Katrina Log

Click here to read our 2006 Christmas letter. (This will open a new page.)

Click here to read our 2005 Christmas letter. (This will open a new page.)

Monday, September 12, 2005

I have finally caught this log up to the present day. We moved almost all of Freddy's and Sandie's belongings to their new house this weekend, so we have now "the barn" to ourselves.

We keep hearing more and more reports of progress in getting our city back on its feet. The water is continuing to be pumped out, less than 50 per cent remains flooded. Hopefully the main waste water treatment plant will be back in operation today. More and more parts of the city that were not flooded are having electricity restored.  Some are saying that the French Quarter will "reopen" by the end of the year. The airport will reopen to regular commercial passenger flights tomorrow. Regular cargo flights have already started.

We actually think that progress will be even faster than that. Some of the diehards who stayed in the Quarter have been working to clean up storm debris. Except for a report we heard by Geraldo Rivera, no one on television is talking about the parts of New Orleans that had little or no flooding. We saw few pictures of the areas that were not flooded unless it was to show a building on fire. We think most of those areas will be back and open to residents by the end of the year, probably sooner.

This will probably be my final posting of significant length, but there are a few things I thought you may be interested in. Forgive me for getting up on my soapbox.

There has been an incredible amount of misinformation, false information, and just plain stupid pronouncements distributed and made by "experts," journalists, politicians, and others regarding Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in the city of New Orleans. 

One major criticism of Mayor Nagin is his not calling for an evacuation before Saturday afternoon. The truth of the matter is that he waited until then because he was following a hurricane evacuation plan that was in place before the storm. This plan was the result of a lot of work and consultation among many parishes in southeast Louisiana and the state. It called for a phased evacuation and New Orleans was last on the list. Early Saturday morning, the coastal parishes called for an evacuation of the lowest lying areas. Then around noon evacuation was called in the next lower areas. Then a few hours later the voluntary evacuation was called for New Orleans and similar areas. That way, the few available roads would not be clogged with everyone trying to get out at once and those in the lowest areas not being able to get out at all and drowning. He didn't call for a "mandatory" evacuation until Sunday because there were doubts as to whether he had the legal authority to do so. I'm still not sure that was settled, but he did it anyway.

The untold story is that this plan worked! What you haven't seen on the news is that an extraordinary number of people were able to evacuate - many, many thousands more than had been previously thought possible. No one who has studied hurricanes striking New Orleans has thought this many people would and/or could get out.

There will be a lot of blame to go around when it comes time to examine what did and did not work in storm preparation and recovery. This ranges from city government up to Washington, D. C. No one did everything right. However, one group who bears a lot of blame is Congress.

For years and years people in Louisiana and elsewhere have said that the city's levees are vulnerable to a category 4 or 5 storm. It would have been a surprise if they hadn't broken! They were only built to withstand a fast moving, category 3 storm. Louisiana members of Congress and a few from other states have tried to get funding to improve the levees for decades. The strength of the levees is something that has been talked about in New Orleans at least since since we moved here in the 70's.

The natural question is to ask why Louisiana should look to the federal government for help? After all, shouldn't the state and local governments be willing to save their own people? The answer, as far as I know, is that they have no legal authority to do so. Years ago Congress made it the responsibility of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to maintain the levees.

Another group of people that deserves criticism are those who had nothing better to do than to get in front of television cameras and criticize those trying to save lives after the storm and people were still being rescued off rooftops and such. If they had any sense whatsoever, they should have either shut up or gone to President Bush and others and told them directly where efforts were not working and that changes needed to be made. Standing in front of cameras and spouting off accomplished nothing but to show how foolish they are. I also include those blathering about racism being involved.

A group deserving all the praise I can muster are the cops of the New Orleans Police Department. They performed "above and beyond" the call of duty. What they were able to do with the little support they received is without doubt one of the standout stories of this disaster. Few know how little they had to work with.

What it is like being forced out of our home and city under these circumstances is not something that we could ever have even remotely understood until it happened. And I do not expect you to. Intellectually recognizing a situation is one thing. Knowing how you feel about it and coping emotionally is quite another. The feeling of disorientation and loss and the sense of helplessness is not something I ever want to experience again. Even today at this writing, two weeks after Katrina hit, we do not know what tomorrow will bring. And we are among the fortunate ones from New Orleans.

Finally, we do greatly appreciate all of the offers of support, sympathy, and aid we have received from so many people. They really do help. Some offers have been extraordinarily generous. Unfortunately, my Internet access is still limited to an hour at a time at the Zachary public library, so right now I am limited in how I can respond.

