Please pray for Pearlington, MS

I'm so sad tonight. I mentioned in my last post that I was supposed to have gone to Pearlington, Mississippi this past weekend for another rebuilding trip with my church and other volunteers. Because of Hurricane Gustav and the threat of evacuation, we postponed the trip. I've been anxiously waiting for news all day, and it's started trickling in this evening, slowly and still unconfirmed, but I trust the sources.

On this, the weekend of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that devastated this tiny town, I've been told that more than 100 homes in Pearlington were destroyed by flooding from Gustav. The blog and a link to the news story can be found here: http://pearlington.blogspot.com/.

I had thought this morning that Pearlington would be out of the woods. The hurricane had shifted course to the west of New Orleans and was not nearly as strong as originally expected. The original forecast had it coming in as a Category 4 with a predicted 8 foot storm surge. By the time it made landfall, it was only a Category 2, but the storm surge was at 10 feet and rising in the last report I received this evening.

Please take a moment to pray for all those in the path of this hurricane. Three years later, there are still many people who are not back in their homes, and there are some who have just recently moved back into houses who will now have to deal all over again with flood repairs and rebuilding.

It was a total coincidence that I was scrapbooking Pearlington photos from my trip in May this past weekend. I'm posting those pages below because they are pretty much the only Pearlington photos that I have access to while on travel. In them, you will see the homes of Tommy and Janet Dawson as well as Lester Dell. I don't have any updates on the condition of their homes at this moment. Tommy and Janet evacuated to Huntsville a couple of days ago.