Thanks for a very interesting local perspective- keep us updated on your travels through the mess. Hope it is better than expected.
Sulphur (my hometown) did better than just about anywhere else in the area, but it still looks like a war zone. Cameron Parish is pretty much gone. One thing I completely forgot about in all of this is the fact that one of the US Strategic Petroleum Reserves is out at the Hackberry salt domes. My cousin works there and he has been in touch with them (Boeing I think). They are having difficulty getting any crews in there to work the site. They have mainly been having to rely on the crews that were already there for the past few days. No word on damge to the SPR site itself, though I did hear mumblings about "salt water intrusion" problems. I didn't pursue it since we were busy trying to tie a generator into the house mains.
My mother's duplex only had some missing shingles and lots of branches of her trees. The other side of the duplex had a tree fallen on it.
Ditto for my sister-in-law's house--a tree on the boys' bedroom. Her parents have a tree on their house also, but it looked like no actual structural damage. Everybody else in my family pretty much escaped with minor damage. Two uncles have damaged barns, but their houses are intact. My cousin came home to find all of his pigs had survived, which was good because he had sold most of them just before the storm and they hadn't been picked up yet. He ran out of feed today and the owner of a local feed store who is stuck out of town told him how to break into the place so he could get more feed. It's that kind of place.
A piece of property I sold two years ago had 50% of the trees knocked down--about 40 trees including a dozen large oaks are now kindling. I had regretted actually selling until yesterday.
We brought three generators and 100 gallons of gas along with some food and water. The fact we came well stocked was in our favor in getting past the national guard roadblocks. My cousin and uncle were glad to see it.
We couldn't get into Cameron parish--they are even turning away most news crews. We are getting limited reports of the Hackberry area and it doesn't look good for our place near Dugas Landing--there is supposedly a picture floating around that shows water covering Joe Dugas Road from Hwy 27 to as far as can be seen.
After getting back my wife told me that her best friend's family has decided not to reopen the store in Holly Beach. The father is just to old to rebuild from scratch. I wonder how many other people will feel that way?
Overall things are better than we had feared--It looks like my Dad and I are gonna be the only ones in our family that lose out--the Hackberry place is probably gone. It's a shame: my Dad and his father built it in 1958. It somehow managed not to get a single drop of water in it-- 'til now.
But, my Dad feels like we have been blessed by God because our family has escaped so much of the potential harm. I couldn't possibly disagree.