Ryan Garrity\r\nNew Orleans, 2005\r\n\r\nMy Katrina Experience\r\n\r\n My Katrina Story begins pretty much like everyone else’s. The Friday before the storm, I went to work at UNO like I did every other Friday. My first class ant 10:00 was really the first time I had heard about the storm. My Spanish teacher, who had just moved to the area from Barcelona, was very worried about this storm and gave us extra homework in case of an extended absence. I was really confused because just the night before, the wise Carl Arredondo had written off the storm as a “panhandler.” After class, some colleagues and I went to lunch at Joe’s Crabshack on the lakefront. While we were there, we watched a news story on how the projected path had switched to Mobile, AL instead of the Florida panhandle. After lunch we returned to work, ready to face the rest of the day and thinking to ourselves, “it stinks to be Mobile.”\r\n When we got back to work we had urgent mail waiting from the director of UCC about an emergency action meeting to be held at 3:00 that afternoon. All I could think about was how we were overreacting yet again, just like we had done so many times before. Reluctantly, I went to the meeting to see what was going to be said. The director basically wanted us to prepare for a worst case scenario, only because it was Friday and we wouldn’t be back on campus until after the storm passed; if it passed at all. At the end of the day, we put all our equipment up on the counters in our office and shut down all our machines. I checked to see if the uninterrupted power supplies were charged and ready to go in case of power failure, and I secured all our loose equipment in our storage closet. \r\n At 4:30 in the afternoon it was time to go home. Instead, I went to the machine room down the hall where UNO runs its’ servers. I wanted to witness the shut-down procedure that we use in case of emergencies. If we are expecting power-loss, we have to shut down the servers to prevent damage to them. It’s a fascinating process to witness so I figured it would be cool to see. It took about an hour to shut everything down. I had never heard the machine room so quiet. The persistent hum that you can hear all over the building was gone. It was a creepy feeling to see the building so calm and quiet.\r\n After arriving home, I called my parents to talk about meeting them for dinner and going to watch my sister perform at a local prep football game. While I was at the game, there was a buzz about the storm that I hadn’t heard all day. It seemed that more and more people were beginning to worry about the storm. After the game I went home and logged on to my favorite weather forum on WWL-TV.com. It seemed that most of the computer models were trending closer and closer to New Orleans. I went home after the game (which we won by the way) and packed a small bag and my valuables in case I had to make a quick exodus the next day. \r\n Early Saturday morning, I had a meeting I had to attend in the French Quarter. At the meeting, I realized that it seemed more and more likely an evacuation would be called. On the way home around 10:00 am, I stopped for gas on Metairie Rd. on my way home. The line for gas was already about 20 minutes long and the evacuation was really just starting, which surprised me because most people are not pro-active when it comes to Hurricane evacuations. After I got my gas, I went by my house, picked up the bag I had packed the night before, and headed to Destrehan to help my mom pack her things. At about 4:00, we left Destrehan in a caravan up to my brother’s condo in Baton Rouge. We made it in about 2 hours, which isn’t bad considering the traffic that was on the interstate. We took Airline Hwy., which was much faster. We spent the evening with another family that was staying with us playing games and eating ridiculously good food. We stayed up most of the night watching the storm come through. Even up in Baton Rouge, the wind was really storm. It was so strong that water was being blown through the doorknob on the back door! \r\n We were out of power in Baton Rouge for about 7 hours, which isn’t bad at all. After the storm, I managed to get in touch with my boss about 2 days later and I went back to work almost immediately. UNO opened offices at the LSU System building and the Frey Computing Services Center on the LSU Campus. I have been working lots of hours ever since.\r\n Watching the media coverage of storm made me realize a few things. First, that race and class really do still make a difference in New Orleans. It is unfortunate that most of the lower income families in New Orleans are the African American families. It is also unfortunate that for some, the only place of refuge was the superdome. However, the city did have means to evacuate those people to higher ground. The city leadership chose not to follow that course of action and so I feel very little sympathy for “poor” Ray Nagin. On the other hand, I feel terrible for the poor people who had to endure the nightmare at the superdome while local and national officials sat on their hands instead of doing something to help those poor people.\r\n Another topic I would like to address is the looters in New Orleans. No one ever believes me when I talk about the dregs of society that live in New Orleans; black and white alike. Why on earth would someone take advantage of a disaster to rob and steal from others? Please do not try to defend these people by saying they were stealing to survive. No one needs ten pairs of Nikes or plasma TVs to survive. I even saw people breaking into Walgreen’s and stealing drugs instead of clothes. New Orleans will ever escape its image problem until parents start raising their children to behave like people instead of animals.\r\n While Katrina was a horrible disaster, I think it presents a rare opportunity for New Orleans to rebuild itself into the grand city of the south that it used to be, instead of the hole that it had become. The flood waters washed away everything that was bad about New Orleans and surprisingly spared most of what was good. Now we have an opportunity to expand on the good and build New Orleans back into the Queen of South and shine again.