August 28, 2006\r\n\r\nSubject: Our Hurricane Katrina Story\r\n\r\nA year ago today we evacuated from our house in Covington, Louisiana, because of Hurricane Katrina.\r\n\r\nMy wife Elizabeth and I had been on a short five-day trip to Hollis, New Hampshire, to visit our son Sean, his wife Tracy, and their daughters Isabelle and Constance. We got back home on the evening of Friday, August 26, 2005. The next day was busy, so I did not unpack my suitcase. I knew a hurricane was coming, but I wasn’t worried, because we live ten miles inland from Lake Pontchartrain. Sunday morning, August 28, the telephone rang at 7:00 a.m. while we were still in bed. It was our son, Patrick, who lives here in Covington. He said, “Dad, it’s a Cat 5. We’ve got to get out. Kelli and I are coming to get you at 11:00 o’clock, and we’ll caravan to Tallahassee, Florida, where Lynda (our eldest son’s wife) has found us places to stay in motels.” I only had time to take my dirty underwear out of my suitcase, which I had packed for a five-day trip, and put in clean underwear. The rest of the four hours we had was taken up with loading our car with things like important family papers and photographs, drinking water, snacks, flashlights, batteries, things we might need for camping out. We asked our guest house renter, Steve Treptow, to look after our dog Moselle and our cat Leo. I went to a gas station to fill our Cadillac up, and got the last bit of gasoline that they had. Patrick, Kelli his wife, and their children Anneliese, Sam and Mary Grace came at 11:00. We were ready to go. Our dog Moselle must have known we were leaving her. She looked so sad as I patted her head. She was lying on her outdoor dog bed, and wouldn’t even get up, as she usually does when I touch her. Kelli’s parents had left for Tallahassee also an hour earlier, and told us by cell phone that they were in a bad traffic jam on Interstate 10 going east. So we decided to go around that, by going to Mobile on state highway 26 out of Bogalusa, Louisiana. We left Covington and drove north on Hwy 21 to Bogalusa. Patrick was following us, but missed the turn onto Hwy 26 in Bogalusa. Fortunately, in this age of cell phones, when I didn’t see him pass a quick stop that Elizabeth and I had stopped in, I called him and told him his mistake. He eventually caught up with us on the right road, and we drove on about 160 miles east to Mobile, Alabama. As we were coming along the main street of Mobile, the hurricane winds and rain were lashing at us, and I thought, “Oh no, do we have to drive in this now?” Patrick’s car radio told him a tornado had just touched down near us. As we approached Interstate 10 in downtown Mobile, we could see a terrible traffic jam trying to get into the interstate highway tunnel under Mobile Bay. Fortunately, we could duck into the old Bankhead Tunnel at the foot of Government Street, and got under Mobile Bay that way. I-10 east of Mobile was fairly traffic-free. \r\n\r\nI was worried about a traffic jam at Escambia Bay in Pensacola, because Hurricane Ivan had destroyed the eastbound bridge across that bay in 2004, and the temporary bridge built to ease this problem was just a one-lane grating. But the Florida highway patrol had the foresight to create a counter-flow traffic route across the westbound bridge, so we crossed over to the westbound side, and crossed Escambia Bay with no problems. We got to a town called Crestview about 6:00 p.m., and stopped in a large gas station that had a Subway sandwich shop at one end of it. We bought gasoline, and got some supper for Patrick’s children. Then drove on the more than 200 miles to Tallahassee, mostly in the dark. Our eldest son Jody’s in-laws, Jack and Sue Kirik, had evacuated a day earlier, and were in their motel waiting for us, with a dinner of ribs and salad. They were a very welcome sight to look forward to, especially because we knew we had someone waiting for us at the end of a long drive. \r\n\r\nThe next day, August 29, the hurricane hit Louisiana and Mississippi. And that night we learned that New Orleans was fairly well saved, although the wind damage was bad. That same night we went to a Japanese restaurant, the kind that seats you around a big stove and the cooks fix your meal right in front of you. Almost all of our whole Covington family was there at the restaurant: Elizabeth and I, Jack and Sue Kirik, David and Kathleen Stuart who are Kelli’s parents, Kelli’s brother David, plus Patrick, Kelli, and their three children. I told the children, “You’re going to grow up and think hurricanes are fun.” David, Kelli’s brother, looked very upset. He had found out that about four of his company’s five or so sites had been destroyed. \r\n\r\nThe next day many of us went to an elaborate automobile museum in Tallahassee, at the behest of Jack Kirik, and while in there we learned that many levees had broken in New Orleans and that the city was being flooded badly. That night we saw pictures on the television of the flooded city, and somehow we found out that Covington had been badly damaged by wind and falling trees. Cell phones weren’t working, land lines weren’t working, and so we couldn’t communicate with anyone at home to find our how our house had fared.\r\n\r\nThe next day the Stuarts left to go back. And the day after that, Patrick and the Kiriks went back. But Elizabeth and I stayed. I had a hunch it was a mistake for us to go back. I was afraid to go back, with the biggest fear being the uncertainty of being able to buy gasoline.