I just got back from a fairly exhaustive survey from Rosemary to Ed Walline. I'm not going to discuss each property individually, because I saw no obvious, external damage anywhere. This does not mean there may not be leaking roofs, or damage to the back of a house that I could not see from the front, etc., but everything looked good.
One building at Beachside Villas lost a small amount of siding, but nothing serious.
All beach walkways I saw that were already re-built or under construction looked the same as they had before Katrina.
As for sand--it appeared that in most areas there was an overall gain. From Seacrest to Ed Walline everywhere I looked the sand looked better. The only exception was some of the trucked-in piles which had not yet been pushed around--some of those were a little smaller. The surf was still high, though, but the waves were breaking offshore. My guess is that when the surf first started picking up over the weekend, it washed some of the loose piles out and built up the sandbars to a level higher than they would normally be. This caused the waves to break on them instead of on the beach or against the dunes, so that they rolled in more easily...bringing some of the sand back with them and re-distributing it.
There were a couple of exceptions--the area directly behind Seagrove Dunes appeared to have lost sand overall, but the beach was still usable and the walkover was still intact.
I did not look much at Grayton (I think Smiling Joe's got that more than adequately covered) and only gave Seaside a cursory glance. I was mostly focusing on Seagrove, Eastern Lake and Seacrest. All in all, we've (again) dodged a big ol' bullet here. Let's hope this luck holds. September begins tomorrow, then we still have October and then we've only got eight months until the '06 season begins. But for now we've got a lot to be thankful for.
Those of us who own rental property might want to consider converting them to long-term for awhile and reducing rents. People from New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, etc. may not be able to get back in their homes for months--if at all. It could just as easily have been us showing up there.