re: Craziest/Shadiest/Scariest thing you saw in Katrina Aftermath

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Harvey was a bigger storm, we handled in a ZILLION times better than NOLA did Katrina

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Harvey had more rain.

I was working for the power transmission system of my company back then. I volunteered to go help restore, but was a pretty new at the time and wasn't selected. Offered a place to stay for family, but none of them made it up to Knoxville where I lived at the time.

Grandpa went back almost immediately after since he worked for a parish and he had some good stories. Unfortunately, I can't remember them any longer.

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Remember the couple who wouldn't leave the Quarter and became somewhat celebrities for a day or two? He ended up cooking her in a pot and then did a high dive off the Wyndham on canal

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They like to talk about that one on the ghost tours now.

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You don't want to be near a large American city.

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You dont want be in any city if SHTF. Its part of the reason I live in the country. The people in any city will be the first to go and I wont have to worry about the dregs venturing out to me.

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Harvey was a bigger storm, we handled in a ZILLION times better than NOLA did Katrina

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Houston being above sealevel helps.

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Pretty sure a bank would have battery/ generator back up? It’s not the old school movies where you can cut the power and the security system goes down right?

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Networks were down, phone lines were down, doubt there was anyone around monitoring alarms, and if the police ever got a call they probably would not have responded.

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Wait. What?

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Looked for a link sorry.

Couple stayed in the quarter after Katrina, became semi famous for a while by not leaving...


End up going nuts, he kills her, cooks her then jumps to his death. I was living right down the way

Big news at the time. I've forgotten how crazy it was in the months after.

I could walk through the quarter at times at night and not see one soul. It was fricking eerie

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Dome is a pretty big building ya know.

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I got you, but we were, effectively, the authorities.

Now, I can say, that Monday night and Tuesday during the day were pretty okay. I actually walked across the field and looked at the hole in the ceiling sometime Tuesday morning. The field was wet - that was the last time I was on that field.

And the lights were on, the toilets were still working - just a number of things were going well Tuesday. The crowd inside the dome was generally well behaved where I was, which I was in the main building and concourse for well over an hour in the morning and some time in the afternoon.

I actually slept in some office space inside the dome on Monday night. The word came down on Tuesday as the sun was going down for us to get all our shite out of the dome because we were, and I quote, "Setting up a perimeter." So, that tells me that things had changed for the worse. I witnessed an incident where the crowd was very chippy with a national guard soldier at a portal (all were African American, as was the soldier) when I was accomplishing my redeployment. Sometime on Wednesday, someone in the crowd tried to disarm a national guard soldier (again, one of mine) and the weapon discharged injuring the soldier.

As far as deaths - when I arrived there were already 5 or 6 bodies in the morgue (I can confirm this first hand). With 10 confirmed bodies, that means only 4 or 5 more happened the rest of that week, at its worst. I can also confirm shite tons of folks being flown in from senior centers, nursing homes, hospitals - a large number of those folks were emergent and I presuppose that at least some of those folks filled out that number of 10 confirmed dead at the dome. The only high profile "death" that I was aware of was the cat that either fell/jumped/was pushed and said, "Look out" before falling to his death from an upper level.

We had reports of gang activity and some isolated reports of rapes. With upwards of 30k people, and no working toilets, at least Wednesday and Thursday, I can accept that living conditions deteriorated fairly quickly inside. This spread to the New Orleans Centre, although there were never very many people over there at any one time.

And the convention center is an entirely different story - was never supposed to be a shelter. A National Guard commander, and I believe he did this without authority, initially, set up a command post there. Folks started spreading the word that the dome was like the end of the world and redirected themselves to the CC. We weren't even aware of this burgeoning problem until Wednesday.

In fact, we had to delay evacuating the dome by about a full day because we had to retake the CC and evacuate it first, with the first load of outbound buses.

So, misery? Sure. Widespread murder, rape, pillage? The folks were governing themselves for about 48 hours inside the main building. I did not see any evidence or signs of things at that level. That does not diminish the individual experiences or suffering of anyone in particular.

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Pretty sure a bank would have battery/ generator back up? It’s not the old school movies where you can cut the power and the security system goes down right?

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Even if they had generator backup. Everything tied to their local network was down.