Stand at the entrance of Williams Street in the Ford Subdivision and the first thing you see is a wood-frame house with the front door pointing the wrong way.

Before floodwaters covered Williams Street and nearby Ford Road, that front door faced east. Now it faces north. Like a giant hand, the flood plucked the house off its cinder block foundation and turned it, abandoning the front steps, which still face east.

Next door, another house sits partially on its foundation, while a pink house a few feet away was floated off its blocks and placed neatly on the ground next to them.

The houses are three of seven homes on Williams Street that Vicksburg Inspection Department officials said were floated off their foundations during the flood. Located north of the Anderson Tully Co. mill, Williams Street is a cluster of small, wood-frame homes. Some homes are elevated on poles. Others sit on concrete slabs. Some are on cinder or concrete blocks. All took water.

Reminders of the flood remain. Green water stands in the open ditches along the road. A small bayou passing through the area remains out of its banks. Thick, grey gumbo mud, mixed occasionally with standing water, covers the ground, and the smell of mold and decaying plants permeates the air.

Only a few residents were in the area Wednesday.

“The water got up on my roof,” said resident Claude Blue as he pointed to a water line about 14 feet off the ground.

“I stayed at the Red Cross shelter,” he said. “ I had nowhere else to go. When I came back, I opened the front door and there was a big snake. I closed the door.”

Blue was sitting outside talking with friends while he waited for sulphur to finish burning in his house in an attempt to run the snakes out. One piece of advice Blue and his friends give people walking through the area is “watch out for snakes.”

The warning was reinforced by a shed snakeskin dangling in the breeze from a tree branch about eight feet in the air.

Blue said he has been flooded out about “eight or nine times��� since he’s been living on Williams Street. He pointed to a slightly leaning mobile home sitting on poles about 11 feet above the ground.

“I own that house, too,” he said. “I rent it out. I’ve got a house behind it, but I can’t get to that one until I get some stairs. The water washed the stairs away.”

Across the street, Linda Johnson was finishing a telephone conversation with someone from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, trying to get an inspector to assess her house before she begins cleaning it out.

Her house is 10 to 12 feet off the ground and took about 4 feet of water.

“I’ve been through hell and high water,” she said with a chuckle.

Johnson said she stayed with friends and relatives during the flood, “But most of the time, I stayed in my truck.”

“I’ve never had water in here,” she said. “I think I’ve lost everything. I’m just waiting on FEMA. I hope they can help me some.”

Around the corner on Ford Road, Renia Miles and her three children were sitting outside their home. A FEMA inspector had just visited the home.

Miles said she had about 8 1/2 feet of water in her house.

“We had some water in 2008, but this was the worst,” she said. “When they say ‘this was the worst flood,’ they were right.”

Like Blue and Johnson, Miles, a single parent, said she plans to rebuild and stay in her house, which she owns.

“I guess the Lord didn’t like the way I decorated the inside, and he wants me to redecorate,” she said.