Like so many, Rudy Obgartel rode out Hurricane Katrina wishing he hadn't.
But unlike so many, he is still alive.
"I've always said, ‘My momma didn't raise no fool,'" Obgartel said Tuesday in a phone interview from the southern tip of Louisiana, "but after sitting on this boat after I could have left, I started to question that."
That's right. Rudy Obgartel rode out what could end up being the most costly natural disaster in the history of the United States in a boat.
Granted, it wasn't your average boat.
Obgartel works for a company that transports workers and equipment to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. He is a 1965 graduate of Holmen High School who lives with his wife and grown children in Houma, La., and is a crew member of a jack-up boat, a massive structure with three steel legs that can lift the boat out of 170 feet of water. His particular rig is 194 feet long and 90 feet across, weighs a couple thousand tons and can hold 13 semitrailers on its deck like Hot Wheels.
He and the five other crew members returned from a job Friday with Katrina following across the gulf. They jacked the boat out of the water at a coastal town called Venice, 80 miles southeast of New Orleans at the tip of Louisiana. Two of the men left. Four stayed to ride out the hurricane on the boat, designed to withstand 150 mph winds.
The eye of Katrina passed just a few miles to the west.
Since they moved to Houma in 1983, Obgartel said he had ridden out six hurricanes, five in the jack-up boat and one, Hurricane Andrew, at home with his family in 1992. Andrew blew a few shingles off the house. This time, though, he convinced his family to leave, and on Saturday, his wife, Luddawan, and children — 35-year-old Mary Ann and 32-year-old Sam — drove to Liberty, Texas, to a hotel they found online that would accept their dogs.
One his neighbors, a sheriff's department dispatcher, called Obgartel to tell him his house now has a foot and a half of water in it.
"This was worse than Andrew," Obgartel said. "This one seemed like it wasn't ever gonna quit."
He and the remaining crew rode it out in the wheelhouse, lying down and watching the massive storm pass from water to land though a window as the jack-up boat shook like an oversized "Tinkertoy."
"They gave us a choice (to leave or stay)," he said. "I knew my family had gone to Texas. I thought, ‘I'm good here, because I rode out the others.'"
Was it the right choice?
"No sir. There's an old saying, live and learn. I don't want to learn anymore.
"It was a sight to behold," he said. "It made me doubt my sanity."
Across the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, rescuers are trying to save those who couldn't, or wouldn't, leave. Already, 100 people are believed to be dead in one Mississippi county. Two levees broke and flooded most of New Orleans, where helicopters are picking people off rooftops.
"There's gonna be hundreds of dead people in New Orleans when they're done counting," Obgartel said.
He hasn't been able to contact his family to let them know he was alive. He hasn't left the boat, and probably won't for some time. They were planning to head back to work in the gulf sometime Tuesday night.
"There's a lot of repairs out there to be made," he said.
Sounds like a hell of a time...?