• Extensive destruction across some 12 Mississippi Gulf Coast communities, from Pearlington and Waveland in Hancock County to Gautier and

• 68,700 homes and businesses were destroyed, 65,000 sustained major damage, and 60 % of the forests in the coastal communities were destroyed along with much of the shipping and fishing industry (Editor’s Notebook, 2005b). The number of homes destroyed in Mississippi is more than 30 times the number destroyed in the tragic wildfires in Southern California in October, 2007. • There was a 34-foot high storm surge from Katrina in western Mississippi that was propelled inland as far as 10 miles from the coast through myriad rivers and bayous, severely damaging or destroying homes and communities that had never previously been flooded by storm surges. And damaging hurricane-level winds and tornadoes swept up through the central and north central areas of the state (Walsh, 2006). • An estimated 350 buildings listed in the National Register of Historic Places were washed or blown away, along with most of the evidence of 300 years of Gulf Coast history. This makes Katrina the worst historic preservation disaster in our nation’s history (Huffman, 2006). • The two major east-west bridges on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that connect the three coastal coun-ties together were totally destroyed. Hurricane Katrina slammed into the GulfCoast on August 29, 2005.1 My family and Istayed through the storm and its aftermath. My personal losses were substantial: the destruction of my University of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast office and our social work department building that are situated right on the gulf, including the loss of 95 % of 30 years of professional records. In addition, there was serious damage to our home in the Gulf Coast community of Long Beach. However, this paled in comparison to the extraordinary extent of the physical devastation across the Gulf Coast that was unprecedented in U.S. history. I will first briefly highlight the impact and recov-ery on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at three points in time: in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, 1 year later, and 2 years later. I have tried to present a bal-anced picture of both progress and the lack of it o