Janet’s Book Nook

I have been wanting to blog about this subject for some time now but I never could bring myself to type it up. There were so many lives changed forever by the arrival of Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. My family was affected by this storm in so many ways. Here is my hurricane story.

My husband and I were fairly clueless about the fact that a hurricane was coming. On the Friday before it hit we were in New Orleans at the Superdome enjoying a Saint’s game. It was while waiting in traffic to park that we heard the news reports about the impending hurricane. We decided to take a few precautions the next day and went about enjoying our evening.

The next morning my husband went out and bought a generator, gas and a few other staples. We live about 40 miles north of New Orleans and figured we would get bad weather and some flooding and the electricity would go out but we would be good. My immediate family lives in Metairie a suburb of New Orleans. It was decided that my mother and my grandmother and my aunt would come over to my brother’s home a few miles from my house. My youngest brother and his girlfriend and their children would come to my house. Everyone arrived and we all hunckered down for some bad weather for a day or so. Little did we know.

On Sunday midday my aunt recieved a phone call from one of our relatives. My grandfather on my mother’s side was one of seven children and was the only one to ever have children. One of his sisters got married but the rest of the family remained single their whole lives. There were two brothers and three sisters who bought a home in the Lakeview area of New Orleans and lived  together their whole lives. Three of them passed away of old age over the years and there were only two left. One sister who was 82 and had been diagnosed with cancer and one brother who was 80 and her sole caretaker. This was an Italian family and they were close to each other. They didn’t trust outsiders though and as they got older they became more and more reclusive. As a child we would visit them all the time and I always found them so interesting. It seemed as though they had the nicest things. They were unique and interesting and had led amazing lives. As they got to be older and sick they no longer wanted visitors. They didn’t really trust people in their home and they really didn’t want to bother. I imagine that had we pushed the subect they would have allowed us around. We were young and everyone was so busy so what was the point? Who had the time? The phone call my aunt recieved was from her uncle. He and his sister were in the house in Lakeview. She was no longer able to walk or even move herself and he was concerned that they should leave. The problem was that he couldn’t lift her to get her into the car to leave and he didn’t know where he would go anyway. At this point we all started looking for a solution. My husband and brother tried to go and get them but all of the bridges crossing Lake Ponchartrain were closed down. There was no route that we could take that would get us to them. We began to call police stations, ambulance services, and even 911. Noone could do anything because the storm was dangerously close and no one would take the risk. We were stuck with no options. My mother’s brother spoke to his uncle and told him to take the life jacket, a hachet and a flashlight and hunker down.

The next 24 hours were truly outrageous. The hurricane arrived that night and the damage that occurred in New Orleans are well documented. What wasn’t as well documented was the chaos that ensued in trying to find family members. We were without electricty for 31 days. We had a generator but had to drive an hour and a half to Baton Rouge to get gasoline. This stayed this way for almost two weeks. Cell phone service was sketchy at best. There just wasn’t anywhere to go or anything to do. We began a few days later calling different outlets to try to get someone to go to the house in Lakeview and look for our family members. Noone had seen them or heard from them. We registered them with every registry we could find but heard nothing.

When the waters went down and we were able to get back in to the city my husband and uncle went to the house to see what they could find out. The house was destroyed. It had been under 8 feet of water for weeks. All of the beautiful things they had collected all of their lives were tossed and strewn everywhere. There were marks on the house that showed that someone had been there and the markings indicated that they had found noone, alive or dead. This was a sign of hope for us. We thought that surely someone had come along and found them and driven them to saftey. The vehicle was still in the driveway so we knew they hadn’t gone anywhere themselves. It wasn’t possible at that point to search the house because things were still so wet and the doors were all swollen shut. Finally a month later my husband and uncle went back to begin to check out the house. They wanted to see what they could find that might be of use in helping us find them. When they arrived they noticed a hole in the roof of the house that had been cut and that the markings had been changed to indicate that they had been back and recovered two dead. It was at this point that realized that they must have passed away in the attic of the home they lived in their whole adult lives. This wasn’t the end of it. We still had no idea where they were. The bodies that were being found were being taken to St. Gabriel Louisiana where there was a makeshift morgue for identifying and holding bodies. On October 7th (my birthday) my mother finally recieved the phone call that their bodies were in St.Gabriel and had been identified by driver’s licenses that my uncle had put in a plastic bag and put in his pocket. It took a little longer to actually match up her body and get them "reunited". It wasn’t until December 29th of 2005 that were finally able to lay them to rest. It took four months to find and bury them. The story doesn’t end here.

