Last entry five years ago today.
It’s Monday morning. I should be getting ready for work but there's no work today. New Orleans is shut down. Hurricane Katrina roars ashore near the city at about 6AM. She reaches CrabAppleLane in all her power and ugliness at about 7AM. The power goes out here and the anxiety begins. If you're a fan of big weather and you have no stake in the outcome, this is the ultimate event. The winds howl for about 8 hours. Trees all around the house are lying down. A tree trunk or a limb snaps every few minutes. You hear a blast like a gunshot when it does and you worry for a few seconds hoping it doesn't come crashing through your window or roof. Speaking of the roof, a piece of flashing keeps tilting up and down as the wind hits it. If it doesn't hold up, wind will be able to get underneath the metal panels. It holds up. When the storm is over, we have no power, the yard is a mess, and the phones are down but we're safe.
Almost immediately after the storm passes, we hear chainsaws. People are out cutting up the fallen trees on Highway 1083. CrabAppleLane is right off of 1083. We can hear the chainsaws until it gets dark 3 or 4 hours later. I figure they've cleared the roadway. There is always a tree or two down on Highway 1083 after a big thunderstorm. Hurricane Katrina was more than that so I figured there were 20 or 30 down. 1083 is about 5 miles long from Highway 40 to Highway 21. Those guys aren't even trying to clear the roadway. They're just trying to clear a path so one vehicle can pass. There are hundreds of trees down. There are trees every 10 feet. One tree sometimes but clusters of trees most of the time. It is an enormous undertaking. They are not done but they surely did a lot. What those handful of guys got done with their chainsaws in such a short period of time is nothing short of amazing.
On the south shore, there is street flooding in the places where it traditionally floods in and around New Orleans after a heavy rain. That's expected. There is an elaborate drain and pump system in place in the greater New Orleans area but it can't keep up with torrential downpours. After the rain stops, it usually takes a couple of hours for the water in the street to go down.
As night falls, we're in the dark. We have no TV because we have no electricity. A generator would get here two days later. After a major disaster of any kind, the reporting is pretty haphazard and, usually, wildly exaggerated. Remember the early reports of the San Fransisco earthquake of 1989, the early reports in the first Gulf war, the earliest reporting from 911? Katrina reporting was like that, too. People are calling into WWL (The designated emergency broadcast station in the New Orleans area) and saying some of the most ridiculous things that they'd heard or claimed to have seen. One thing was consistently reported, though. The water is rising. It should have been receding.
The water is rising.
I offer the two photos below that I took at work some three weeks after the storm. The city was still shut down. You needed a special pass to get off of the interstate. Once you were off of the interstate, it was the wild west. You could go pretty much anywhere you wanted but everyone except me was armed to the teeth. No one else is supposed to be in the city but people ARE in the city. Some are just trying to protect their property but some are up to no good. Many businesses hired security. These are not the part-time rental "mall" cops. They are very serious and heavily armed. The photos show both the start and the finish of Hurricane Katrina. The clock stopped when the power went out. About two feet above where the clock is hanging, well, look at the next picture.
When time stood still
The rest of the wall
I'm facing the north cinder block wall. The big roll-up doors on the east and west side of the building were blown in by the winds. Hurricane-force winds got inside the building and blew the wall out. Somehow, the clock remained hanging.
We were in Destin, FL watching events unfold on TV in our condo. We couldn't stop watching for the next 7-10 days. By this time Joey's parents and two brothers had joined us. Joey's brother, Scott, had come with us to run the triathlon but had driven back to Metairie on Sunday because he's a nurse and required to stay during evacuations. His wife (girlfriend at the time) stayed with us. Joey's parents and brothers brought Brooke to us in FL. On Wednesday, when it became evident that we wouldn't be able to get back to our house for a while, we decided to pack it up and drive to Atlanta to stay with Sue. Elizabeth and Scott had joined us in Destin for one night but then decided to go on to Orlando to stay with Scott's parents. They also came on to Sue's house later in the week but not sure which day.
Our drive to Atlanta was a scary one. We pulled off and back onto the interstate 5 times before we found a gas station that still had fuel (about 6 other cars did the same thing with us at every exit). At that gas station, somewhere in AL or GA, they were rationing out the gas. It was quite an inequitable process though because initially they told us they didn't have any gas for us, but when they saw me get out with my six month old baby and black lab to take for a walk I think we fit the mold of "a good-ole white American family" and reconsidered. I think we paid over $4 a gallon for that gas. We were so relieved to get to Sue's! We weren't sure how long we would have to stay or what condition our house or business was in. We were in touch with some neighbors who had stayed throughout the storm and they told us our house was fine, at least from the outside. Little did they know that our roof had leaked some in the kitchen and living room causing some damage to the walls and wood floors. It wasn't until about 5 days later that Joey's brother, who was working in Metairie at the hospital, was able to get out and assess the damage to the business. Joey's store got about a foot to a foot and a half of flooding- mainly due to Aaron Broussard's genius plan of turning the pumps in Jefferson Parish off during the storm and evacuating those pump operators to a safe house over 1 hour away. John's Tuxedos reopened for business on November 1st after gutting and renovating the store. Joey drove back and forth to LA from Sue's twice before staying for good. Samuel and I were evacuated for a total of 3 weeks. Once back, it seemed like forever before things got back to "normal"!
These reminiscences were so interesting to read five years later. I remember going with Robbie for gas, wondering where we should exit the highway to look for it. I can't remember which little town we ended up in, but we joined a long line at the exit which we believed had to be a line for gasoline. There were people there who were filling up big containers as well as their cars and that made it a pretty time-consuming project, but not impossible and certainly worthy. On the way back to Bush, we saw that a grocery was open with another long line waiting at the door, so we stopped to see what we could buy. Turned out to be not much and I really can't remember what he came out with. I stayed in the truck because we had something back there that a looter might find interesting -- a generator we had earlier received from Bobette when we checked on her. During this trip out of the area, I was able to use my cell phone to call people who were worried about us to let them know we were all okay. With the towers out, there had been no communication, and of course the land phones were also inoperable. On Friday, Phillip and Scott drove down from Georgia to check on their properties and then came to pick me up to spend the rest of the exile at Sue's. Those weeks in Lawrenceville were delightful I thought. It didn't seem to me we interfered all that much with the resident family -- but I could be wrong. And then, of course, it was eventually great to come back to Kenner and find everything pretty much as I left it. Just my huge pecan tree filling up my back yard but only damaging the fences on either side.