Categories: uncategorized
Date: 18 September 2005 06:06:24
What does one wear to a hurricane evacuation?
Let's see... hours expected in a hot windblown car... too much sun... hmmm. One wears as little as possible.
But, knowing not what the future holds, one also brings along sturdy items and footwear, and several changes of underwear. You never know...
Katrina was on her way -- growing like a big splotchy tumor on the weather maps, moving slowly over warm Gulf waters, the very worst sort of way for a hurricane to move. She'd already killed a handful in Florida.
Until a last-minute hook to the east almost as she hit land, she'd been headed straight for us. So far as we knew, as we boarded up the windows and replaced our iffy door locks with new more effective ones -- we'd not find our house here when we came back. We bagged up the computer and the expensive Bible research library in big black garbage bags and tucked them onto the top shelf of an inner-room closet... and we left town, hoping for the best and prepared for the worst.
So -- expecting landfall early Monday morning, we hustled to leave town by lunch time Sunday. The main highways were already packed with evacuees from New Orleans, people who either can't read a map or who are afraid to travel the almost empty country roads. We stopped to gather the vehicles at a local gas station, which was stuffed with dozens of cars and trucks and vans gassing up for a long haul. The state highway overpass soaring almost over our heads was bumper-to-bumper with cars almost at a standstill.
What were those people going to do, wait out the storm on the road in their cars?
In our old borrowed Chevy Celebrity, with no A/C and a questionable water pump, rode my household -- the hubby, the grown daughter, the 13-year-old son, and me.
In their borrowed Mustang convertible -- offered by my son's in-laws, because it had A/C for the baby -- rode the grown son, his wife Kimi, and the Grandboy.
In a big blue van rode Kimi's "Nanny" ("nananne", or godmother); her daughter, Kimi's best friend, who is Grandboy's "Nanny"; and the friend's daughter -- of whom Kimi is the "Nanny". Sounds sort of dynastic, don't it?
Our little convoy headed around Thibodaux in Lafourche Parish -- both Terrebonne and Lafourche had declared mandatory evacuations. We took LA 1 and Hwy 308, along Bayou Lafourche, pretty much north, and then headed northwest. We had no idea where were would end up -- we expected nothing, we expected to sleep in the car for days perhaps. No matter. We were going to live through Katrina or die trying, hah!
Imagine the day:
Katrina was out there, sucking all bad weather to herself. Little light showers only occasionally passed overhead, welcome because they cooled us off. We rolled through beautiful countryside, the northwest route taking us on a tongue of lower land not much different from home almost all the way. It was hot -- but the windows were down and the day was lovely.
As we steered onto roads more and more rural, the going got even easier and the scenery prettier. People we didn't even know started following us -- some had only the most general idea where they were going and we seemed confident, so along they came.
We stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall barbeque place in Livonia -- it was operating with only the cook and a single waitress, feeding a full house of evacuees all day long. Those ladies worked like some sort of heroic warriors in an opera, meeting all challenges and dishing out the burgers with a smile.
More pretty countryside. A little higher land. Less sugar cane, more soybeans, and cotton fields, the bolls open and sparkly white but not yet ripe. We ended up on the little local road called Highway 10, a gravel road winding through cotton fields and levees, which took us to the Melville Ferry across the Atchafalaya River.
Which is closed on Sundays.
Of course the only sign stating this was posted on the very drive approaching the ferry landing, not back at the main road. Naturally.
There was a Department of Transportation and Development trucker in our now-considerable following. He got on the radio -- cell phones were already failing, if their networks went through New Orleans -- calling his home office, which has much to do with the ferries. It would have been the most efficient way for him to get to his emergency assignment, and he'd have taken us all across with him if he could get the operator out there.
No dice. Of course. Since when has anything sensible ever happened in a red-tape scenario?
So, we all filed up the levee back to LA 1 and followed the river miles and miles to the next bridge, crossing well after dark.
As we neared Nachitoches, the other two cars of our party peeled off to stay with some relatives, and we heard about a church shelter -- but then we saw the sign for a Red Cross shelter at the state university. We knew there'd be no hotel rooms between home and Shreveport. We figured maybe some church contacts would put us up, but ended up there at Northwestern State University, almost in Texas.
We stayed the Sunday night there on the gymnasium floor, comfy enough with all our own pillows and blankets we'd brought -- but we did borrow a couple more from the Red Cross for extra padding. There weren't many mattresses available yet, and of course the elderly and delicate needed them more than we did. We took mattresses the second night, after we were reassured that plenty had been delivered. I actually slept better the first night on the floor. Explain that? That was fine with me -- that floor had felt luxurious after all day in the car.
They had two televisions set up, monitoring the Weather Channel and CNN mostly. I slept some, as did the daughter and teen son, but the spouse was restless and stayed up all night helping out a bit and watching the storm.
Seemingly at the last moment it dropped a little power and joggled to the "right" , which meant great things for our town -- but you know the horrors that happened northeast of us in New Orleans.
Many who were there with us were from New Orleans. These were not the desperate and injured, weary wet dirty survivors of the flooding that followed the storm -- those we would meet in our local shelters after we came home. These were the ones who had been able and willing to get out. Many brought TVs and games to keep the little ones occupied. I looked up "between sleeps" after folks started waking up Monday morning, and smiled to see two little African-American brothers across the aisle, under a comforter, contentedly watching one of the "Lord Of The Rings" trilogy.
Meanwhile their parents were in the middle of the gym floor, though, with others, anxiously watching the reporters standing in the wind and rain of New Orleans. I saw a reporter in a yellow slicker, out with his cameraman, get blown around Canal Street, in the storm itself, before the levees breached. The guy was literally blown down the street a bit and fetched up against a mailbox. The piece of it that "saved" him broke off in his hand. He crawled back into the somewhat sheltered parking garage area with his cameraman and vowed he'd never pull such a stupid trick again.
I met a handful of fellows from some sort of group home for challenged adults. They were utterly congenial, sitting most of the time in some chairs along a hallway and talking with folks as if we were passing them by on the streets of Mayberry, and they were the denizens thereof, sitting before Floyd's Barbershop for a gossip. Or as if they were Garrison Keillor's Norwegian Bachelor Farmers. It was so sweet.
We were fed huge college-cafeteria meals there on campus. The food service people did a fabulous job -- half the cafeteria was set aside just for us. I bet there were over 400 of us, counting the little ones and the volunteers. There was a handprinted sign up on the cafeteria door asking the students to basically put an arm around us and comfort us, so far from home and anxious as we were.
I'd thought we'd be sleeping in the car and bathing with Wet-Wipes in gas station restrooms and eating snack foods for days. Those hot meals meant a lot to me, and the gymnasium showers were a godsend.
We watched the news all day Monday. Katrina seemed to move on -- she was still a Category 3 as she passed into the rural parishes north and east of New Orleans, then hit the beaches in Mississippi and Alabama. Lots of destruction there.
But, for whatever damage she had done, she was gone from our home area southwest of New Orleans. It looked as if we'd dodged the bullet again. And New Orleans seemed to have come away with nasty wind damage and "normal", "expected" flooding. Things were gonna be OK, we thought.
But they weren't. Things were not OK. A reporter stood on a highway offramp, looking down below her as water swirled over rooftops in New Orleans neighborhoods I knew. Churches and businesses I knew were going under. The levees had broken. Lakes Bourgne and Ponchartrain were taking the city.