5 years ago today

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At this time, I was getting a tire for my car because it was looking like I would have to evacuate today.

I left around 3pm after finally convincing my grandma that she needed to go with me and couldn't stay and didn't arrive at my destination until 4am the next morning.


I ended up not having to pay for the tire and wouldn't get back to New Orleans for another 4 years.

5 years ago at this time, I was making the trek across northern Louisiana on I-20. It's taken me all day to just get to Jackson, MI and I still have to cross all of LA, into Texas up north about 30-40 miles north of Dallas to McKinney. I won't arrive at my destination until 4:30 am after having started my drive around 2:30pm the previous afternoon.

From that point on forward, I will have held 4 jobs in 3 different states before finally getting an opportunity to move back home to New Orleans. The year that I move home, the professional football team the New Orleans Saints will win the Super Bowl and I'll celebrate it with my friends hugging and screaming.

It's still not finished yet. The city desperately needs its levees fixed and not merely patched, there are many areas still not rebuilt, there are many local businesses that have gone out of business, and there's about a million or more people who still haven't moved back yet.

My arriving back here may still not be my return home.

I do not know New Orleans' future, but I do know you are not the only one there with concerns. If you ever need a place to go in an emergency, I have a tent and everything you would need to stay here a ways north of you in my backyard for a while.

Katrina was the only hurricane I forecast with the correct intensity and landfall location. I am forever haunted by this. My school newspaper interviewed me asking me what I felt.

Thanks. I was more just writing as a way of just kinda excising how I feel about the whole "5 years gone" thing they've been highlighting everywhere locally and in the national news. Personally, unless it's something about a couple Fortune 500 company finally being drawn here due to our low taxes and their impacting the amount of work being done to actually properly repair the infrastructure in/around the city, I don't want to hear any of it. But since it kept coming up, I figured I'd type up and remember my own 5 years ago.

Today I had posted one thing those 5 years ago: "Well, it's official, I'm homeless".


I then went out and started applying for jobs in my area so I could keep working since my job was destroyed and they wouldn't be coming back and they haven't...it was a local video rental store with a huge vintage back catalog.

Never mind... wrong type of thing to post in a thread like this...

Five years ago today, I was completely unaware of what was happening in my city. We evacuated to a house in the country. It was the first we ever left New Orleans for a hurricane and in the back of my mind, I knew this was no ordinary hurricane. We lost power the next morning and a small radio was the only contact to the media I had for the next three days. I couldn't sleep at night, so I would listen to the one radio station that was working on my little radio.
We were looking for ice because the country house was freakishly hot and I remember walking into a store and seeing the words Hurricane Katrina on the cover of a magazine. I thought to myself "Wait, what?" I had no clue how much of an impact this hurricane would have on my life.
Madness. Just madness.

Where were you living in New Orleans?

At the time, I was living in upper Gentilly/Lakeview by UNO. Our apartment got 12 feet of water in it and everything I left behind got ruined because there was no place high enough to avoid it. The water went into the attic and took all the ceiling and insulation down with it when the waters receded.

When you say the country...I'm guessing you evacuated to Mississippi since you still saw a good portion of the storm?

I am and was living on the West Bank. Yeah, ain't no culture over here but the French Quarter's just over the bridge. No water damage at all. Lost our fence and our cat. It could have been worse.
When I say the country, I mean Vacherie, LA.

I have/had a few friends on the West Bank. That side fared way, way better than everything on the other side of the river.