Hurricane Isaias — Thursday Is the Day You Get

One quick personal note before the weather: my son Drake's varsity soccer team at Ocean Springs High School is raffling off a beach condo stay and a Turtlebox for the Greyhound soccer program — $10 a ticket, drawing October 29. The whole story is at the bottom of this email. Now, the storm.

Good Thursday morning from The Seawall.

Overnight the watches became warnings, and Isaias became a hurricane. If you only read one line this morning, read that one.

As of the National Hurricane Center's 7 a.m. advisory, Hurricane Isaias is about 385 miles south-southwest of the mouth of the Mississippi River with 80 mph sustained winds, moving east-northeast at 9 miles an hour. NHC's own instruction, in their capital letters, not ours: preparations to protect life and property from storm surge and damaging winds along the warning area of the Gulf Coast should be rushed to completion today.

Here is the line that matters most for where you live. The Hurricane Warning begins at Ocean Springs and runs east. West of Ocean Springs — Biloxi, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, Waveland — is under a Tropical Storm Warning. And every coastal county on this coast is under a Storm Surge Warning, which NHC defines as a danger of life-threatening inundation within 36 hours.

A warning is not a watch. A watch meant conditions were possible. A warning means they are expected. The time for deciding has passed; this is the day for doing.

Cruisin' the Coast was supposed to finish this weekend. Almost nothing else that was on the calendar is going to happen. What's below is the storm, where the sandbags are, what moved, and the one thing still standing tonight.

We write a weekend guide most Thursdays. This is not that. We'll be back to music and markets and where to eat next week, and if this thing wobbles east and spares us we'll feel a little silly about the tone. That's a trade we'll take every single time.

All figures from the National Hurricane Center advisory issued 7 a.m. CDT Thursday and the National Weather Service in New Orleans. ⚠️ Advisories come every few hours and this storm has already changed category once. Check before you act on anything here.

Position, 7 a.m. Thursday: about 385 miles SSW of the mouth of the Mississippi River, moving east-northeast at 9 mph. A turn northeast is expected later today, then north.

Strength: 80 mph sustained, 975 millibars. A Category 1 hurricane, and Hurricane Hunters were in it this morning.

🦀 Jackson County — Pascagoula, Ocean Springs, St. Martin, Gautier, Moss Point

🔴 HURRICANE WARNING · STORM SURGE WARNING. The hurricane warning line starts here. Peak surge potential 4 to 7 feet above ground. Local wind forecast 25–35 mph with gusts to 50. This is the hard end of our coast in this forecast, and it is the end with the warning on it.

🌊 Harrison County — Gulfport, Biloxi, Pass Christian, Long Beach

TROPICAL STORM WARNING · STORM SURGE WARNING. Peak surge potential 3 to 5 feet above ground. Wind 20–30 mph with gusts to 45.

⚓ Hancock County — Bay St. Louis, Waveland, Diamondhead, Kiln, Pearlington

TROPICAL STORM WARNING · STORM SURGE WARNING. Peak surge potential 3 to 5 feet above ground. Wind 20–30 mph with gusts to 40.

Northern Jackson County remains under a Hurricane Watch, and northern Hancock and Harrison are under the Tropical Storm Warning as well.

The surge window for all three counties is the same: Friday morning until Saturday morning.

Thursday — Partly sunny, high near 84, northeast wind around 15. The last normal day. Use every hour of it.

Friday — High near 80, falling through the afternoon. East wind 15 to 30 mph. Showers from mid-morning, then thunderstorms likely, some with heavy rain.

Friday night — Tropical storm conditions expected. Northeast wind 25 to 30 mph, 90 percent rain, heavy at times. This is the night to already be where you're going to be.

Saturday — Tropical storm conditions still possible. High near 79, west wind 20 to 30 mph, 90 percent rain, improving late as it pulls away.

Saturday night — Clearing. Down to a 40 percent chance, wind easing.

Sunday — It's over.

Bottom line: you have today. Friday afternoon it starts, Friday night is the worst of it, Saturday it drags out and leaves, and Sunday you'll be picking up branches. The water is the part to respect — not the wind.

Sandbags. WLOX is maintaining the list and adding to it as sites open — and it has grown a lot overnight. All sites are self-serve and you must bring your own shovel. No hours posted, and more are still being added.

🦀 Jackson County

🌊 Harrison County

⚓ Hancock County

The rest of it, in the order that actually matters:

⚾ Still on, and it's tonight. The Hancock Whitney Classic moved up: Mississippi State vs. Auburn is now Thursday, October 8 at 6 p.m. at Keesler Federal Park in Biloxi, gates at 5. It was Friday. Tickets bought for Friday's game are good tonight. If you want one normal evening before the weather turns, this is it.