We have heard many people make pronouncements saying that if New Orleans is rebuilt that it will never be the same. They are right to a limited extent. The city never will be the same. No place could be after a disaster of this magnitude. But while many of the historic sections were only slightly damaged, that is not what makes New Orleans New Orleans. It is the spirit of its people, their live and let live outlook, their feeling that life is to be enjoyed as much as possible. That is New Orleans. That is why New Orleanians are already talking about how to put on Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest next year. Our city will be rebuilt - is being rebuilt. And we welcome you to pay her a visit.

Friday, September 9, 2005

Today we got to visit our house! As to how we got in, let's just say it was through official unofficial means.

While we had reports that our house had little damage, it was reassuring to see it. Two boards had blown off windows, but the windows themselves were intact. Two French doors leading to a covered patio were blown off and there was some minor roof damage where some trees were blown against the side of the house. Three palm trees we just had planted were blown down. All in all we considered ourselves to be extremely fortunate, certainly better than 90% of the rest of New Orleans. We even had running water! although it is not yet drinkable. That helped a lot in cleaning.

Our next-door neighbors were not so fortunate. They must have been out of town when Katrina hit because none of their shutters were closed and every window facing our house had at least one pane of glass broken. We did not try to look inside to see the havoc that must have been there.

As was expected, there was a pretty unpleasant odor emanating from the kitchen. I put on a breathing mask to empty the contents of our refrigerator and freezer. There were hundreds of flies to help. It was a bit sad as we had just put up 50 pounds of beautiful shrimp and I lost part of my birthday present, 5 slabs of barbequed ribs from the Rendezvous restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee.

From a list we had previously created, we gathered together belongings that would make our life a bit easier in Zachary. I retrieved EasyGrapher manuals and other related materials, so I expect to start shipping programs next week.

We did not do any sightseeing per se. We took one direct route in and a slightly different route out of the city. The uptown area is in remarkably good shape considering. The flood waters reached as far "south" (If you know New Orleans, you know why this is in quotes.) as St. Charles Avenue, but not even that far in many places. There was very little significant damage to buildings. Certainly there was a tremendous number of trees and limbs down, and electric and other lines brought down with them. The streetcars won't be running for a while. There was an occasional window or two blown out and some roof damage. But what we saw made us believe at least the uptown part of the city could be up and running in a relatively short period of time, possibly as soon as a month. We saw no evidence of looting of houses.

We saw National Guard, regular armed forces troops (Army and Marines), and police (from various places) all over the place. The Guard and others had cleaned almost all the streets we saw, including side streets, of trees and other debris. We had no problem getting to our house in that regard. There were also many, many trucks and crews working to repair utilities. There were several trucks within two blocks of our house working on natural gas lines.

Power has been restored to more of the Central Business District. As far as we could tell, it reached from the river to at least City Hall, which is just short of the Superdome. The Hyatt Hotel, which you may have seen on television as most windows on one side had been blown out, had power. It is across the street from City Hall. Not all buildings in the area had power, but at least there is progress in getting the power grid functioning again. While there is power reaching City Hall, it did not yet have power because possible damage from flooding in the basement had to be resolved.

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Lisa had to work, but I visited Sydney in the morning and later picked up Lisa and we saw her in the evening. There was not much change, which we knew was not good. There is only a short time window in which she could recover. While she wagged her tail for us, it wasn't quite as enthusiastic as it had been the night before. That night, a little after 9pm, we received the call that she had suffered a heart attack and died. She would have been 12 on November 1.

In some ways the past year has not been good. We lost our beloved Rosie, Sydney's older sister, last October 12 after evacuating for Hurricane Ivan (which bypassed New Orleans). The way we feel right now, I don't know if we will ever evacuate for a hurricane again.

On a different note, we have been finding out how many people know who we are and where we live. We have never spent so much time on the telephone. We have been trying to call neighbors and friends to see how they fared. I have also been trying my best to reply to emails one hour at a time at the library.

Of course we have been watching the news to see how our city and southeast Louisiana is faring. So far, there are few things to find  encouraging. Through some sources we have, we know that the horror stories that everyone has been hearing are actually in some cases worse than has been reported.

We are also increasingly frustrated with the preparation for and the response to this disaster at all levels of government. This country has never seen a disaster of this magnitude and too many are too slow to realize it. A million and a half people have been forced to leave their homes.

I won't recount any of the stories that you may have already heard and are available elsewhere, but I want to say that the state of Texas has responded wonderfully to this crisis. It is not alone, but the people of Texas have truly opened their doors to Louisianians.

