The Storm Woke up Sunday AM, Sun was out but we all knew Katrina was coming. The roads going north were clogged but about 20% or our summer population in Diamondhead decided to stay and ride it out. At about 2 in the afternoon it got a little windy and the first rain band hit. We got about 2 inches of rain in about 30 minutes. Then the wind slowly started to pick up with additional rain mixed in. We watched the weather channel until about 10PM during which time the winds increased little by little. They were blowing about 60MPH when we went to bed for not much sleep. We got up at 4:30AM and my satellite TV was still working. It went out at 5:02AM. By that time the sustained winds were over 100 MPH. We got the good stuff at about 8:00AM Monday, sustained winds of between 125 & 135MPH (we found this out later)-gusts up to 175 MPH. This lasted until about 11:00AM when we got into the eye. The winds sub-sided somewhat, maybe to 80-90MPH and no gusts. At about 1:00PM in the afternoon, we came out of the eye and got fairly heavy winds again for about an hour. At 4:00PM, Masumi and I went outside and walked around in about 40MPH winds and looked our house over and then started looking at the neighborhood. Little did we know that the Hurricane had spawned about 150 tornado type funnels on the MS Gulf Coast of which about 18 hit Diamondhead. All homes in Diamondhead must be built on ¼ acre lots or larger. Most of us have l/2 acre lots. There are about 6 house visible from our house on our streeet and 3 or 4 if we look out at the street that is our main drag so to speak versus ours which is a side street. 3 houses away we saw a house with not much of a roof and 2 walls gone-hit by a tornado. We have a lake about 150 feet from our house, about 25 feet lower than our elevation. It is normally 100 x 250 meters. It was still about 100 meters wide but overflowed its 6 foot high bank and now was over 1 mile long. Our street slopes down about 100 meters from our house and every house that had an elevation that was 10 feet less than ours was swamped. Some had water in them as high as 10 feet. Likewise, you could see the path the tornado had followed. All the trees, mostly pines that are 60 to 80 feet tall were snapped in two about half way up, just like you would see a wooden matchstick snapped in half. Trees not hit by tornadoes were mostly uprooted or had cracked trunks near their base. I lost about a dozen trees, all between 30 and 60 feet high. To continue reading AK's Katrina account, click The Aftermath here, or in the frame on the left. |
