On the morning Katrina struck, what were you doing?

[TSmith274]

I just know I was in Ruston, La. I do, however, remember exactly where I was when I heard the news that she had gained strength to 175mph sustainted... standing on the driveway of the house we evacuated to. I even remember the exact spot, and everything about that moment. I'd guess everyone remembers those same things when the realization hit you that everything you knew could be gone, and that your home city/town could quite literally be wiped off the map. As odd as it sounds, I feel lucky and fortunate every day here in New Orleans. The city is still here, it's people are slowly returning, and after that moment on that driveway, that's all I could ask for.

[Frederic1979]

I just saw this this thread and had to jump in......It wasn't THAT bad in Mobile,but it was as bad,if not worse than Ivan was. Yes,we were on the western side of Ivan's eyewall,but that was one terrible night of hearing trees popping and creaking and falling. The 28th,I had worked until 6pm,closed the store down (I'm a Store Manager for a huge pharmacy chain),but by 6pm,all the gas stations had closed,so I couldn't fill up. I stayed up late watching the sustained winds increase dramatically,then woke up around 7:00am on the 29th. It was like a usual rainstorm at first,then with the tightening outer bands came increased winds. I kept watching TWC,and Jim Cantore's live reports (gotta love that guy),until finally my power died around 9:30-10. I had not prepared much,since it was heading so far west,but boy was I wrong. After the winds died down enough I went to check on my mom,huge trees were laying on top of power lines on her street,we had to drive in the ditch to get around them. She had few trees down in her yard,so they were ok..They had hooked up a small generator to their new camper. I went to my store to check on it,and everything was there,the guys that were supposed to come install plywood on the windows had never shown up on the night of the 28th,so my plywood was all over the parking lot. I went home,lit a few candles,and sat there........in silence,other than the hum of loud portable generators. On the morning of the 30th I was told a large generator would be delivered to my store,so I had to go sit and wait on it. I grabbed a summer beach chair,a nice cold drink,and a portable TV (that someone had returned,only one I had left) so I could hear the news reports. I went to check on the milk to see if it was ruined,and to my surprise,it was still at about 40 degrees in there,so I loaded it up in a buggy,made a sign saying "Free MILK,One per family" and rolled it outside......people were crying as I was giving them milk,because there was nowhere to buy ANYTHING. I grabbed a few cold sodas for the ride home,put them in my plug-in cooler,best invention ever made. THAT night was the worst,I stopped by my moms,she cooked in the camper,and I saw the news of the levees failing,and pictures of the damage to my nieghbors to the west. They wanted me to stay in an overcrowded camper with AC,I refused to be with my dog in my house. BIG mistake. I sweated myself to sleep that night.......Finally on Thursday at 6pm,I called the store and the automated response came on,which meant power was restored. I called a cashier in,and called the local radio station to tell them I was open. This was after the 6pm curfew,but people starting pulling in the parking lot immediatly,to buy cigarettes,snacks,cold drinks,beer,baby formula,etc. We had a line to the back of the store for 4 hrs before I HAD to go lock the doors...........We did 1/2 weeks business in 4hrs,it was crazy. You could definately hear the N.O. accents,and for the next few weeks,we had many people coming in regularly from the MS. coast and N.O. that were displaced and living in apartments nearby. It is a storm to remember,even for us on the AL coast!