We were left with their home to deal with. My family and I had to don mold protection suits and respirators and enter the home that had been sitting in mold for 4 months and try to find anything we could find to try to settle their affairs. We didn’t know who their lawyer was, who their insurance companies were, what banks they used. NOTHING. Remember they were very distrustful of other people so they never discussed their financial affairs. I went into the home once. That was all it took for me to realize that once was enough. Even with a respirator the smell of mold was so strong that I had to keep walking outside for "fresh" air. The air outside wasn’t much better since everywhere you looked the houses were covered in mold and mud and muck. Everything was brown. Nothing in the home was where it was originally. Furniture had floated from one room to the other. We saved what we could- very little.

It was at this time that I started having problems sleeping. I would cry in my sleep. I would wake up with the smell and taste of mold in my mouth and nose and throat. I began to have serious survivors guilt. I didn’t regret that I was alive since I had children and a life and I needed to be alive. I felt guilty that someone I had known my whole life had died such a horrible death. I felt guilty that I hadn’t done something to get them out of that house before it was too late. I felt guilty that I didn’t even consider that they might need help. In short, they never even crossed my mind. I felt horrible. They had no other family. The only had each other. We had failed them. The next months were even worse. They had a pretty good amount of money and my mother and her sister and brother were their only heirs so everyone became focused on finding all of their assets so that they could be sure to get what was theirs. This made things even more difficult for me. I was not in line to recieve anything so I didn’t really care what their assets were. All I cared about was the fact that noone was remembering them. Noone was memoralizing them. Noone even noted the fact that they had lived and died.

I could go into a political rant. I could get mad because they lived in an area that hadn’t flooded EVER. I could be upset because they were alive after the storm from accounts of neighbors who left after the storm but before the levee break. They didn’t die because of the hurricane but because of the levees. They had lived full and amazing and unique lives in New Orleans and they had died horrible, useless and unspeakable deaths. The house was torn down. We have a few things that we were able to save from the house. Their is an empty lot where the house once stood. The neighborhood that once had not a single empty lot for sale not is barren. The houses are coming back but they aren’t the same. The character of the neighborhood is gone. It was an old neighborhood with old houses. I used to laugh at the fact that they lived in a pink brick house. There aren’t anymore pink brick houses. Now people are buying the lots in multiples and building what are being called BIG BOX homes. These are homes that are 4000 or more square feet each.

The rest of my family were very lucky. Noone else was harmed. No other major loss of assets occurred. We made out with a good bit of discomfort but WE made it. I only wish we had checked on EVERYONE we knew and not just those closest to us. So many elderly people passed in the storm because of the lack of transportation, stubborness, and lack of family to help them get out. I sleep okay now but there are times when I still dream about being in that house. I dream about being in that attic with a man who tried so hard to save his sister and himself but in the end had nowhere to go. We found his life jacket and flashlight and hatchet on the washing machine. It seems that his sister had passed away of natural causes after the storm but before the flooding. With no electricity and no winds it must have been unbearable for her. She was bed ridden and I am sure ready to go. When the water started rising it came quickly. He was afraid of water and couldn’t swim. When it started to come in he must have run for the attic and climbed in . Being afraid of the water he pulled the attic stairs up behind him thinking it would keep it out until the waters went down. The problem is that it didn’t go down for weeks. There was nowhere for it to go. The levees couldn’t hold it and so it needed to be pumped out of the city. No easy or quick task. Once those stairs were pulled up he couldn’t push them back down to get out because of the water underneath them. He had no hatchet to break through the roof and escape. He had no food or water. He passed away in the attic. This is where the Coast Guard finally found him. I have issues with attics now. They freak me out and I can’t imagine I will ever go into one again.

Lives were changed on August 29, 2005. So many people lost so much. Some, lost all!