Return to schlatterfamily.org Front Page

Bay Saint Louis,
Mississippi
after Katrina

This page contains some of the photos I made of sites in Bay Saint Louis, MS a few days after Hurricane Katrina.  Because of the number of photos, I will break this into two pages.

This photo looks south along Beach Blvd.  Before the hurricane, Beach Blvd. was a two-lane asphalt street with the beach and the Gulf of Mexico on one side and big, old, gracious homes, shops, restaurants, and historic buildings on the other side.  In the distance, under the red text, are some wooden pilings -- these are the remains of several restaurants and bars that were on the beach side of the street.  The blue text on the right marks the former location of a historic, 3-story bed & breakfast.   The building is gone, completely gone without a trace left behind.  As you see, the street was destroyed -- two miles of Beach Blvd looks like this.  This section of the street was on a bluff, about 20 - 25 feet high.  The storm surge got under the street and blasted it into pieces.

Close-up of Beach Blvd -- black asphalt is the remains of the roadway, concrete is remains of sidewalk.  In the background is the remains of a 2.5 mile long highway bridge that carried Highway 90 between Bay Saint Louis and Pass Christian.

Typical of the damage along Beach Blvd.  The right half of this building was a coffee shop, left half was a restaurant.  The building on the left is the old theater that housed the local community theater.

Here is an aerial view of the same area shown above.  The building in the photo above housed a coffee shop (right side) and restaurant (left side).  Both were favorites of ours -- they appear in the aerial photo below.

At the intersection of Beach Blvd. and Hwy 90 was a development of houses -- lots cost $150,000 - $300,000.  The houses were multi-story, costing $400,000 - $700,000 each.  This photo shows all that's left of four of these houses -- the concrete slabs you see are the foundations.  Each of these slabs was the location of a completed house, with people living in them.  These slabs have not been cleaned up -- this is how the storm surge left them -- the houses were simply swept away, debris was located over 1/2 mile away.

Here's another view of the concrete slabs.  Note the house in the background -- the houses on these slabs were as big or bigger than the white house.  The white house, while it looks okay, will have to be bulldozed -- it's leaning to one side and it was completely gutted as the storm surge burst through the windows and walls on one side and out the other side.

Here is an aerial view of the same scene.  Note in the aerial view you clearly see the empty slabs where houses once stood; see the big white house; and, see the beginning of the 2.5 mile long bridge that once carried Highway 90 across the Bay of Saint Louis east to Pass Christian, Gulfport, and Biloxi.  The red numbers on the three slabs in the aerial photo correspond to the numbers in the ground-level photo above.