Katrina Part 2

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Shannon: After spending a few days in Spokane with family at Sean’s mom’s house, we moved on to Sean’s dad’s house in Port Orchard, hanging out with family and visiting friends in Seattle and Portland.

On September 15, 2005 Mayor C. Ray Nagin officially announced that areas of New Orleans would be opened in stages - first Algiers on September 21, 2005, then a part of Uptown (zip code 70115 - our area) would be opened 2 days later. We spent most of the day on the phone from Port Orchard trying to make arrangements to get down there and get our stuff moved to Seattle. We finally nabbed flights into Jackson, MS with the plan that we would pick up a moving truck from there and drive into New Orleans. But of course, it couldn’t be that easy…

After making the reservations and spending the weekend at my sister’s house in Mt. Vernon, WA, Sean and I drove to Portland, OR to visit my mother. The plan was to leave from Portland to fly to Jackson. A small hitch in the plan appeared, though - Hurricane Rita! Though it wasn’t projected to hit New Orleans, officials were worried that the path could change or rain from the hurricane would swamp the levees and flood New Orleans again. Thus the mayor rescinded his decision to allow people back into the city and ordered another mandatory evacuation. But we had already purchased our tickets….After a quick Team conference, we decided to just take our chances and fly into Jackson.

Sean and I landed in Jackson on Wednesday at 10 pm. We had tried to make a hotel reservation from Seattle, but no hotels were taking reservations, presumably because they were still full with evacuees. Our prospects for comfort were grim - we figured we would either find a shelter or sleep on the floor of the airport. In a last ditch effort, though, I called around to different hotels/motels in the chances that we would find an empty room. To my absolute amazement, one place had rooms…though at $40/night I knew we wouldn’t be sleeping in a palace. My suspicions were confirmed by the cabdriver who was going to take us there. Sean asked him if he knew where it was and what it was like. The cab driver looked at us in the rearview and hesitated before answering, “I guess it’s not as bad as it used to be” and indicating that he was sure we would be fine for one night. Not as bad as it used to be… words to inspire confidence. Then he advised us not to open our door if anyone knocked during the night - advice that I would later find copied on the “SAFETY GUIDELINES” the management helpfully posted on the backside of the entry door. In addition to that warning, they included such pearls of wisdom as “Remain alert if a stranger approaches you” and “Do not linger in the parking areas after dark”. And to think, other evacuees hadn’t snapped this place up already…

Once we arrived, the manager of the hotel checked us in and nicely knocked $5 off the price - a discount for using the room for so many consecutive hours, I surmised to myself sarcastically.
He told us he had a “nice” room still available and sent us to Room 222. The room looked exactly like I thought it would - what Sean later described to his father as “a place where you find dead hookers with needles still stuck in their arms”. I spent the roughly 7 hours we were there curled in a small ball on the bed trying to touch as little as possible and wondering if the chair Sean had used to blockade the door would suffice.

The next morning, a cab picked us up and took us to Penske to pick up our rental truck. We filled out the usual paperwork and then the guy went to get the truck for us. Sean and I had the same impression when we saw the size of the truck that they were giving us - “holy mother of Jesus -that’s a big truck”. It seems that they did not have any of the trucks in the size we had requested, so they upgraded us to a bigger truck. Bigger may actually be an understatement. I’ve lived in apartments smaller than this truck. Seriously. Anyway, we got on the road for the 2 ½ hour drive to New Orleans, after stopping briefly for water and other supplies. The drive was uneventful; we were one of a handful of vehicles heading into the city - though there were quite a lot of vehicles heading out of the city in preparation for Hurricane Rita, so we were definitely unsure whether they would let us in. As it turned out, luck was on our side. We had no problems at all getting into Jefferson Parish, which was allowing residents in and had not issued a mandatory evacuation order for Rita. Sean and I decided to see if we could sneak into Orleans Parish via River Road - traffic was slowing on I-10 from what appeared to be a checkpoint at the parish line. There was no problem getting down to River Road, but as we approached the parish line from that direction we saw that soldiers had set up a checkpoint and had firmly barricaded the entry into the parish. Sean rolled down his window as we approached and told the soldier we were just trying to pick up some stuff from our apartment. The soldier was polite but firm and told us he couldn’t let us in. He told us to take a left and head back, which we did very reluctantly. As we made the left and headed towards Claiborne Avenue to leave, Sean and I kept looking down the street to see if we could somehow get across the parish line, which was parallel to the street we were driving on. Fate was smiling on us when we reached Claiborne, though - we happened to come up to Claiborne on the best side street possible. The main checkpoint on Claiborne had been set up just one block to the left of us, and only one lonely soldier was checking vehicles to the right of us. We pulled out onto Claiborne just as a large army troop transport passed by. We followed along, hoping to look like we belonged with them. Sean waved nonchalantly at the soldier manning the road as we approached and followed the lead of the troop transport. The soldier just waved us both through, probably assuming that we had been checked at the main checkpoint. We were in….

