General

Hurricane Katrina Memories Part Two

 

This week I’d like to share some of the thoughts I wrote down in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina destroyed our home, my car and almost all of our belongings (everything we didn’t pack into our truck when we evacuated).

I learned three important lessons that I’ll share in a later post but today I want to share what I perceived as the three things that Katrina and her aftermath were all about.

First: My Katrina experience was all about timing.

Taxes and insurance rates were climbing for locations on or close to the water and they were increasing at a higher rate than our income. Before Katrina we were contemplating a move further inland.

Real estate prices were rising, especially those properties that were either waterfront or had a view of the water, which ours did. We loved our location but realized that each year we spent more time working on the place than enjoying the location. We replaced the inside and outside central heat and air unit for the second floor and decided we would work on our last major landscaping project through the fall and winter and put the house up for sale the next spring.

We now know that before the end of that summer there were only three trees out of thirteen left on our property, a slab and 11 day old heat and air units stuck in the mud, but no house to sell the next spring.

Second: My Katrina experience was all about money.

Last week I wrote about the insurance fiasco that ensued in the days, weeks, months and even years following the destruction. As stated earlier the insurance industry in 2005 and 2006 made out like a bandit, pun intended. The proof was in their yearly financial reports stating their net profits.

It didn’t take long to learn how disasters, like wars, are money makers for an army of individuals and corporations at the expense of the victims and taxpayers. FEMA was especially overwhelmed. It’s one thing to lose a home and possessions or for a neighborhood to experience a total loss but this destruction went on for miles, and miles and miles and years and years and years. One early news report estimated that there had been 70,000 homes destroyed!

Employees and contractors shamelessly helped themselves, sometimes more than they helped the people suffering unbelievable loss. “Safety” contractors were to make weekly inspections of the travel trailers that we were living in to make sure they were still in a safe, livable condition. The VIN type numbers were entered onto their reports and then residents signed those forms to confirm that they had actually inspected the trailers. One contractor explained that they could not get paid for the inspections unless the reports were signed by the resident whose name must match the trailer numbers that were on file for that trailer. When we started having multiple inspections daily I knew there was an enormous amount of fraud being perpetuated and started to refuse to sign the reports after the first one for that week. After a couple of weeks the inspectors stopped coming around at all!

I personally witnessed EPA and FEMA employees “rummaging around” the slabs. The people on a golf cart from EPA were supposed to be gathering up toxic items like paint cans and gas bottles from the edges of the road and wooded areas but were not supposed to be on personal property that was cleared and/or had a slab where a house had been. They left pretty quickly when I rode my tricycle up to their cart and ask them what they were doing on the slab of one of my former neighbors.

The FEMA employee I caught stealing was supposed to come to our trailer and make a report of some kind but she stopped on another slab first and picked up several items and put them in her trunk. I could not see if it was as innocent as a copper pipe or jewelry which was found on many slabs after the storm. She jumped back in her car and left immediately without asking me any questions on her form when I told her I had watched her steal something from my neighbor’s slab. I did not see that same car in our neighborhood ever again.

Third: My Katrina experience was all about love.

I’ll try to make these next few “long stories short” as I relate the love that surrounded me during and after Katrina.

Our neighbors across our street, whose home faced the bay, had a family home 100+ miles north of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi where we lived. They invited us to come and stay with them in that home until Katrina blew through. We had planned a different evacuation but fate found us hunkering down with those generous souls through a strong Category 1 hurricane when it roared through that location 100+ miles inland. We spent several days of cleaning up downed trees in sweltering heat just to get out of their driveway. We had no power and the only communication with the outside world was through public radio since all cell towers and most power lines had been blown down, not only on the coast but that far inland as well. It would take a book chapter to relate the kindness and love that we were shown as those folks shared their home with us as well as their own fears about what we would all face back on the coast.

When we were finally able to travel to Georgia to stay with family and regroup, one of my future sister-in-laws who owned a travel trailer offered to loan it to us to live in. My brother-in-law pulled that camper from Georgia to Mississippi for us. One of Royce’s co-workers who lived well inland insisted that Royce put that camper on their property, hooked up to their sewer and water lines and even to their electricity. They had other family members who had lost their homes staying there, too, and had even set up their own camper for one of my friends and co-workers who had lost her home. They even turned their garage into a gathering space for all of us. We were once again surrounded with love.

Volunteers! There were thousands of people who gave up their own comforts of home to live in tents or camp houses and worked in some of the most disgusting conditions like mucking out structures that had flooded but were still standing. They worked in hot, humid conditions, never complaining. Some manned the PODS (Point Of Distribution sites) handing out donated supplies or even dishing out food under big tents for folks who had no way of buying, storing or cooking food or who had been working all day volunteering. Once again I found myself surrounded by unconditional love.

Sometimes my experience felt like Katrina was all about timing, sometimes it felt like it was all about money, but the most important thing that I experienced during and after Hurricane Katrina was unconditional love. Some of that love came from people I knew. Family and friends. But some of that love came from people I’d never met or only met briefly and would never see again.

Love.

Unconditional love.

The kind of love that lifts you up from a state of despair to a state of hope.

Roberta Byram’s book Little Bits and Bytes: Messages from God has an entire chapter on Katrina and is full of stories of that very love and hope in the midst of total destruction.

Has there ever been a time in your life that was or felt like a total disaster when you were surrounded with love that lifted you up with hope? If so please comment below and share that experience. You might be giving another person the very hope they need by sharing your story.

Check back next week when I will share the three stages I experienced by living through Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath.