(This diary, originally published one year after Katrina, is republished for the tenth anniversary of the storm.)
It's hard to describe the feeling that I get whenever I see a Katrina diary or story in the newspaper. There's a sense of dread, an unwillingness to dwell on the events of the past year, and yet I can't stop myself. I'll click on the link and luckydog's or blksista's words will drag me back to New Orleans again. My Katrina experiences were relatively mild, but with a storm like that, even "mild" was nerve-wracking.
More after the jump...
Living in New Orleans means that you obsessively track each storm in the gulf. The week before Katrina was no different and several times a day I would visit http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ to check the storm's progress. That Monday and Tuesday I wasn't too worried because all the projections had it making landfall around Pensacola. By Thursday the predicted track had shifted westward towards Mobile but it still appeared that we'd only get the barest edge of the storm in New Orleans. Friday morning it had shifted westward again and was targeting Biloxi which meant that New Orleans would definitely feel the effect of the storm, but only from the weaker side so I still wasn't thinking in terms of leaving. I spent most of the day wrapped up in work and forgot completely about the hurricane until that evening. By six o'clock the predicted track had shifted westward again and it was clear that New Orleans was going to get hit hard. That evening I read a hurricane diary by DarkSyde and it began to sink in how big a deal this was. The nonchalance I felt 12 hours earlier was gone and in its place was a growing sense of unease.
(Note, in searching the archives, it appears that the diary by Darksyde that I mentioned, Katrina Cat 4 - 5: Horrendous, actually came out on the Saturday we evacuated. I probably read it the just before we left for Baton Rouge)
Still, even at that point I hadn't decided to evacuate. Those of you who have lived in hurricane country are familiar with the "do I go/do I stay" dilemma. To evacuate a city of any size you have to commit to leaving the area before you know if you really need to leave or not. If you want to leave before the traffic overwhelms the roads you have to get out of town 72 to 48 hours before the storm hits and that far out it's difficult to predict the storm's path accurately. If you wait until you're sure you're in the storm's path then it's almost too late to do anything except hunker down. The previous year during hurricane Ivan, my 70 year old landlord and his wife left the morning of the day before the hurricane only to return about 12 hours later. It had taken them 9 hours to get 30 miles or so and they decided to take their chances at home rather than risk being caught on the road. The other issue with evacuation is finding a place to stay. When a hurricane makes an appearance, people hurry to make hotel reservations in-land. If you don't have family or friends you can stay with and you're not the sort to evacuate every time a hurricane comes through then all the hotel rooms are long since booked by the time you get around to trying to find one. You're then left with the possibility of driving for hours, not certain if you'll find a place to stay. Add pets into the mix and you can see how the incentives for staying put can add up.
The tipping point came on Saturday morning when my sister called to say that she was leaving soon for Baton Rouge to stay with her fiancé. She was taking our aunt with her and said that somehow they'd manage to squeeze in my girlfriend and I as well as our cats. I talked it over with Carolyn and we decided that we would evacuate - the first hurricane that I had evacuated for since hurricane Betsy.
We spent the morning and early afternoon getting ready - topping off the gas in the car, getting extra cat food, and then visiting the vet to get some tranquilizers to make a multi-hour trip with angry Siamese cats bearable for everyone in the car. The vet's office was a madhouse as people were dropping their pets off to be boarded while they were away. Then it was back home to pack - clothes for a week, pet stuff, hurricane supplies and the "just in case" box - all the stuff that it would be painful to replace, such as passport, checkbooks, tax returns, business licenses and computer backups. One of the last things to go in the car was my laptop which would prove to be most useful thing we brought with us. By 5 pm we were on the road, slowly making our way down Airline highway instead of trying to fight the traffic on the interstate. Five hours later we made it to my sister's fiancé's house in Baton Rouge, just 70 miles way, but further inland and out of the path of storm surge that threatened New Orleans and the coastal areas. We spent a little while getting the cats settled in the room that had been cleared out for us to use and then chatted awhile before turning in. The last thing that I did that evening was find an unsecured wireless network in the area and use it to send out a quick email titled "Ok, so far..." to friends and family.
Sunday was anticlimactic. We made a number of trips get extra hurricane supplies, but spent most of the day glued to the television waiting for the storm to hit. The real sense of dread started to sink in when in the course of a day that Katrina went from a category 3 to a category 5 hurricane.
I awoke Monday morning around 7 am with the wind beginning to pick up a bit. There wasn't a whole lot of news - coastal Louisiana was taking a pretty heavy hit with wind and storm surge but nothing unexpected yet. About 7:30 falling tree limbs took out the power lines and we were left in the dark, both literally and figuratively. Our only sources of information were a couple of battery operated radios, a difficult adjustment for someone who is used to having broadband internet all the time. I spent the rest of the day reading some trashy science fiction and keeping the cats company in their cell, surfacing every once in a while to see if there was any news. Around mid-day we heard the first reports of flooding in New Orleans and later that day there was the "oh shit" moment when we heard that the levees had breached. That night we just sat around the dining room table straining to hear any news over the radio. One of the enduring memories I have of that day was a moment when my sister was leaning towards the radio trying to hear the announcer as he said something about the lakefront, where her condo was located. Her face was dimly illuminated on one side by the battery lantern on the table and the other half in shadow and I remember thinking what a great picture it would make, but deciding that this wasn't the time to intrude by pulling out a camera.
