Today is one of those days some of us mark as watersheds in our lives. Sometimes those days are just personal and only have an effect on our immediate lives or the lives of those closest to us. And some will have an effect on much larger numbers of us. I guess this day is a little of both for me.
This was the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast back in 2005. Mississippi, Alabama, and much of southeastern Louisiana were devastated. The much vaunted levee system maintained by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers (which had never been tested before by a storm of that magnitude) failed, devastating much of St. Bernard, Orleans, Jefferson, and Plaquermines parishes in Louisiana. If the hurricane had jogged just a little more west as it was originally plotted to go it was have literally wiped New Orleans and southeast Louisiana from the face of the map, especially if the the nightmare scenario of the hurricane going up the mouth of the Mississippi river would have occurred.
I think about what happened quite often, usually on the anniversary of the event. I can't help but do that because August 29th just happens to also be the birthday of my late maternal grandmother, Geraldine. No, thank God, she did not lose her life in Katrina. It is just a bad association I have to make every year at this time.
I was one of the lucky people. I was living outside New Orleans at the time and was able to heed the warnings. The majority of my family lives on the north shore of Lake Ponchatrain in St. Tammany Parish. I got my grandmother out of the city and to my parents' home two days before the hurricane was forecast to hit (luckily it was a weekend so people had time to prepare and evacuate if they could). So personally, my grandmother and I were fine, riding out the storm at my parents' home.
I pretty much lost all of my possessions, as did my grandmother. Although there wasn't a whole lot of really bad flooding in my part of the suburbs, my apartment did get enough water into it to ruin the apartment and I lost all of my possessions. My brother could not get into my apartment for a month after Katrina. By that time he said he had to were a filter mask to go into the apartment because of the toxic mold that had built up. My grandmother lost everything as well, including her apartment which was in the brunt of the flooding in Canal Street.
Some of my co-workers weren't so lucky. A few months after I had heard that one of them had died during the height of the storm in St. Bernard Parish. She had not evacuated and had literally drowned. She was found in her home with her family covered in dried mud when they finally found her. She was a kind, quiet and shy soul. Just one of the 1800 lost to us I guess.
As I said, I was one of the really lucky ones. I lost possessions, but because of the nature of my work, I still had a job and I still had a car. The job got temporarily relocated to Fort Worth, where I spent seven months after Katrina literally setting up equipment that was being salvaged from New Orleans to insure others could work. The company I worked for insured we were still paid and had a roof over our heads (not to be sarcastic, but they could afford it because they were charging back to the government). It was tough to leave, but I felt I had to do it.
Let's get something straight here. Louisiana is home. It's where the majority of my family is and has always been. But after what happened after Katrina I realized I wanted to be elsewhere, at least for a while. I decided living in the proverbial bullseye of the "Storm of the Century" was enough for one lifetime. It was time to look at things elsewhere.
At the time I would rather have been somewhere like Dallas-Fort Worth or even Houston since it was closer to the family. But as luck would have it I got a job in Richmond VA, somewhere I had never been before in my life (closest I had been was Washington D.C.). It was a tough decision, but I think it was a good one. So in 2006 I moved to the mid-Atlantic and have been there since.
It's definitely been interesting since the move. Moved twice since moving to Virginia and changed jobs twice. Been two high school reunions in that time, the 25th and the 30th. I've lost an uncle on both sides of my family to cancer. My parents have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and both have turned seventy. Once niece popped into existence and seems to be a gymnastics phenom while the older niece seems to be a math geek while trying to be Mark Spitz (I guess I should say Ryan Phelps instead).
The tough loss was the death of my maternal grandmother only a few short months after her 90th birthday. But I think it started shortly after Katrina. Although it really wasn't anything really out in the open, what happened in Katrina really affected her. After the storm she was a little less lively and she wasn't as healthy. Her mobility seemed to deteriorate a lot and she lost a lot of her independence. I keep thinking that if the storm hadn't hit when it did she might still be around today and still have some of the fire and independence she had.
I've rambled enough on this subject today. For that I am sorry. But I felt I needed to make an acknowledgement of my own on this anniversary. If you did get through the whole of this long-winded, rambling post, I commend you on your perseverance and mental fortitude. I won't blame anyone who could not (but then, since you couldn't make it through the post you didn't get to this point, did you?).
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