[Aric Dunn]

i was doing like 24hr coverage on internet partnership radio http://www.ipr365.com

relaying evact routes storm reports updates and recon ,storm surge, all night till it made landfall

[hurricanefloyd5]

I was having a hugh fight with my family and the cops were called and this was the night before and the morning at landfall i woke up at my ex-girlfriend's house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[hurricanefloyd5]

That was a bad day for me Presonally

[bevgo]

This thread brings back painful memories. I was on the chat here arguing with some turkey that kept saying NO was NOT going to be under 20 ft of water if Katrina hit there when my power went at around 5 AM. Here in Ocean Springs, right on hwy 90 maybe 3 miles from the beach things went from bad to worse. The apartment managers would not allow us to board windows so I nailed a quilt to the inside to catch flying glass but my windows held. I got the last phone call out to my mom in Meridian around noon and that was it for telephones for a long time. All I had was a radio and I kept it on WWL in New Orleans since that was all I could get. It was a VERY long day. My daughter kept yelling "you b----, go away" Periodically I would have to go outside and kick sheet metal away from the door to prevent it from breaking the sliding glass door or blow inside and hurt us. While outside I was lucky to duck when a turbine from a roof flew by my head. When it was finally over we had to face all the devastation that Katrina left. After 3 days I could no longer stand it and finally was able to get out with my daughter, and grandson. I had no idea how really bad it was in NO except from hearing callers on WWL talking about being stranded. I was able to get only 1 phone call out on day 2 and let my sis know we were still alive. She notified the rest of the family. To this day I have problems keeping it together when I see or hear something that reminds me of those days. I personally did not have great loses but the emotional toll was great. I will NEVER stay in a hurricane's path thinking it won't come here or it wont be that bad.

[hurricanefloyd5]

I remember at my ex-girlfriend's house when i got up we started to watch the aftermath and the storm itself that morning fort alittle bit

[Acral]

Rode Katrina out in Orange Beach on the back bay, fortunately, it never got too bad in Orange Beach. Power went bye bye that morning, and once I as able to start getting reports, I was shocked at the severity of the damage. Lost a good friend in Mississippi in that one.

[HurryKane]

I had evacuated to my parents' home in central Mississippi and was watching her hit back home on TV/internet. Then I spent a day or two being angry that the talking heads were ignoring Waveland/BSL/D'head/Long Beach, until my father pointed out that the talking heads probably couldn't GET to those places yet.

Spent Labor Day weekend volunteering at the Red Cross shelter in the town I'd evacuated to and it was one of the most humbling and rewarding things I've ever done.

[HarlequinBoy]

I was at school, fairly unaware just how bad it was. During break my mom called to tell me she couldn't get through to any of my cousins or aunts/uncles in NO or the MGC.. my dad was traveling back from Florida and he got stuck south of Meridian by fallen trees/power lines. We didn't hear from him from mid morning until late that night. I remember when I got home I was pretty surprised we couldn't contact anyone. The weather up here in the Delta was nasty, but not too bad.. gusty winds maybe to 55 and a few inches of rain (we were pretty much the least damaged part of Mississippi). We temporarily lost power around 9 PM until shortly after midnight. I know this is naive, but I was floored when I turned the Tv back on and heard a report that at least 50 people were dead in Harrison County. It sent chills up my spine..

Fortunately, my dad made it home about 8 PM on the 30.. as for my relatives, all but 2 of them lost their homes that morning, with and one of the two that didn't had his bulldozed because it was such a mess. I will truly never forget that day, and the days afterwards... After going down there in the late Fall and Winter of 05/06 I was in awe of the devastation.

[NewOrleansMom]

For so many of us, August 29th is a morning we will never forget.

My family evacuated from New Orleans early Sunday morning. Pulling away from our home was more difficult thank you can ever imagine. I tried not to look back. The thing that stands out in my mind the most is while sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, moving at a snail's pace, was the look on other people's faces. We were all bewildered...it seemed like a dream. People weren't chatting in their cars, everyone was just sitting quietly and staring out of their windows at one another, like in a movie.

We evacuated to my mother's, located 200 miles north of New Orleans. When the winds started, the power failed and all we could hear was the sound of trees falling all around us. (It took us two days., working in intense heat, to cut our way out of the driveway.)

We weren't able to see what was going on, on the television. We had no power. We could only go by what we were hearing on the radio. THen the cell phones failed and we couldn't reach friends and loved ones. One of my husband's employees was able to get through to him and he had stayed in New Orleans. He was fighting to get his invalid father and disabled sister, who was in a wheelchair, out of the flood waters and to higher ground. The call was dropped and my husband was unable to reach him again for almost a week. It took them three days to get out of town. I was frantically trying to reach a good friend who had vowed to stay in New Orleans because, as she stated...she wasn't in a flood zone and "her home had never flooded". After about a week, I located her and thankfully she and her two children had evacuated Sunday evening. Thankfully, because she ended up with 10' of water in her home. Her home still stands gutted today...but she now has windows...so things are looking up, as she says.

Our oldest daughter's best friend evacuated with us and for privacy reasons I won't give names, but her friend's father "had" to remain in New Orleans because of his position. What I remember most is trying to comfort this young girl and assure her that her father would be o.k., which he was after he was evacuated on day four or five. HIS story is one that should be told, it was harrowing!

A story that I will always remember was told to me by a gentleman who lived in Chalmette, La. He was sitting on his sofa and course he had no power. He heard something and looked up and all he could see was water rising fast against his window panes. He described it as sitting inside of gold fish bowl and looking out. He jumped off the sofa and sprinted for the stairs, he immediately heard the pressure of the water blow the windows and doors in. The water was rushing up the staircase and he pulled down the attic access and headed for the attic. When the water began moving into the attic,he layed on his back beneath a small roof vent of some kind and started kicking out the vent, trying to make a hole large enough to squeeze through. Once on the roof, he took off his belt, then slipped it over an attic beam just inside the hole he had kicked out and slipped the belt over his forearm and buckled it. He remained here until after the storm has passed and he was rescued off his roof. He said that although he sent his wife and children out of town, staying to protect his home and valuables was the most foolish thing he had ever done and he would NEVER do it again.

[duris]

I think that for those of us living in post-Katrina New Orleans, part of the way to get through it is to not think about it, and writing about it would mean that we would have to think about it. That's probably not healthy and may explain the news reports on increased thoughts of suicide and PTSD for survivors, and sometimes I wonder if someday I'll just go postal, but ironically, the worst behaved people that I've seen are those whose homes and families didn't suffer any damage. The way we see it, our families were safe and we had insurance and were able to rebuild, so it could have been much worse. (And we ended up with one of those pesky little post-Katrina babies as a gift with purchase).

Anyway, I don't even remember exactly what I was doing that morning, I guess because that was only the beginning for us and not really the worst part. I'm sure I went online while we had power, and I remember the first reports of the levees breaching. I remember some bad wind, and a tree fell on the carport where my wife had parked, ironically so that nothing would hit it. There were some tornados nearby. We were with friends in Tickfaw but left the next day for Lafayette because the power went out, and they were on a well that needed power for water. Prior to that I had driven north until I could get cell reception to call people and let them know we were ok and to call in payroll for our firm. We had no idea that we would be in Lafayette for almost two months and still didn't know if our house had flooded. I think it wasn't until Wednesday or Thursday that we found a photo online and found our house by identifying the flooded railroad trestle and coffee house nearby. We then ended up pouring ourselves into our work and planning to reopen my kids' high school as a charter school until we could return in mid-October, not to our house but in-laws where we lived for six months.

[Jinkers]

I was unaware what was going on, Katrina hit here in South Florida as cat.1 and we had no power, so I was out cleaning up my yard and stuff, when I got my power back, I was astonished & very sad to see what had happened to the gulf.

[timNms]

I was unaware what was going on, Katrina hit here in South Florida as cat.1 and we had no power, so I was out cleaning up my yard and stuff, when I got my power back, I was astonished & very sad to see what had happened to the gulf.

That's how it was for many of us inland in Mississippi. We didn't know what had happened to our coast and to NO until several days afterward.

[oneness]

Was in North Queensland monitoring S2K, plus watching various TV streams from the area, and the live coverage was exceptional, from half a world away.