❌ Cancelled. Mississippi State vs. Southern Miss, which was Saturday, is off entirely. Those tickets can be exchanged for tonight's game — Biloxi Shuckers box office, (228) 233-3465, or [email protected].

🏈 Friday night football moved to Thursday night. Six games across South Mississippi shifted up a day: Harrison Central–West Harrison, Pass Christian–FCAHS, Pascagoula–Picayune, Gautier–Long Beach, Greene County–Presbyterian, Stone–Wayne County. D'Iberville–Ocean Springs was reported as likely to move as well, but we could not confirm the final call before this went out. Check your school before you drive to a stadium.

🚗 Cruisin' the Coast. This was to be the final weekend of the 30th anniversary — seven venues Friday and Saturday, the finale at Cruise Central Sunday morning. As of this morning, organizers had announced no cancellation and the schedule still shows all three days. We are not going to tell you it's on and we are not going to tell you it's off. But Friday and Saturday now sit inside a storm surge warning, and the Sunday finale at Jones Park is on ground that will have spent two days taking water. Check cruisinthecoast.com and their Facebook page before you load the car.

Everything else this weekend: assume it's cancelled until the organizer tells you otherwise. Markets, festivals, outdoor music, the haunted house, the art walk. Bay St. Louis's Second Saturday, the Moss Point barbecue festival, the Pass Christian market — all of it sits in the Friday-to-Saturday window. Do not drive anywhere this weekend on the strength of something you read earlier this week. Including ours.

Short this week, for obvious reasons.

Waveland got an oyster bar. The Sand Bar opened on Coleman Avenue in late September, the city's only one. Downstairs casual with a sand pit for the kids, upstairs dining, chargrilled oysters under four cheeses. Owner Thomas Genin on the city: "they've helped us build this in record time." A good place to go the week after a hurricane. — WLOX

Gulfport has a gas station on the beach again. Beth's soft-opened October 2 at Highway 90 and Courthouse Road — the first along Gulfport's beachfront since Katrina. Owner Jody Thind spent three years getting there. Relevant today for the obvious reason. — WLOX

A destroyer built in Pascagoula was commissioned. The USS Ted Stevens, built by Ingalls Shipbuilding, was commissioned Saturday in Whittier, Alaska. Ingalls president Brian Blanchette: "thousands of shipbuilders put their hard work, their craftsmanship, and their dedication into building this vessel." — WLOX

Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey, released October 1:

A quarter point in one week on the thirty-year. It updates again at 11 a.m. today, after this email leaves.

But that's not the number that matters this week. This one is: thirty days.

That's the standard National Flood Insurance Program waiting period between buying a flood policy and that policy covering anything. Which means that to be covered for Friday, you needed that policy in place back on September 9th — a month ago, when nobody on this coast had heard of Isaias. If you don't have flood coverage this morning, you cannot get it for Friday. Nobody can sell it to you. That is not a sales pitch, it is just the calendar, and I'd rather you hear it from me plainly than find out at a claims desk.

So file it for the next one, because there is always a next one. If you own on this coast and you've been telling yourself you'll look into flood insurance when you get around to it, put it on the calendar for the week after this storm clears — when the adrenaline is still fresh enough to make you actually do it, and thirty days still means something.

And for anyone in a contract right now: if your closing is next week and the property takes damage Friday, that is a conversation to have with your lender and your agent today, not Monday. Most contracts have a casualty-loss provision. Most people have never read it.

I'm a licensed Mississippi real estate salesperson with REAL Brokerage, and a Ramsey-trained financial coach who's led Financial Peace University classes at Mosaic Church in Ocean Springs. That second part is why this section is about a waiting period instead of a listing this week. Reply any time — www.robrecio.com. — Rob

Robert Recio · Licensed Mississippi Real Estate Salesperson #S-62221 · REAL Broker, LLC · Equal Housing Opportunity. This week's House of the Week is our own listing, as disclosed above it.

"If the water gets in my house Friday, does my homeowners policy cover it?"

Almost certainly not, and this is the single most misunderstood thing about owning property on this coast.

Three different kinds of damage, three different places they get paid from. Wind — shingles off, a tree through the roof, windows blown in — is your homeowners policy, usually with a separate, higher hurricane or named-storm deductible that's a percentage of your insured value rather than a flat dollar amount. Go read that percentage today; people are routinely shocked by it. Flood and storm surge — water that rises from the ground up, which is exactly what a surge does — is almost never covered by homeowners. That's a separate NFIP or private flood policy. Water that comes through a hole the wind made is usually wind, not flood, which is why the photographs matter so much.

The nasty case is the one where a house takes both, and the two carriers each point at the other. That fight is won or lost on documentation, which is why "photograph everything today" is on the checklist above and why you should photograph the damage before you move one piece of debris.

One more: flood policies generally don't cover your stuff in a basement or below the lowest elevated floor, and contents coverage is usually separate from structure coverage even within a flood policy. Having "flood insurance" and having your furniture covered are two different sentences.

