On Friday, 8-26-05, right before I was about to get off work, my coworkers had told me "Becky, I think this one is going to get us." and I told them I doubt it would probably hit Florida like they always do. Well I woke up Saturday to my dad and husband wanting to evacuate and Nagin and Broussard saying, "Get out of the city or drown". Well, if you've lived in New Orleans all your life then you know that as soon as a tropical wave forms or even thinks about forming, its the "big one" and everyone is going to drown.
Over the last couple of years, we had evacuated, just to sit in contraflow traffic for endless hour after endless hour and then to call back home and everybody who didn't leave is grilling in the beautiful weather. So when they said get out for Katrina I was like, "Yeah I don't think so". So my dad and sister Brenda's family went to Mississippi to stay with Jessie Walter and they begged me to come but it didn't do any good. I was not evacuating again and I would not leave all my animals. Plus I just really didn't want to go. You just don't understand New Orleans contraflow unless you've been there. For hurricane Ivan it took me 6 hours to get home from work and another 6 to get to Lafayette the next day because of their wonderful, organized contraflow traffic routing.
So after Dad and Brenda left the phone started to ring off the hook. Even my cousin Pat called from Florida and said to come and stay with her. If I would have known the future I would have been a beach bum with a great tan. I told Pat, "Its not coming here. Its coming for you." Well, Brenda's husband, Al, finally called from the hospital where he was working and said, "Becky, are you still there?" I said, "If you don't think I'm here why do y'all keep calling?" Well, anyway, Al convinced me to go stay at their place for the night because its a two story and he claimed his neighborhood was more dangerous so the house needed to be protected from looters and such. So I packed my cats, dog, lizard, and a change of clothes and went to spend the night.
Sunday night we lost electricity about midnight and during the night I would look out the window, but I really could not make nothing out until Monday afternoon. The tree in Brenda's backyard fell and picked up a large chuck of yard with it and then slammed into the neighbors' house. Her neighbors' tree fell in her front yard crushing the neighbors' van on the way down. The streets were flooding because all of the pumps were turned off. At least we still had tropical storm winds so it was not boiling hot. On WWL all they kept reporting was crime, rapes, looting... They had a curfew in place, but even after curfew you could hear people wading through the flood waters. The helicopters didn't do any good -- where was that stupid copter supposed to land in Waterville?
By Tuesday, crime was getting worse, politicians kept promising to turn on the pumps, but the water kept rising and the weather kept getting hotter. My husband, Chucky, had gone and fetched the canoe, so we went canoeing around Kenner and got a sunburn. We checked out the damage and we also figured the mosquitoes would be out soon. The city looked horrible, at the time it looked as if every tree in Kenner had been knocked down or like a giant came and twisted it all up. Power lines were down everywhere, you would think that a power line poles would break at the bottom? Not the case, most poles either snapped in the middle or at the top of the poles. Electrical lines were laying everywhere. The Rite-Aid seemed to have the most damage out of the stores. They pretty much lost 3 walls, but the roof, back wall and floor was still there. They also had two US Marshals sitting out front. So we are sitting in the canoe in front of Rite-Aid on West Esplanade and saw these black people tubing on Loyola Drive. From where we were we could see everything. The blacks could see us, but could not see the Marshals. There were about 8 black people in the tubes yelling at these two black guys walking to the store, "What? You can't get in or something?" They were talking about looting Rite-Aid. The Marshals drew their guns and hid behind what wall was left and the black guys just walked up on them and were like, "Oh, hey, what's going on?" So there was no shoot-out or anything and, of course, they didn't loot because of the cops. So we just paddled away.
To be continued...
Written by Rebecca Doster, August 2006, in Kenner, Louisiana.