Glad you guys ducked it. Now let's set those posts a little deeper this time... unless a view of your neighbor is what you really are going for...

I heard from my friend - she is fine. She says they didn't even lose power or anything!

well i've got one. and go freaking figure that when i left my house this morning at 5:30 i forgot my camera for my helicopter relay mission. only good news out of this is i got to fly the geronimo which is valuable twin time ($160/hr) for free and get paid to do so. but that's mute in comparison to what i saw today people. my post was Abbeville Louisiana, same as with Katrina. Abbeville is 90% under water. the coast from at least there to into Texas looks as if the jolly green giant himself (not being so jolly) took a straw broom and swept the gulf onto the mainlands. you could see wind swaths and the water that came in with them. La has been losing it's marshlands for a while now, and thanks to Rita, more is lost. i circled over a VOR (aerial navigation transmitter) for about 3 hours plus and looked in awe at the destruction the whole time. fields, houses, trucks, cars, trailers, you name it, destroyed. if we are still doing the relay missions this weekend, i'll get some pics for sure. you see pictures and video on TV. that's one thing. Busterb, just damn bro. i know katrina was worse but i didn't make it that far east on the missions to even grasp what i saw today. just damn. i feel for everyone that has suffered these recent tragedies.

Okay, I'm sure I missed the explanation somewhere, but:

1) What is a helicopter relay mission?
2) How does one fly it in a fixed wing aircraft?

lol, right! this goes back to katrina, and rita did the same thing: the radio repeater towers were knocked out offshore so a helicopter company contracted us to relay the choppers flight plans to their base. i.e. go circle over said given point and fly there for several hours, take flight plans and radio them to their base in Galveston since they can't hear one another. yesterday i was over abbeville for about 5 hours before returning to my airport for fuel and a quick bite then i went to a fix southwest of Abbeville for about 3 hours. it can be boring but, hey, it's free time in the aircraft.

So, essentially, you were an airborne human repeater?

yep. sample call:

"Relay 1, Relay 1, 814 off of west cam214 enroute to westcam 300, 30 minutes, 4, and 60 gallons." pretty self explanatory, helicopter 814 is leaving oil rig west cameron 214 and he's going to west cameron 300 and it's going to take 30 minutes to get there, there are 4 on board and he's got 60 gallons of fuel on board.

so i copy that down and radio base operations and give them the info. then when the dude is landing he calls and reports that to which i relay that to base ops.

or sometimes after the enroute portion they'll just say 30, 4 and 60.

ok, i have some more pics, not from the abbeville area, but Sabine Pass/Beaumont area that was slightly less hit. yeah, it's where the eye went through but either the damage wasn't as bad or they've done a bang up job in a week cleaning things up. the first coupla pics are the shoreline where there used to be a beach but the runoff ate it up, eight more pics to follow...

this rig was stuck in the channel leading to port author and the second is/was an area where houses were. hopefully trailers or something that was easily moved by man.

these pics were taken from 9,500 feet so please excuse the quality....
the next two are of still flooded low lying areas

more low areas. in the second one here if you look hard enough you can see the direction of the wind during the hurricane

a small residential area devistated and another of the texas coastline, i just thought it made a cool pic

and finally can anyone tell me the purpose of the diamond shaped cuts in the ground? and the last one is a rig being taken in for repairs through the houston ship channel.....possibly more pics tomorrow. i have the 6 a.m. shift.

I found a picture of your and NBN's neighborhood!