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

I visited Sydney in the morning and got her to eat some. It seems I have some magic powers of persuasion with her where I can convince her to take pills and eat food where others can't. I spend the day running some errands and then picked up Lisa. The traffic in Baton Rouge is normally bad, but it is now horrific because of the sudden influx of evacuees. We reached LSU somewhere after 6pm, getting there just in time to visit her and talk to the doctor before the staff left for the day. The LSU vet staff have effectively been working double shifts since Katrina. For a time Sydney had shown some difficulty in breathing right before we arrived. The way the doctor was talking, we fully expected a late night telephone call. It didn't come.

Monday, September 5, 2005 - Labor Day

We took Sydney to LSU today and they ran tests on her. (Even though it was a holiday, they were open because of Katrina.) The results were not good. She had a pulmonary embolism that was blocking one of her lungs from working. She was put into an oxygen cage so she could breathe easier. The doctor said there was no treatment to give her. Her body had to throw this off itself for there to be any chance of survival.

Because of Sydney, we didn't even think that it had been a week since Katrina hit.

Friday-Sunday, September 2-4, 2005

I spent Friday helping Freddy move boxes to their new house and all of us on Saturday and Sunday. They had pretty much filled up where they were with all their furniture and such, so we had to move things to make room for us.

Freddy has no telephone land line, so my only access to the Internet is through the computers at the Zachary public library. I visited the Cox Cable office and ordered cable to be installed, which is scheduled for Sept. 14. The woman at Cox said it was faster to ask just for cable and then after that was installed come back in to request Internet access.

Sunday morning Sydney, our older dog, clearly had something wrong with her. She was having difficulty breathing and her color was pale. As a little background, she was diagnosed with bone cancer in February, 2004 and was not expected to live past April. We got her into a vaccine trial and also got her an experimental samarium treatment. All of this was done through the LSU Veterinary Small Animal Clinic in Baton Rouge. Regardless of how, she lived a year and a half longer than any other dog would have, for which we are grateful. That night I called the LSU emergency number, but received no return call.

Thursday, September 1, 2005

We left the generator with my parents because it took up too much room and we didn't know when we would need it. We drove through Mississippi to get to Zachary, Louisiana (just north of Baton Rouge). Power was out in many areas of the state. The roads were closed south of Meridian, MS so we took I-20 West through Jackson. We tried to get gasoline in Jackson, but the few stations that had power also had lines as long as a quarter of a mile - no exaggeration. We continued on and found gas when we reached Louisiana.

Freddy and Sandie welcomed us to their converted barn. They were just finishing building a new house and are literally waiting only for a new meter and power to be connected to move in. It was scheduled for last Tuesday, the day after the storm hit, so obviously it didn't happen. 

Wednesday, August 31

We don't know for certain if it is true, but we heard today that someone had diverted helicopters from dropping sandbags into the levee breaks to rescuing residents from the roofs of houses. If so, that was a big mistake in our view. With the levees broken, the "bowl" of city will fill up. Where the main break occurred at the 17th Street Canal, water was rushing in so quickly that people barely had time to get to their roofs before floodwaters inundated their homes.

The longer the delay in repairing the breach, the wider the breach becomes and the faster the water rushes in. Even if dropping the 3,000 pound sandbags merely slowed the widening of the breach, that would give more people more time to get to safety. Remember, there is no power and no communications so there is some delay before people realize where the flooding is coming from and that they need to climb to safety.

Lisa learned that a coworker of hers near Baton Rouge has room for us and Lisa had talked to a company manager who wanted her to report for work "yesterday." Lisa works for the company that manages the Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the federal government. President Bush decided to release oil from the reserve and also to loan oil to companies that needed it to continue running their refineries, so she was needed.

We went shopping to get clothes to wear, since we brought only enough for about 3 days, and an air mattress to sleep on. Everywhere we went we ran into fellow evacuees. We also got new cell phones, since no one could call us on our New Orleans phones.

Friday-Tuesday, August 26-30, 2005

I am a hurricane "nut" from childhood, so I watch all tropical systems, what turned into Katrina included. I don't remember the exact sequence of events here, but on Friday afternoon, August 26, I saw that not only had the computer models predicted a secondary landfall (after Florida) further west than before, but much further west. Also, when Katrina moved southwest across the tip of Florida, I felt that New Orleans better wake up and pay attention.

Friday night I told Lisa that, if by Saturday morning the storm track had not changed, we were getting out of New Orleans. The Friday 10pm advisory placed our city in the direct path of Katrina. Everything I looked at pointed to us as the target. 

