re: What's the craziest thing you saw or heard about during Katrina?

Craziest things was all the made up stories...

But seriously...

I evacuated so I was gone when the stuff really hit the fan. Came back with a friend in late September when they had finally gotten all the water out of St. Bernard. Came to check on our house and the house of my future parents-in-law. There were a few things that stood out for me on that trip back.

1) We came in via Highway 11 from Mississippi. Going through Slidell as we got close to the lake, all the completely destroyed wood frame houses / camps, just piles of wood basically.

2) When crossing into St Bernard on 510/Paris Rd, there was a checkpoint. At the checkpoint, in the middle of the highway, was probably a 20 foot high, wooden cross. I remember thinking, this is end of times stuff here.

3) The amount of dried, cracked dirt. It covered all the roads in our neighborhood, all the driveways, sidewalks, etc.

4) The smell, obviously. I told myself I never wanted to smell that smell the rest of my life. I didn't smell that smell again until I was helping friends clean up houses after the Baton Rouge Flood in 2016.

5) My chest of drawers was upside down in my kitchen. My fridge was in my hallway. A paperback copy of To Kill A Mockingbird was perched on top my bedroom door, opened up, pages straddling the top of the door.

We then left and headed to my future in-laws house, where we saw the craziest thing I saw - a 4 door sedan sitting on the roof. My first thought was, OMG, the water had to be at least that high. My second thought was, damn, that's a well-built roof!

My future sister in law worked at Methodist in the East and stayed. She doesn't speak of it much. The only things she talks about are how a wall collapsed and crushed some people and they had to just leave them, getting pulled up in a hoist to a helo when they finally left, and running into a police officer she knew at the convention center who drove her to Baton Rouge.