Recharging in Gulf Shores, Ala.
Posted: Tuesday, September 6 at 09:31 am CT by Mike Brunker
GULF SHORES, Ala. -– The story of how we came to end up at this barely damaged resort area instead of our original destination –- Baton Rouge, La. –- is complicated and not especially interesting, but for those of you following the minute details of our journey I’ll explain.
After finding gas in Pearl River, Ala., and waiting for only about half an hour to get $25 worth (paying only $2.59 9/10 a gallon), we were feeling good as we set out for Baton Rouge, where we hoped to talk to some of the Red Cross officials overseeing the Hurricane Katrina relief effort and visit the shelter there.
But our best-laid plans quickly fell apart.
We were hoping to take advantage of our partnership with NBC News and stay with the crew based in Baton Rouge, but when we spoke with coordinating producer Janet Stone, who is running the operation there, she told us they were living under battlefield conditions -- sleeping in shifts in recreation vehicles -- and had no room for us.
After a quick consultation with our editors, we decided instead to head east back into Mississippi in hopes of finding space with the NBC crews in Gulfport or Biloxi. We were unable to find the Gulfport crew, so we pressed on to Biloxi, driving past badly damaged businesses and houses that looked like they’d been bombed to eventually arrive at the NBC compound near the Hard Rock Hotel.
We got bad news upon introducing ourselves. Frieda Morris, who is managing the NBC operation in Biloxi, told us that they, too, had no room, with only a few RVs and a couple hotel rooms for the sizeable network contingent.
We got on the phone to our travel service in search of available hotel rooms, but were told that there was nothing available as far away as Pensacola, Fla. We had resigned ourselves to a night of trying to sleep in the front seats of our minivan at the NBC compound when Jennifer Sizemore, MSNBC.com’s deputy editor for news, called with the welcome news that she had somehow found us a room at a Marriott Courtyard hotel in Gulf Shores, Ala., about a two-hour drive from Biloxi.
We inched our way back through the nightmare landscape of Biloxi at night, swerving to avoid dangling power lines and piles of debris encroaching on the roads, then hopped on Interstate 10 and drove like we were trying to outrun a hurricane, arriving at the Marriott at 10:30 p.m.
Refueled and restored, we’re now heading west to resume our search for Katrina’s outcasts to see how they are coping with the disaster of a lifetime.
The first signs of recovery
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