East Biloxi’s railroad tracks act like a line that divides the city economically, racially and in recovering from Hurricane Katrina.
East Biloxi received the worst of the damage in the larger city of Biloxi from Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. The city says that about 80% of the area’s houses were either lost or made unlivable.
South of the railroad tracks were casinos that literally floated on the water. Mississippi law prevented them from being constructed on land, so they were instead built on barges. When Katrina’s storm surge came, the casinos moved with the flooding, in some cases, several blocks up.