Driving through New Orleans was surreal, to be sure. It was abandoned. Uptown, where we lived, was relatively unscathed from major devastation, save what the looters did. Trees were down and power lines were lying in the road like spaghetti. But overall, it looked like a hurricane had passed through, not that a major disaster had occurred. We already knew that our neighborhood had seen very little flooding. It wouldn’t be until we drove around later that we would see the real devastation.

Entering our apartment, we were relieved to confirm that there was no major damage. Our landlord had seen the house from the outside about a week earlier and reported to us that there was some roof damage but that it wasn’t major. We did have some minor water damage inside but our stuff looked basically intact. Sean and I moved as quickly as possible to load up our things, almost all of which we had already packed before we left. We were hoping to be in and out in less than 24 hours. The fact that the streets were deserted actually helped quite a bit - we could maneuver the truck as needed and not have to worry about any traffic whatsoever. We only saw a dozen or so vehicles the whole day - a few police cars, a few army trucks. They pretty much left us alone. It appeared that once we were “in” the Parish they were not worried about kicking us out. Only twice were we questioned - once by a police officer (very polite and professional) who was just checking to make sure that we lived in the apartment and that we weren’t looting all of this stuff, and once by some gun-toting FBI agents (not very polite nor professional) who came on very strong and were probably hoping to make a bust to relieve their boredom. When Sean explained our situation they just turned around and left - surely disheartened by the lack of ne’er do wells.

By nightfall, we had loaded all of the furniture and most of the boxes. Without electricity, there was no use working after dark, so we tried to get some sleep. Unfortunately, even after a full day’s work, that night was spent very restlessly. The blow up mattress was uncomfortable and the wind was howling from the pre-hurricane winds of Rita a few hundred miles away. We had to keep the windows open because in New Orleans, even in late September, it’s still pretty warm (90+ degrees). We could hear small pieces of debris being blown around occasionally, then the wind would die down and you would wake up a little while later to the sound of the same debris clattering against the house. The next day, thoroughly unrefreshed, we finished loading and cleaned the place. Luckily for you, our faithful readers, smell-o-vision hasn’t quite been refined yet and so you are spared the awesome stench that waited behind the refrigerator door. Let’s just say that three weeks without power to a refrigerator is two weeks, six days and 23 hours too long. It’s a smell that’s hard to forget.

Sean here:

Fully loaded, apartment clean, we decided to take a tour of what Katrina had wrought elsewhere in the city. The Uptown and Central Business District areas weren’t too bad, but it got progressively worse as we got closer to Mid-City and Lakeview. We drove around and were in jaw dropping awe at the amount of flooding that had occurred. The multiple scum lines from the varying levels of water as the city drained were still evident on much of the buildings and cars. Shannon’s hotel, across from the now famous Convention Center, faired (seemingly) just fine considering the mass of humanity that lived and died in and around the block in the days following the storm. Shannon’s construction company looked like it received the double whammy from Katrina, both flooding and wind destruction were obvious from the street. Hopefully the damages weren’t debilitating because there will be a lot of work for general construction companies in the coming months and years. Amazingly enough we traversed the city unmolested by officials of any stripe. The very few vehicles we saw weren’t interested in challenging us or our huge Penske.

It was now time for the heroes of this tale to bid farewell to their beloved home of 5 years and move on. While sad to say goodbye it was very exciting to finally have closure on this chapter and begin the much anticipated Around the World trip.

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