"Poor Old Biloxi" a Biloxi Travel Page by JGB

I thought I would get around to telling you about my home town one day, but this isn?t what I wanted to tell you. Biloxi sits on a peninsular and, the eastern part is called Point Cadet, where the traditional seafood factories were and the blue color workers who work their lived (including most of our Vietnamese community). The beach front area is where all the lovely homes used to be, many of which were built in the 1800s by wealthy people from New Orleans, bent on escaping the summer heat. The beach also had our most famous old homes, Tullis Manner, Green Oaks Bed and Breakfast and many many more. Many of these places now are only empty lots, not even slabs. The land around the Biloxi Bay (we call it Back Bay) was also graced with many fine homes, but most of these were new. From what I have seen (and maybe you have seen more than I have with TV, a nicety we still do not have) most of these are gone too. I live on Gill Ave, just North of the rail road tracks and the tracks are 28 feet high. There are two high sand dunes between my house and the beach, of course these are very old and have been built on for more than a hundred years (my house in 103 years old). No hurricane has ever pushed water over the first, but this time it almost made it over the second one. Going East from my house the land flattens out and gets very low, that is why there is so much destruction around Point Cadet; the water completely covered this area. By the way, the water did not just slowly rise, but it rose quickly and was topped by huge waves which crashed into the houses and tore them apart. The big mistake we made was in using Hurricane Camille in 1968 as a benchmark that could ever be topped. Boy, were we wrong on this one! Many of the people that stayed, including myself, felt safe because my house survived Camille. Many of them are gone now.
So, this is short, but I wanted to tell you. We will come back from this, just like always. Come see us some time, I?ll fix you a bowl of gumbo!

The casinos in Biloxi were our economic base and now we are hoping that they can be rebuilt quickly. After the hurricane on Monday there were literally thousands of people with out jobs, not to mention with out homes as well. Most of the damage was caused by the storm surge, which is the rapid rise of water that comes with an approaching hurricane. If you can imagine it, the water rose 20-30 feet and then had extremely large waves on top of that. Houses were battered into splintered pieces of wood.

This is a photo of the Grand Casino barge (Mississippi law prohibits the construction of a casino on land, all have to be build over the water: what a silly idea!). If you look to the right in the distance, you will see the Grand Casino hotel, the barge was moored in front of it, on the right side. This is the Point Cadet area of Biloxi, where most of our casinos were and where many poor-middle class people lived. It is basically all gone now. Our Vietnamese community was here too. How sad.