While we have a 140 year old house, it unfortunately lost its shutters some time ago. So we have precut 1/2" thick plywood boards that fit into the windows and are secured by metal clips that bite into the window frames to hold the boards to the windows. The object of the wood is to protect against wind, and objects blown by the wind, from the outside of the house. Once a window is broken and wind gets into the house, it is almost impossible to prevent the windows on the opposite side from being blown out if the wind is strong enough. (Shutters are incredibly expensive, but after this experience, I think we will start acquiring some.)

Our house is what is locally called two and a half stories high. That means that we have some living area on the third floor, but not a floor that spans the entire length of the house. In our case, it is like a large finished off attic, and is where my office is. We have about 40 windows, including two on the third floor.

Saturday morning, August 27, conditions were even worse for us. The computer models had begun to converge on us to such a degree that there was no question what we were doing. I don't remember what Katrina's wind speed was at that time, but atmospheric conditions were almost perfect for its strengthening. The National Hurricane Center was predicting at least a category 3 storm and possibly a category 4 at landfall.

I retrieved wood from the storage facility where we keep it (a good reason to have an SUV) and we starting putting up wood. Without help it takes us a little over a day to board up. Fortunately, we were able to enlist the aid of a teenager, who Lisa had hired previously to help with a landscaping project that we just completed. He showed up a little past noon.

All day Saturday we were putting up boards and watching updates on television as best we could. We kept hoping for a turn, but none came. Through the day Katrina was also growing larger in size, i.e. diameter. During the day I called my parents and brother to assure them that we were not fooling around with Katrina. We were evacuating. We had stayed for all the other scares the city had seen other than Ivan last year.

My mother was extremely relieved to hear that. Living near Birmingham, she rarely paid attention to tropical weather. But this one with its dangerous threat to New Orleans had started making the national news and she was audibly upset when I talked to her.

Finally, exhausted, we finished. Even though we have a raised house, we took a few pieces of the most fragile furniture up to the second floor.

We sent Robbie home and sat down to discuss what we were going to do. During the day we off-and-on talked about where we would go. We have friends and relatives in Texas, Alabama, Florida, and other states that we knew would welcome us. We finally settled on paying my parents a visit in Homewood, Alabama, a suburb of Birmingham.

The next question was when we would leave. At first we planned to get a little sleep and leave Sunday morning. Both of us quickly realized that was not the best option. While we were exhausted, we were certainly not sleepy and so we packed up our two dogs (Sydney and Josie), clothing, and other things for what we thought would be a three day stay and took off for Homewood at 1am.

Another reason to leave then was traffic. The roads had been clogged with cars all day. The state had instituted what is called the contraflow plan to help speed the evacuation. Contraflow was when the inbound lanes of the interstate highways are turned around so all lanes lead out of the city. I believe that towards the  west contraflow extended to Baton Rouge, or close to it.

To the east, through special arrangements with the state of Mississippi, contraflow on I-59 (which leads northeast through Hattiesburg and Meridian, Mississippi towards Birmingham) had all lanes going north until about 22 miles inside Mississippi.

Our trip went remarkably well. While there were some cars on the road, traffic was light and most of the time we traveled at the speed limit. I think that either more people evacuated towards the west or all that were leaving at that point had left.

Through the night the hurricane reports got steadily worse. By the time we reached my parents house at 6:30am Sunday morning Katrina had blown up into a storm with 175 mph winds, a massive category 5 storm.

We had been trying to get hold of friends to make sure they were evacuating and to also keep in contact with them afterwards. Some were not planning to leave the city or, in one case, the Mississippi coast. After the storm grew so dramatically overnight, we tried our best to get hold of the holdouts to convince, even beg, them to leave. In most cases either we were successful or they decided to leave on their own. One couple in Ocean Springs, Mississippi we did not hear from until days later, which was a great relief because their house was very near the beach.

We were still thinking we would be back home in relatively short order. Sunday we bought a generator (one of the last few available in the Birmingham area) and gasoline to take back home. We were prepared to return before power was restored.

The next three days, through Tuesday, we mostly spent glued to the television when we could or the radio. My parents lost power for about 24 hours starting Monday night because of Katrina. Several hundred thousand customers in Alabama lost power as Katrina moved north. Almost all. if not all, of the power grid in Mississippi went down, too.

When the levees broke, we knew that every effort needed to be made to repair them. Most of New Orleans is below the level of Lake Pontchartrain, like a giant bowl. Every drop of rainwater must be pumped out of the city because there is no other way to remove it other than evaporation. 

Ken Davis