever, it is just going to take a few more years to get there.