Mother nature sure can be cruel ... and major storms certainly do alter the landscape.
I remember in the early 1970's we were driving on Interstate 10 along the gulf coast heading from Florida to California. It was almost six months after Hurricane Camille had come ashore along the gulf coast of Mississippi. Like a few hurricanes years later, Camille sure wreaked havoc when she hit. Parts of the Interstate were gone along with bridges and so many homes and businesses. Where houses and businesses once stood, only cement foundations were left and in some places only makeshift cardboard signs tacked onto a piece of wood, stuck in the ground with the (former) address scrawled on the cardboard! One vivid memory I have is of a huge ocean liner/ship laying on it's side .... about 2 city blocks from the ocean! We saw one cement slab with a single gas pump; it looked like it was sitting in a desert with nothing around it for miles. The entire area was like a barren land with debris everywhere with no intact buildings to be seen. I remember part of a building on the beach that looked like it had been bombed but that's exactly what the entire area reminded me of. We'd be driving along and suddenly the road would end, with huge chunks of cement sticking up in the air and detours taking us along roads with even more devastation. My husband and I were so stunned by what we were seeing that neither of us could speak and I will never forget those images as long as I live; same for the images after Andrew in the summer of 1992 and of course Katrina in the summer of 2005.
