re: What was Katrina like?

I had about 30 guys just displaced with no communications I just had to wait to hear from them to get them paid. I have one paycheck in my desk drawer that has never been claimed. I just keep it as a reminder. I mailed checks to New York, Texas, Ohio and hand delivered many. Met one guy in Paris, Texas-he drove from some little town way up in Kansas and I met him in a truck stop to get him paid. A few came back but most are gone.

Being from BR I was lucky, I lost a NO office but that was about it. I was given passes by JPSO, LSP and Orleans Parish to get back in to evaluate and I was allowed in on September 5 and that began what was about a year of 18-20 hour days with a daily commute from BR. Anyone else that did that-and there were many, knows what that drive was like. I bought a full set of rims and tires for my truck as a spare because there was no one to repair a tire for months. Floor jack, four way just stayed in the bed and I've never changed so many tires in my life. I'd come home and just drop them off at Plantation Tire, no matter what hour and when they opened the next day just repaired or replaced and left them out and mailed a monthly bill. Wife went and picked up Nextel radios so we could communicate because it was the only thing that worked. Interior of my truck had a whole wardrobe, towels, first aid kit, guns, tools etc...I had whatever I needed because if I didn't I wasn't going to find it there. Swing through the National Guard line every few days and they would toss a case or two of MRE's, bottled water and a couple bags of ice. When Burger King on West Esplanade in Kenner opened it was the first and people went nuts and would wait two hours for a Whopper-which was all they served. whopper, fries, coke. No Dr Pepper, no fish or chicken. whopper fries and coke.

The destruction, the bodies, the water, the smell, the twisted, leafless St Charles oak trees, the Isreali Security firm with Uzzis and Mac10's guarding Audabon Place, Blackwater Security (of Iraqi civilian killing fame) guarding the W on Canal Street walking me in, one in front, one in back, through a sanitation shower at the vestibule, the generators being flown in, the helicopters, god the helicopters like gnats, the warehouses burning in the East and on the Industrial Canal with of course no one to put them out, the train cars at Downman Road just tossed into the swamp, Jazzland under water, the school bus under the barge in the Ninth Ward, the houses floated and set down in the middle of blocks, the dogs and cats, then the dogs and cats gone and the raccoons and opposums and snakes having free run into and out of houses, the red Nissan on a street in Elmwood with a hundred bullet holes, doors open and blood everywhere that sat there for weeks, each and every vehicles gas cap open because it had been siphoned, the X on doors, the aluminum cast of Roden's "The Thinker" sitting in the middle of the road deep in the Ninth Ward (which now sits on a shelf at my home-yet shows someone in that god forsaken place had some sense of art history and culture-and I know that's not the right way to say that), the IHOP opening on I guess Manhattan on the Westbank and you thought Warren LaRuth was back in town, the menhaden boat across Hwy 23 in Buras, the Christiana Brothers truck upside down on the levee there, the shrimp boats on top of one another a mile in the marsh, Venice Marina looked like a snow globe and my boat was long gone.

God damn I just started and couldn't stop. Haven't thought about a lot of that in a long time.