From the Westbank:

• The Shell station at Manhattan and Westbank Expressway blew up and/or burned
• The extended-stay motel place next to the Palace Movie Theatre on Manhattan collapsed
• Debris prevented travel to look at the Timberlane/Bellemeade area
• The Landmark on the Westbank Expressway (the round hotel near Terry Parkway) collapsed (I’m skeptical…you’d think this would be spectacular enough to warrant helicopter photo coverage given its size and the huge amount of debris that would likely be visible)
• Damage in Lafitte was “not very much.” Which is great news for my dad, hopefully the camp will only have some water damage and not structural damage.

From Columbus, MS:

This is the fourth time I’ve ridden out the remnants of a gulf hurricane here. Katrina was still packing 50 mph winds when she got here, and she stayed here a long time. However, the damage was probably only the second most severe (after Ivan).

Ivan, last fall, cleared out a lot of dead and dying trees and tree limbs. From a debris standpoint, it was the worst. It also knocked out power for about 6 hours where I live. Results varied around the region I lived in on power.

This season’s earlier two storms both went by further away than Ivan and my power outage was maybe about 2 hours for the two storms combined.

Katrina left more debris than the last two combined, but even that was minor. As far as I know, there were no road closings, even, though you’d have been stupid to be out in the heart of the storm last night. The storm itself really started here about 6pm on Monday and the wind didn’t stop waking me up until about 2:20am. We lost power at 8pm, so promptly went to bed. I had my iPod so I caught up on a couple of Keith & The Girl podcasts while I waited til I was tired enough to doze. Between the wind and the transformers blowing up, I was woken up about once an hour from 10pm on. Power was out when I left for work at 6:45am. Power was out when my parents drove to West Point to eat lunch (and get out of the hot, sticky apartment — I can’t imagine the horror that the Superdome must be right now). Power is still out right now. Two pilots a couple of units down told my parents they spoke with the power company earlier today and were told that “they’d get to it when they got to it.” Whatever, the discomfort here is NOTHING compared to the three-state area of the coast most seriously affected by the storm.