Katrina + Three Sixty Six

Yesterday was Katrina Central on every damn television program.

I saw everything all over again. Wall to wall hurricane stuff.

Yes, it’s been a whole year. Yes, the government screwed up. Yes, it’s still a mess. But jeez, let’s give it a break.

And since I read a personal account in my friend Samantha’s blog and in order to purge this from my mind I decided that I would tell my story.

It was a dark and stormy night……..

Kidding.

It was a dark and stormy day...........

Having lived through the path of Camille in ’69 and Freddy in ’80 (hurricane party at the frat house complete with flying squirrels!) and at least a dozen other hurricanes, I was fairly prepared for what I thought was going to happen.

Before I get started, I need to interject a funny side note - my lady had a weeklong meeting at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi that she was supposed to leave for Sunday afternoon (yes, the Sunday afternoon before the Monday the storm hit) - and she was going. It didn’t quite register in her brain that there was a big ole storm coming.

She decided to stay home after her boss reasoned with her.

And it was a good thing she did since the next day the Beau was about 2 blocks inland turned into just another pile of debris.

I had evacuated my mother and her cats from her old folks apartment complex the day before. She went up to the farm where my house it to stay with my aunt and uncle 30 miles north since it would be safe up there (yea, right).

So after that, all I had to worry about was my office and my girl’s house and my house and EVERYTHING ELSE.

When you run the transportation and logistics functions for the largest transformer manufacturer in the world, you tend to be very busy during disasters like hurricanes.

So, being the logistics professional am, I was dashing around trying to get the last of everything I thought we would need in order to be as comfortable as possible during and after the storm.

Wal-mart looked like looters had already struck and stolen everything. The aisles were full of stuff thrown down and there was nothing of value left anywhere. But I improvised and got the last of what I thought we needed and went to my girl’s house to hunker down.

Dawn broke and a very windy day presented itself almost immediately. It seems to me like most hurricanes happen at night – I know that’s probably not true but it was odd to me for this to be happening in the day. It wasn’t as scary as it can be when it’s pitch black outside.

Or so I thought.

My girl lived in a huge house on a high point in her neighborhood and there were lots of trees, but none were too big. By mid morning the trees were all bending this way and that and you could hear them snapping all over the place.

It sounded like a firefight in a war zone.

The wind was terrible but there was hardly any rain. I am told it was raining very hard but the wind was blowing so hard that you couldn’t tell because it was being blown to Tennessee.

This went on ALL DAY LONG.

The power stayed on for a lot longer than I thought. It would flicker and then go out and come back on and then go off over and over again. Finally sometime in the early afternoon it went off for good.

And I had no idea that was going to mean it would be out for so very long.

Luckily my girl had very nice gas appliances, which continued to work without the electricity thing.

But it was 100 degrees and no A/C made for some interesting days.

I waited until the evening when the storm was over and took off for my house to check on my family and my abode. Little did I know that just getting out of the neighborhood would be so hard. It took me 4 hours to go 30 miles. Lots of backtracking and all-terrain driving.

I finally made it to the highway and it was impassable due to more trees than I had ever seen in my life. The only thing to do was to grab the chainsaw and start to hack your way through it. I teamed up with some National Guardsmen and we literally cut our way up the highway. I got to the other highway that went to my house and left that convoy that we had set up and tried to get home. I tried one way, then the other. I finally just parked my car in the middle of the road and walked about a mile in the pitch dark to my house.

The huge oak tree in the front of my house was blown over and all I could see was the roots and the patch of dirt it had brought up with it was about 15 feet tall. I could only imagine that it had fallen straight through my house. But somehow, it had fallen right beside the house. The branches were all up on the house and in the windows but there was no structural damage.

I inspected my house with the flashlight as best I could and then went directly to the barn to check on my Harley. Yea, it was just fine. Then I set off across the pasture to see about where my mom was staying. My aunt and uncle have a huge, beautiful house and before I got half way across the pasture I was walking on shingles and nails – which in my Sherlock Holmes state of mind, told me that things weren’t so good up there.

Luckily, the roof was still intact – it just lacked shingles on most of it.

Nothing to do but lay down and sleep. Uncomfortably numb.

The next morning brought reality streaming in with the sunlight. As far as you could see, there was nothing but devastation. And I do mean biblical devastation.

I checked on all the old folks and then went back to look for my car. It was still sitting in the middle of the road. So I backtracked my way and tried to get to my office that is 30 miles in the other direction.

I tried to navigate yet another highway and found it impassable so I went back to my house and got my motorcycle.

That may have been stupid from a safety standpoint – but from a mobility standpoint it was the bomb! I made it just fine, I just had to go slowly.

I was very pleased when I got to work and found that we had sustained no real structural damage to our 5 million square foot building and even more amazed that our power was already back on. The power company has a vested interest in us getting our power back on. Us and the hospitals were up and going right away.

The next week was spent trying to patch together my work force and coordinate truck drivers and deliveries to areas that weren’t even really there anymore in South Mississippi and in New Orleans.

Not to mention trying to check on my girl and my family. My world exists in a nice triangle with each side of the triangle being 30 miles. Little did I know that gasoline was about to become the most precious commodity in the universe.

I ended up running chain saw gas in my motorcycle in order to get to all the places I needed to go and I won’t bore you with all the detail of the rest of it. I won’t even bore you with my wild adventure of driving 200 miles looking for gas in North Louisiana that I never found or how my employer bought out the Exxon station in order to just give our employees gas. Nor will I bore you about being without power for three weeks………Oh My God!

But I will tell you that it was the most amazing time I have ever lived through. I know that you see many stories of tragedy and how bad things were – I mean we even had a boy that shot his sister in the head for a bag of ice. Killed her dead. No shit. It happened.

But my experience was one of seeing the human race hold it’s hand out and help one another in the most amazing way. I saw so many things that made me realize that we are all wonderful people if the circumstances allow us to be. I met more people than I ever imagined who were streaming down here to help just as soon as the storm was over. I saw the government try so hard to get it right. I saw our law enforcement personnel take charge of the traffic problems and make it work better than it should have.

All in all, I don’t ever want to do that again – but I can’t say I’m sorry I didn’t get to experience something like that once.

But one in a lifetime is more than enough!