re: What was Katrina like?

I've enjoyed the hell out of this thread.
LE what's your story? I recall you stayed behind in Harahan and we didn't hear from you in over a week...weren't sure if you were even alive with all the stories circulating.

The katrina photo exhibit they had at NOMA was pretty powerful as well.

I have love/hate relationship with NOLA, I visit but cannot fathom moving back.

It was back in 2006 or 2007.

Lived in Houma and dodged a bullet. Good friend in NOLA wasn't so lucky. After going to help him, made the video set to Springsteen's My City of Ruins

MY CITY OF RUINS

To show you how times changed, there wasn't even a YouTube back then. I had to search for a site to load it to. I used something called PutFile originally. Never knew how many people actually saw it.

A NOLA blogger asked me about the story once on the 1 year anniversary. This was my reply:

One of my best friends lived off of Nashville and Claiborne and his house flooded. About 2 weeks after the storm we went into the city to try and retrieve some personal items for he, his wife, and their newborn son. It was a sobering experience. This was when the city was just about empty, starting to dry out, with National Guard checkpoints all over.

At times, we felt like we were in the Twilight Zone. No people. No cars. No sounds. No bugs. No rats. No signs of any life whatsoever.

Anyway, I was pretty moved by it all. Not just with my friend's house, but the enormity of it all. The water marks. The colorless streets. Boats parked on porches. A jet ski in a tree. The National Guard tent city in Audubon Park. Seeing the houses I used to live in flooded. That God awful smell of death everywhere.

When I got home, I threw everything I was wearing away except my wedding ring. I showered for about 2 hours. Then I rubbed cologne on my nose to try and get that smell out of my brain. It didn't help.

About 2 days later, I was listening to my IPod on shuffle while cutting my grass. Over 1,700 songs on that thing and Bruce Springsteen's "My City of Ruins" just pops up. I owned the Rising album but I guess I never really listened to that song before. But it certainly struck a chord then.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I went back to the beginning of the song. It took about 30 seconds and I was on my knees crying in the front yard.

For the next 2-3 days I couldn't get it out of my head. I had also been collecting some Internet photos from Katrina. I was hoping to put together some kind of CD with each day in pictures. I wanted to explain it one day to my daughters in a way that history books wouldn't.

So the lyrics and images just kept running through my head over and over. I could see it all so vividly. I took some software on my laptop and made the video. It was actually quite therapeutic for me. I e-mailed it to a few friends and then it kind of took on a life of its own.

I started getting e-mails and phone calls from across the country. Mostly displaced people from the Gulf Coast. I was incredibly humbled by most of the letters and requests. I would cry reading their stories about what they lost and what they said the video meant to them.

People asked for copies to show at conventions and speeches. I would get calls from professors in New Jersey using it in their classes. A priest in South Louisiana uses it and compares the scenes to the Resurrection. A school teacher in Tennessee wrote me and said they show it to assemblies and have a displaced 9-year old tell her story to educate the other students. Congressman Charlie Melancon played it to the Democratic National Caucus and they wrote about it in Roll Call. Like I said, pretty humbling stuff for something I created on my coffee table at 3 am.

Every so often now, I try and find somebody (a legislator, an editorial writer, or an organization sending relief our way) to send it to. I just want to remind people of how bad we all felt those days. I want to show our appreciation for all those people who came to help and continue to do so. And I want to remind them of the positive things about New Orleans. That we are all worth saving.

So yes, feel free to post it or the link. I will always agree to let it be used in any positive manner. And thank you for trying to continue to educate people about "the Thing". It isn't going to be easy. This is a long-term fight we all have here. Like I used to tell people, this is one big shite sandwich and we're only on bite #3.

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How do you not remember anything? I was 15 and can recant my issues perfectly.

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OK, recant away.

Others have mentioned the smell.

The smell.

A smell.

I've said earlier that I got out of NOLA and got to a place where I was able to see the dire NWS reports. I wasn't home, though. I was stuck in BR, but lived in Mississippi at the time. You could say that I was a TigerstuckinMS stuck in BR.

I can talk a little about one component of that smell. I, thankfully, left NOLA in time but it was almost three weeks before the roads were clear enough so I could get back to my place in Mississippi from BR. Though there was a lot of damage to houses there(think FEMA tarps everywhere), there was relatively little structural damage to homes except for the unlucky ones that took tornado strikes. Those same tornado strikes decimated the power grid as the eyewall broke up over Mississippi. By the time I got back, the power had been out three weeks.

The smell of the refrigerator alone slammed into me when I opened the door to the apartment. It smelled like I remember dead animals smelling when they'd crawl up under the house. It was straight up the scent of a rotting corpse and there was nothing about it that wasn't just the scent of death and decay. Unlike the NOLA folks, I didn't have the added bonus of waterlogged rot and decaying bodies on top of it, so I lucked out there big time. Still, I never got rid of that smell in my place as long as I was there, which was short, and the scent is seared into the part of my brain that keeps track of smells. I vomited nonstop for the three or four hours after I got there and was trying to get that box of frick out of my apartment.

I can't imagine what the smell in NOLA was like.

God damn, almost ten years down the line and we all still remember details from our experiences and are willing to share.

I normally don't have faith in the goodness of the OT because it has almost zero goodness and it's usually a horrible place filled with horrible us. This thread isn't so horrible, though, and for one brief moment, remembering an unfathomable catastrophe means that the OT isn't completely horrible either.

frick Katrina.

-The smell and the dark.

-The smell could drop you to your knees.

-At night there were no lights for weeks and weeks. Building lights, street lights, house lights, all damaged or without power. So very dark at night.

-And then, those dang stuffed animals strapped to the front of all the trucks, wtf was that about?

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The katrina photo exhibit they had at NOMA was pretty powerful as well.

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If you ever happen to Washington DC go to the newseum. The photo essay they did on Katrina will make you shed tears.