re: What was Katrina like?

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.