I flew the coast of Louisiana today from Terrebonne Parish to Mandeville at about 500 ft. I got probably 1,000 hi-rez digital stills. I'll psot some after I download them tomorrow but right now I'm tired and brain-dead and I have a glass of Old Charter so I thought I'd give you a brain-dump, for what it's worth. There are peopel doing search and rescue and I stay out of tehir way. About 20 of my colleagues volunteered to drive boats for FEMA and are helping with the rescue. They chose 7. Not me this time.

Port Fourchon was in operation, but not terribly busy. I spoke to a oil company exec who said he cannot locate 5 of his 75 oil rigs. The emergency valve systems worked so there was very little leakage.

Grand Isle is terribly trashed, especially on the eastern end. I saw lots of small boats tossed over the sand berm and deposited willy-nilly around the island. The liveoak forest in the middle and ends looks dead. The salt spray has killed the leaves. If the water drains off teh island fast enough, they'll probably recover. Probably 1/4 of the homes on the eastern end of the island were totally destroyed. Another 1/4th were damaged. There were trucks and cars here and there, but none appeared where they were supposed to be. The eastern end of teh island fared better, but there was tsill substantial damage.

Things rapidly degraded from about Bastion Bay to Buras. The marsh and forest was scrapped clean from the substrate. We did not fly over Buris.

We did fly over Venice, LA. It is virtually gone. The ratty little mobile home village is up to the roof tops in water. There were tugs and ocean barges beached in crazy positions. A huge barge with agiant crane on it was deposited in a parking lot. Small boats were scattered for miles in teh marsh.

The Chandeleur islands are mostly gone. They're probably recover somewhat, but they are no longer so significant a feature. The Chandeleur lightouse is gone. The GPS position it formerly occupied is about 3.4 miles from the nearest island.

The ratty houses around FT Pike in the Rigolletes are gones. In fact, the NOLA side of the bridge looks like a madman's lumberyard. Building material of every sort is stacked and piled and arranged crazily for several acres. Later, I figure-out that the debris came from the area formerly known as "Eden Isles" in Slidell.

The twinspan bridges are missing several spans from both lanes of I-12. Others are twisted out of line. The large, cheerful subdivision that encroached on the twinspan is mostly gone. There are plenty of standing houses still, but several ahd boats stuck through them so I would guess water soaked the first floor. There was no standing water in Eden Isles.

Proceeding eastward, destruction was fairly complete for perhaps 15 miles or so. But at about Mandeville, quite suddenly it quit looking like an area of devastation and instead, looked like an area where very bad storms had passed. Trees snapped at 30 ft or so, trees on houses, trees on cars. But mostly not too bad. In coastal Slidell, there were few trees remaining.

On Wedn I'l fly MS barrier islands and the Pearl River to about Bogalousa.

Bot