Bruce Johnson wrote: > There's one photo with the oddest caption, about a store that > reopened..."Residents jam the store to purchase all the essentials, > and cigarettes and beer." > > AND cigarettes and beer!! Don't those come first on the list??? ;-) Yeah, for a lot of folks here cigarettes and beer are essentials, but toilet paper is right up there, too. :) However, cigarettes (fire of any kind) doesn't go well with mounds and mounds and mounds of bone dry branches and leaves that line both sides of every street and cover the yards, and beer isn't the proper lubricant for thousands of us trying to use chain saws to clear said debris from our roofs and yards. :) You know there are still streets here that are like tree tunnels. Trees have fallen across the road, but are being supported by trees on the other side so cars can still travel up and down them. I had to go down one like that Saturday so Mom could check out the Pace/Pea Ridge Homemaker's Clubhouse. I could just imagine one of those massive trees breaking it's support and falling down on me, but we made it in and out okay. The Clubhouse had a lot of trees fallen around it, and the power pole was snapped off about 8 feet up, but there was no damage to the building that I could see. There are pictures I should take that show the damage out here in the countryside away from the beaches. There are buildings that were *completely* destroyed right next to buildings with no damage at all. There are trailer parks that look like a bomb was dropped in, and others that are still there. Oh, and down on the bay next the 90 there was an RV park and a fish camp just up the road from it....now there is *nothing*, pieces of docks still exist, but the buildings are just...plain...gone. From the highway you can see where the storm surge went up 200 or 300 hundred yards sweeping everything ahead of it, but when it withdrew it must have taken all the remains of the houses and boats with it. You can see snags and broken hunks of roofs and walls scattered all over the bay. I drove in to work today, a 20 minute drive to the main campus took over an hour because of the stacked up traffic. Then I drove across town to my campus on the west side (nearer the hurricane's path), and was very happily surprised to find there was almost *no* damage to my campus. The computer labs were up and running, my office was just as I left it, a *lot* of pine trees had snapped off, but none did any damage to the buildings. The main campus wasn't so lucky...a tornado took the roof off the Computer Lab building and wreaked the Networking and Engineering Tech rooms. It looks like the main lab and computer rooms and computers downstairs suffered a lot of water damage. We won't know until Wednesday whether we can hold classes in there or not, but the Lab Techs have already started "salvaging" the computers, and think most will be okay once they are well dried and cleaned (or would that be well cleaned and dried). IAC, *I* am golden as 4 of my 5 classes are in labs on the West campus and they are undamaged and fully operational. Eris
