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Published: January 11th 2009
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By this time Katrina had already hit the coast and seeing the writing on the wall as to how scarse housing was going to be I got a loan from my mom and purchased a 1992 Four Winds 29ft Class C RV. My mom and I then drove it to Louisiana, well actually Alabama, as I had to go through orientation with the company before they would let me work for them.
While in Alabama, I met a co-worker from Texas who would become my next door neighbor for the next 7 months. We drove back to Louisiana and found some land to park the RV. Having finally gotten settled for the duration, it was time to begin the process of helping folks whose lives had been ripped apart by Katrina. There are few things I don't remember from my first day in New Orleans, but I do remember getting back to the RV after that first day and being unable to do anything but stare into space for 4 hours. It was a horrific experience and one I will never forget.
The pictures of that time can and do tell a story that is more poinant that I
could ever tell! Some of the claims which will stay with me are the woman who had spent her whole life savings to start a hair salon and didn't have enough insurance to begin to cover the damages. The woman whose hair salon was on the second floor so it was saved from the flooding only to return to find it had been looted and destroyed by vandals. The building owner who had just finished building out his personal space with custom wood paneling from all over the world. The insured whose father had passed away on the roof while waiting for rescue while the entire family watched. The church that had 12 feet of water in it. The images of the stray dogs and cats running around an empty city. The masses and masses of flooded cars everywhere. The roof of the Superdome in tatters for months after the storm. The piles of debris that were still there in April 2006 when I left Louisiana. The stories of watermelon plants growing everywhere after the storm.
And then there are the happy times spent in Baton Rouge with the Hash House Harriers. Learning to Hash, and learning what it
means to live in the south. Rebuilding my friendship with Kurt to the point that when I moved home to CA I rented two rooms from him, so I would always have someone to look after my stuff when I was gone on storm. The joy of selling my home after having it on the market for 4 years!
So while the images from Katrina are still there locked forever in my head, there are happy times associated with those 7 months as well.
Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest hurricane, as well as one of the five deadliest, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall. Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and crossed southern Florida as a moderate Category 1 hurricane, causing some deaths and flooding there before strengthening rapidly in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm weakened before making its second landfall as a Category 3 storm on the morning of Monday, August 29 in southeast Louisiana. It caused severe destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, much of it due
to the storm surge. The most severe loss of life and property damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, which flooded as the levee system catastrophically failed, in many cases hours after the storm had moved inland. The federal flood protection system in New Orleans failed at more than fifty places. Nearly every levee in metro New Orleans was breached as Hurricane Katrina passed just east of the city limits. Eventually 80%!o(MISSING)f the city became flooded and also large tracts of neighboring parishes, and the floodwaters lingered for weeks. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in the actual hurricane and in the subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. The storm is estimated to have been responsible for $81.2 billion (2005 U.S. dollars) in damage, making it the costliest tropical cyclone in U.S. history.
The levee failures prompted investigations of their design and construction which belongs solely to the US Army Corps of Engineers as mandated in the Flood Control Act of 1965. There was also an investigation of the responses from federal, state and local governments, resulting in the resignation of Federal Emergency Management Agency director Michael D. Brown. Conversely, the
National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service were widely commended for accurate forecasts and abundant lead time. Three years later, thousands of displaced residents in Mississippi and Louisiana were still living in trailers.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_katrina
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