Three refrigerated 18-wheel tractor trailer trucks laden with Hurricane Katrina’s dead lumbered out of Waveland headed north Wednesday.
Jim Fricke doesn’t know where they are going. He just knows it’s one of the many horrors he’s seen since he returned home to his native Waveland Wednesday morning.
‘In all my 53 years I’ve never seen anything like this,’ Fricke said. ‘It’s unbelievable; total devastation.’
Fricke, his wife Linda, along with his brother, Clyde and wife Loise, kids and grandkids hooked up a travel trailer and headed for north Alabama in the wee hours of Monday morning when they realized Katrina was going to bring certain disaster.
Fricke bought the travel trailer on a whim two years ago. It’s been sitting unused in his Bay Shore Park yard on Whale Street since.
Now it’s home.
Fricke called friends in the Cayman Islands at 12.30am Thursday to let them know he and his family were OK.
If they could have seen his eyes, they would have seen the shock they heard in his voice.
‘They’re marking the houses where there’s dead bodies and then they’re marking the streets so folks will know where to go.
‘Downtown Waveland is gone. Bay St. Louis is gone. All those houses on the beach are gone. In Long Beach there’s nothing left back to the railroad tracks,’ he said.
Katrina dragged away nearly every home and business within a half mile of the beach, leaving driveways and walkways to nowhere. The water scattered random reminders of what had been normal, quiet lives: family photos, Barbie dolls, jazz records, whiskey bottles.
The two towns about 35 miles east of New Orleans have been partially cut off because the U.S. 90 bridge over the Bay of St. Louis was destroyed.
Fricke said the National Guard showed up with ice Wednesday and yesterday was to deliver generators.
He hasn’t been able to get to his stilted Whale Street house; he’ll do that today (Thursday).
He does know he’ll have to contend with water damage. But that’s OK. At least the house, which sits on a canal jutting off the Jourdan (cq) River, is still standing.
Brother Clyde’s mobile home is still standing too, although it was flooded with seven feet of water and pushed back from its foundation blocks.
It was the first time a storm had taken water to Clyde Fricke’s spot of land in Waveland. It remained high and dry during Hurricane Camille, which was the benchmark storm that struck the Gulf Coast in August 1969.
Fricke said everybody in his family has had their cry and all know it’s time now to get down to the arduous task of cleaning up.
A generator was hooked up to Clyde Fricke’s well pump Wednesday afternoon and the family experienced just one of the small miracles one does after such a devastating catastrophe as Katrina; it worked.
‘We all finally got a shower,’ Jim Fricke said. ‘It was cold, but it was a blessing.’
As the family washes out muck and mud from clothes, furnishings, tools and everyday material possessions of life they have to watch out for deadly poisonous snakes and alligators.
‘They’re everywhere,’ Fricke said.
While Fricke knows what he has to do to return some sense of normalcy to his and his family’s life, the number of deaths has him dazed.
‘They took 200 bodies out of Bay Shore, more out of those apartments there behind the little welcome center up on highway 90 in Waveland. It’s just awful.’
Fricke said everyone in Bay St. Louis and Waveland had ample notice to evacuate the area.
But many thought they could just ride out the storm.
‘They just thought it was going to be another Camille,’ he said.
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