I'm not an insurance agent and this isn't a coverage opinion on your specific policy — call your agent, today, while they're still answering the phone. But know which of the three buckets you're asking about when you do.

Full disclosure, up top where it belongs: this week's house is ours. It's my own listing. The county rotation says Harrison; we're taking it off-rotation a second week by my own choice, and you deserve to know that before you read another line.

85035 Pohaku Drive, Diamondhead — $355,000

There's a reason this one makes sense in a storm issue, and it isn't the view.

It was built in 2024. Four bedrooms, three full baths, 2,219 square feet on a 0.193-acre lot in Diamondhead Lakes — an Elliott Homes "Dune" plan, two stories on a slab. A house built to the 2024 version of the building code on this coast is a materially different object from a house built to the 1994 version, and this week is a decent week to think about what that's worth. Every hurricane on this coast is, among other things, a very expensive audit of construction standards.

The honest part: the listing data says flood insurance is not required here. We have never been able to verify that independently — Diamondhead's high-numbered addresses don't resolve in the public geocoders we use, so we can't run the FEMA flood layer on the parcel the way we do for every other House of the Week. We're telling you that instead of quietly printing "no flood zone." Get your own flood determination and your own elevation certificate. That's advice I'd give you on any house, and it's advice I'm giving you on mine.

The numbers:

Contact: it's my listing, so call me — www.robrecio.com. And if you'd rather have somebody looking at it who isn't the listing agent, that's a completely reasonable instinct and I'll tell you so out loud.

Bosley — Humane Society of South Mississippi, Gulfport

Hound mix. Adult. Male. Large. HSSM lists him as neutered, heartworm negative, and house broken.

He had a home once. He lost it, came back to the shelter right before Christmas from a different part of the state, and came back sick — patchy coat, sore skin. The shelter writes his bio in his own voice: "My skin hurt, my fur was patchy, and honestly... I just felt kinda crummy." Then: "these humans stepped in - the really good ones. They got me feeling better with baths and meds and a whole lot of care."

And now: "I'm all fixed up, heartworm negative, house broken, and ready to get this forever home thing started. I'm overall a pretty easy going guy so other than a larger than average spot on the couch I won't ask a lot."

A word about shelters and storms. Every coastal shelter's worst week is the one after a hurricane — owned pets come loose in the wind, strays come in soaked, and the kennels fill while adoptions stop. The most useful thing you can do for HSSM right now isn't to adopt in a hurricane warning. It's to make sure your own dog has a collar with a current tag on it before Friday, and if they're chipped, that the chip registry has your right phone number. Ninety seconds. It's the difference between a neighbor calling you Saturday and a stray intake form.

Then come get Bosley next week, when the sun's back out.

The shelter: 2615 25th Ave., Gulfport · (228) 863-3354 · Tue–Fri 10–5, Sat 10–4, closed Sunday and Monday · no appointments or holds, first come first served, photo ID · adoptions stop about thirty minutes before closing · fees vary by dog. ⚠️ Storm hours may change — call first.

Normally I don't ask you for anything. You get this for free every Thursday and that's the deal.

This week I'm asking.

My son Drake plays varsity soccer for the Ocean Springs Greyhounds, and the team is selling tickets for the Skyler Flowers Soccer Memorial Raffle.

Skyler Flowers was an Ocean Springs kid — Ocean Springs High School, class of 2013, graduated with high honors, a tennis player good enough to go on and play college ball at MGCCC and then at Belhaven. He was twenty-two when he died in 2017. The raffle carries his name, and the Greyhound soccer program is the beneficiary. That's a family and a town deciding that a name should keep doing something useful, which strikes me as about the best answer available to an unanswerable thing.

Tickets are $10. Two prizes:

To buy: just reply to this email, or call me at 228-325-1502. I'll take Venmo or CashApp and send you the details directly — I'd rather do that than print my payment handles to a few thousand people, for reasons every one of you can probably guess. Checks work too, made out to the Greyhound Goal Club.

The drawing is Thursday, October 29, at the home game against Pascagoula. You don't need to be there to win. Get in before then.

If a few of you buy a ticket because a newsletter you read on Thursday mornings asked you to, I'll consider this whole thing paid for. And if this week has you spending your money on plywood and D batteries instead — do that first. The raffle will still be here on the other side of the storm.

Assume everything here is subject to the week we're having.

We'll be back in your inbox next Thursday with a weekend guide, and with any luck the worst thing we'll have to report is a lot of branches in the road.

Fill the tank today. Move the patio furniture today. Take the pictures today. Then go watch Mississippi State play Auburn tonight and sleep in your own bed, because Friday you're going to want to be home.

And check on the neighbor who won't ask.

Take someone with you.

— The Seawall