The first week after Katrina was a daze of heat and boredom and increasing anxiety caused by a lack of solid information. We were without power until Friday so our news was pretty fragmentary - the day after the storm we stood in a crowd at a Best Buy gathered around the big screen TV's and got our first views of how bad the flooding was. Cell phone service was out and communications were limited to going to Starbucks to use their wireless network to send a few emails. We passed the time doing the things that I remembered from riding out hurricanes while growing up: reading, playing cards, listening to the radio.
Throughout all of this we still didn't have an idea of what was waiting for us in New Orleans. My sister had a condo on the lakefront near a marina and we knew that there was a huge storm surge in that area but not if her building had just taken flood damage or if it was gone entirely. Carolyn's apartment was about three blocks away from the breach on the 17th street canal, on the dry(er) Metairie side of the canal, but we still didn't know the extent of any wind damage. My own apartment was on the second floor of a duplex in an area where we knew there was flooding, but once again we had no idea if the roof was intact, etc. These were the sorts of things that preyed on our minds for the week immediately after the storm hit. After a couple of days we began to hear about plans to reopen Jefferson Parish for people to check on their property, but the details were pretty sparse.
When our power was restored, we finally began to get some information. The TV was good for getting a general feel for the situation but details were still hard to come by. For days the TV would show aerial footage of the breach in the 17th street canal, and you could see the flooded condos in the block next to my sister's building, but it was maddening to see the camera pan to the side to show the flooding and then stop just before it would get to her building.
Once the power came back on, so did the neighbor's unsecured wireless network and I shamelessly piggybacked off of their service. It was via my laptop that we started to get some real details about what was going on. Google posted early satellite photos of the flooding and then NOAA posted pictures from an aerial survey that they did. Someone put together a Google Maps app where you could add pushpins and brief notes like "xyz Lake Ave. 4 feet of water 8/31." We became amateur aerial photo analysts as we tried to locate houses and evaluate damage. We discovered that my sister's condo was still standing but there was heavy roof damage and we still didn't know if the flooding made it to the second floor where her unit was. Carolyn's building looked intact but the school where she taught was obviously flooded to the rafters of the portable buildings in the back lot. There was flooding all around my duplex, but from the shadows it didn't appear too deep and the roof looked intact.
The night before they reopened Jefferson parish, we downloaded a series of aerial photos onto the laptop and plotted our route along roads that appeared to be dry. The next morning we got a fairly early start but still the interstate was backed up all the way to Baton Rouge. We quickly abandoned that idea and made our way over to the river and followed the winding river road, crossing at Donaldsonville where I grew up and then again just before New Orleans. We picked up Airline Highway and slowly made our way inward. One of the eeriest things about that first trip back was driving through a completely abandoned city. Once we passed the activity around airport, we made it the entire length of Veterans Blvd and saw only one or two cars on the road.
On that first trip in we were able to get to Carolyn's apartment and found her unit untouched. Her neighbors weren't so lucky. The lakeside of the building was missing the exterior wall. We checked my aunt's condo and her building was also intact. We were unable to reach my duplex because of the flooding so we decided to call it a day and leave before the curfew went into effect.
Two days later we went back, prepared to wade several blocks to my duplex if necessary. By that time all of the sporting goods stores in Baton Rouge had sold out of hip waders so we wrapped plastic garbage bags around our legs and secured them with duct tape. This time we managed to get through and found my duplex intact and we used a trash can to float some belongings out to where we had parked the car. On the drive back to Baton Rouge we were passed by a huge convoy of emergency vehicles. In the darkness it was difficult to make out the names on the sides of the fire trucks and paramedic units but eventually we saw one that read Peoria. I was trying to remember if there was a Peoria, Louisiana when I saw a truck that said Decatur Fire Department. That's when it hit me - they weren't from Louisiana - they had driven down from Illinois. Carolyn and I just stared as they passed, each and every truck from a different town in Illinois, some cities that we recognized, mostly places that we had never heard of, but all there to help. I don't know which of us started crying first but I remember how quiet we both were for the rest of the trip.
That day pretty much sums up what it's been like in the year since Katrina. Small victories, lots of frustration, and the occasional thing that has an emotional impact all out of proportion to what you'd expect. Carolyn teaches kindergarten and the first time she saw the school supplies aisle at Costco she just started crying. For me, I was on a job interview and having lunch with my future coworkers when I had to change the topic because I could feel the emotional rollercoaster starting again.
Maybe a rollercoaster is the best description for what Katrina means to me. It's a series of highs and lows like I've never experienced before. The outpouring of kindness and generosity that Katrina brought out shows us what is best in this country. And at the same time Katrina displayed to the whole world the ugliest side of this country. It's not possible to talk or think about Katrina without whipping from one extreme to the other - I go from amazed and humbled to sad to furious and back again until it's all jumbled together. And even though I'm thousands of miles away from New Orleans these days, that rollercoaster is there waiting and I know that it will be a long time before I'll be able to avoid getting pulled back on it again and again.
Postscript
Ten years later that rollercoaster has stilled, but not without some cost. My relationship with Carolyn sputtered and failed and while the aftermath of Katrina played a role I have to be honest and say that it wasn't the only reason. Elderly relatives that were my strongest ties to the area are passing away and my visits have become less frequent. I've since married and my wife and I talk of where we want to end up when we retire. It's hard to believe that retirement, once so incredibly distant is possibly closer to me in the future than Katrina is in the past.
But even as I look to the future, I can look back and still see the silhouette of that rollercoaster on the horizon. And while I (mostly) no longer feel it's draw, I can not, will not forget what it represents.