Diary of a CAT man: our associate editor travels to the Gulf Coast just days after Hurricane Katrina hit to survey the damage and discovers the real meaning of the word "adjustment."

Risk & Insurance, Oct 1, 2005 by Matthew Brodsky

Thursday Sept. 1, 2005

I heard the stories. Refugees were flooding Atlanta. They were snatching up hotel rooms, slowing the airport, clogging the highways. But when I landed in Hartsfield Airport, there were no evacuees, no people on the run with all their possessions slung over their backs in a tablecloth. The airport was crowded with vacationers. It was Labor Day weekend. The hotels in Midtown Atlanta were bustling--with conventioneers attending the 2005 Dragon*Con, a sci-fi convention for "dorks," as the attendee in my airport shuttle put it.

Friday Sept. 2, 2005

I cabbed it to the Peachtree Dekalb Airport; told the driver to take me to the main terminal. He dropped me off at what turned out to be one of the main terminals. How was I to know? I've never flown on a corporate charter. After a harried phone call to my contact, Bud Trice of Crawford, I hoofed it like a golf caddie, a bag on each shoulder, to the correct main terminal. It's 7:15 a.m., and I'm already sweating.

When we landed in Mobile, Ala., I got my first taste of hell--and my Mustang. Don't get me wrong--I ordered a compact car from the rental car company. But even the rental company doesn't have gas in Mobile. They were forced to give me the only car on the lot with gas: a convertible, spanking-new red Mustang.

The Mustang also got me out of having to drive to Biloxi, Miss. You can't expect the CEO and vice president of Crawford & Co. to squeeze into the backseat of a sports car. So we took their company minivan. CEO Tom Crawford was grilling me and another reporter in our group about car insurance. We better not have minimum coverage, he told us.

I don't know when the good-natured chatter stopped. It could have been when traffic on 1-10 crammed into one lane, then no lane. Or it may have been when the road approached Pascagoula and the scene out of our windows went Third World, or when the security forces in bulletproof helmets redirected us toward highway 90, toward the coast.

Nearly 90 miles from New Orleans, we passed through Gautier, Miss. Don't ask me how to pronounce it, but the town's gas stations were twisted from above like something had tried to unscrew them from the ground. Ocean Springs, Miss., Song River, Miss. As we passed through them, it got quieter. On the side of the road, one of the country's biggest chain home-improvement stores had a hole in its front facade the size of most morn-and-pop hardware stores. We're getting closer to New Orleans. The world's getting less and less familiar.

We had to swing back up to 1-10, because the bridge into Biloxi coming from the east was supposedly in ruins. Off 1-10, we took 1-110. I'm sweating, this time from the excitement of approaching Biloxi. I've heard about Biloxi, just as I heard about Atlanta. Would Biloxi be a big disappointment, too? I want to see.

We enter Biloxi. I don't want to see it anymore. It was maimed by the wind. It was raped by the sea. I have been thinking how to describe what I saw in Biloxi. At the time, it was really hard to wrap my heart or my mind around what I saw: the flipped over roads, the foundations with no homes, the beach of garbage, the casino boats on land, the casino hotels teetering into the sea, slot machines strewn about like coins.

I thought about how to describe it--and the cliches poured into my mind like memories of a favorite sitcom--but I could think of nothing better than violence, raping and maiming. I dreamed about this when I slept on a couch in the party room of an apartment complex. That was the only accommodation I could manage. Hotel rooms are as hard to come by as gasoline, maybe harder. I am still sweating.

Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005

I followed around adjuster David Atkinson today, a pro with whom I've traveled before, and the experience calmed me. He's got an air about him that, given time, given the right people, anything can be put back together. He even landed me a hotel room.

And just as I was beginning to feel comfortable in Mobile, to feel like I was in the United States again, Atkinson drove me out toward the Gulf, toward the low, back neighborhoods of town. And we visited the gulf-front seafood restaurant that was hit by a wave that tore the front of it off like a layer of gift wrapping. I talked to the owner, or he talked to me. I think he mistook me for an adjuster, and he rattled off all his woes, especially his broken foot. He showed me around his place. It smelled like maggots were there, tie showed me his big toe. It was purple, the nail black.

At least I had my hotel room at day's end. Trying to sleep, I turned the lights off, but the dark was perfect for the projection of memories in my mind. Biloxi. I saw the signs from the people left behind, the people who sat in their front yards with their destruction at their feet. "We are home. No looting. We will shoot." "The South will rise again. Amen." Then spray painted on the top floor of an apartment building down the street from where the casino boat was dumped: "Mom we're OK."

Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005