\r\n\r\nWe stayed in Tallahassee for eight days. During that time Patrick got through to us somehow that our house was all right, except for a great number of fallen trees, some broken windows, some dings to our roof, no telephone, and no electrical power. That meant no air conditioning and no water, since our well pump was electric. \r\n\r\nI went out in Tallahassee each day early in the morning before breakfast, and bought gasoline. There was one station that seemed to have it consistently, if you got there early enough. We went to Target and bought many hurricane supplies, the most notable was a water purifier, so we could drink water out of the river, and a cheap cell phone, that operated out of Tallahassee’s area code. The cell towers in South Louisiana were not operating, because of no power. Many land lines had been torn down. I was upset by all the bills we were running up by eating in restaurants and staying in a motel.\r\n\r\nOn the ninth day we invited ourselves to Ft. Lauderdale, to stay with Jody and Lynda, in order to get out of the motel and away from the restaurants. It had been about 450 miles from Covington to Tallahassee, and about 450 miles further to Ft. Lauderdale, but we did it. While there, and while still in Tallahassee, I kept trying to get through to FEMA, either by telephone or internet, to apply for their grants for people who had to evacuate. I couldn’t get through to them either way, after many tries. \r\n\r\nAlso, while in Ft. Lauderdale, I was contacted by phone by one of my Covington friends, Bruce Barnes. He loves Moselle, so right as we were leaving our house to evacuate, I called him and asked if he were interested in taking care of her at his house. I found out the next morning that he had taken her, but heard nothing else until about ten days later. His rented house had been badly smashed by two falling trees, so somehow he got out of Covington with Moselle and they went to Bruce’s brother’s house in Houston. Elizabeth enjoyed telling people that we evacuated to Tallahassee, but Moselle evacuated to Houston.\r\n\r\nIn our minds we had cancelled our plans to go to Colorado to my niece Shannon’s wedding. But Lynda suggested we go; she would find us a cheap flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we could rent a car there, to drive it to Denver. So we went. We stayed three nights in Santa Fe, then went on to Denver, and stayed with Jack and Mary Frances Bills, my sister and her husband. Our daughter Sarah and her husband Chad came from North Carolina for the wedding; our son Jeff came from San Antonio; my brother Pat came from Salida, Colorado. Many of my cousins were there. At a church fund-raiser Elizabeth and I had previously won a two-night stay in a hotel named the Monaco in downtown Denver, so we spent two of our nights there. The day after the wedding, we took Sarah and Chad to Colorado Springs and went through the Garden of the Gods. That same day, a Sunday, I finally got through to FEMA on my sister’s land-line telephone about 6:30 a.m. I must have answered the questions correctly, because we did get a FEMA grant, which paid for the whole evacuation trip.\r\n\r\nThen we drove back to Albuquerque, turned our rented car in, and flew back to Ft. Lauderdale. There were two reasons for this. One, our car was there, and two, the power was still not on at our house in Covington.\r\n\r\nWe stayed in Ft. Lauderdale, until our cabin renter, Steve, called and told us the power had been restored. I decided it was time to go back. I was embarrassed that Patrick, Jack Kirik, and my friends Bob Hurst and Bruce Barnes were solving my problems at home in various ways. I felt I needed to get back and solve my own problems. But this was not a good decision, because by this time Hurricane Rita was heading for Louisiana. We drove for two days to get home, stayed there one night, then evacuated again the next morning for Rita, by inviting ourselves to Sarah’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Once again, I exchanged my dirty underwear for clean, and we took off. I ended up driving about 450 miles per day for four straight days. I was a little tired the next day at Sarah’s. \r\n\r\nWe stayed at Sarah’s for two days, then returned home. Hurricane Rita had missed us. I had lived for five weeks out of a suitcase that I had packed for only five days.\r\n\r\nIt cost us about $18,000 to get all the fallen trees on our property cut up and hauled off, and $3,800 to get our roof fixed (It still isn’t fixed right.) We spent more money just getting the broken windows fixed, but took this chance to replace almost all the old wooden framed windows with aluminum framed ones, and to make one window in our loft into a door for access to the balcony we had built outside the loft windows. The loss of so many trees meant our house wasn’t shaded any more, and even in the winter the merciless sun now shining on the windows made the inside of the house very hot, so we spent more money getting shades and blinds. \r\n\r\nBut we count our blessings. Thousands of people lost everything; their houses, cars, businesses and jobs. Elizabeth’s job at the Times-Picayune got going again after two months, and I got my little piano tuning business going by then also. For us, everything is back to normal, as I finish this on September 2, 2006. Richard Moore\r\n\r\n