What were you doing when Hurricane Katrina hit?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I live, and lived then, in Fort Worth. But I stayed up all night watching the cable nets as it rolled in, concerned about friends of mine in New Orleans who decided to stay. (They lived uptown and were ok.) When the eyewall made landfall and communications became impossible, I went to bed… when I got up, there were reports of flooding but nothing yet indicating that the levees had been breached. At that point I was worried mostly for the poor folks holed up in the Superdome.
Somehow, I could feel it before the storm ever landed that New Orleans was about to run out of what little good luck it ever had.
Crazy, 5 years ago already?
I was in Florida at the time, getting ready to embark on a road trip/move to Los Angeles. My roommate and I had planned to take the 10 freeway all the way out there, passing through New Orleans on the way. A couple days before we were set to embark, my roommate’s transmission crapped out, delaying us a few days while he got it replaced. In the meantime, Katrina made landfall. Thus, had my roommate’s car decided to break down a few days later, we might have found ourselves stuck in the middle of the Katrina craziness – as so many were who lacked vehicular mobility. This incident, even more than the images on TV, in a way, gave me a great deal of sympathy for those folks.
As a side note, Katrina was originally en route to hit my hometown of Sarasota, FL directly, before it swerved and headed for New Orleans instead. At least 3-4 other hurricanes that summer made the exact same fakeout (it’s easy to forget that 2005 was one of the busiest hurricane seasons in years, Katrina aside). Many of us Floridians had a “there but for the grace of god go I” feeling watching Katrina turn into a Category 5 and tear down New Orleans.
My wife and I were in Italy away from news. A local person told us at dinner that there was a big storm in the US but we didn’t get the importance. When we got to the airport about 3 days after the storm hit we were shocked by newspapers in the newstands and read all about it on the flight home. Made me feel as out of the loop as Bush should have felt, but I wasn’t the POTUS on duty at the time.
I was at a low key family event, which meant we were glued to the Katrina coverage for 4 days. truly horrible, watching people at the superdome, people dying before our eyes. saw gwb’s friday visit with the fake water station. everything beyond words horrible
In Philly, almost certainly drinking beer, and probably complaining about the Resident being a fucking piece of shit who deserved to hang from a nooses fashioned of his own withered penis.
you probably have a link for that, too.
ahh, I know what i was doing (went through my archives). My son’s mother was breaking up with me at that point. I had just gotten past my 90 day probabtion at the grant writing job I took so i could afford to be a father to my son. Sam and his mom were schduld to move in right after labor Day weekend. Two weeks before they moved in she called me on the phone from Canada, told me i didn’t love her, that her dad would be a “father figure” for MY son, and that her best friend was going to help raise MY child.
it was a pretty shitty time, although not as shitty as it was for the residents of New Orleans’ 9th ward.
As it wound up, I ended up with a lovely new girlfriend in October, a year later I got a raise, and two years after that I took a job with a $10K salary increase. My son’s mom is now married, and uses her ivy league degree from UPenn to work as a waitress.
I’m trying to remember when we first met. It must have been that spring of 2005. Yet, I have no memory of a time prior to your son’s Mom being in Canada.
DL was still at Tangier at that point. If we met in spring, Sam’s mom and I were still trying to make it work. She was already in canada though: she went up in 2004 to have the baby (canada has a real health care system); she was supposed to be back for grad school in September 2004, but Penn fucked up the visa and by the time it was straightened out, it was too late to start school, so she deferred for a year; in 2005, she broke up with me because a Canadian college offered a better deal (and also i didn’t love her, etc etc).
it was a bittersweet moment when the canadian college welshed on the deal. She’s been a waitress ever since.
I was following the news here in CA. It was looking for Katrina news that brought me to the blogs. I wonder what I could have done with all those wasted hours since…
Moving back to the United States from England. Literally on the plane.
Sleeping. I woke up to the news in my computer class, and we didn’t do work; he had the news up all day. I couldn’t stand watching, so I asked for headphones so I could play videogames on my computer. It was too much for me to bear.
I’ve gone down on two of my Spring Breaks during college to go down there to help out–the latest one being two years ago–and it’s still in shambles, man. It’s an outright fucking outrage. Especially when I saw all of the young children’s living conditions. Ok, I’m going to go talk about something else now before I tear up and have my blood boil.
It occurs to me… we have 10% unemployment. We have a destroyed city on the coast. Maybe we should put some of those unemployed to work rebuilding the city on the coast.
In my first year in law school.
Then I had to go to class and hear how it’s was their own fault because everybody told them to leave and they stayed anyway.
I gave to Red Cross and wore beads to symbolize solidarity. Everybody asked me did I just get back from Mardi Gras.
Heavy, heavy sigh.
Law students can be fairly clueless at times.
I don’t tell this story, often, cause it’s still an emotional story for me, and I just hate the judgmental looks, and the glances of pity, that I receive, but here goes.
I was sleeping in my bed in New Orleans East, with my sister and my mom in the other room. We slept through the storm, we woke up, and the storm had passed. We realized that there was no electricity, and so we had the windows open. I remember calling my grandmother, and telling her that the electricity was off, but everything was fine. We stayed overnight until the next morning, when we woke, up heard a loud bang, and look outside and saw water and downstairs saw water rushing through the hole in the glass patio door.
Three days later after wading through water to get to a bridge on high ground, while at a shelter in Lafayette, LA, my mom, my sister and I found out that my grandmother who had to be evacuated after the levees broke, had died on Sept 1st, after having a massive heart attack brought on by the stress of the evacuaction. She was buried a week later in Thibodaux, where she is still laid to rest.
I’m just now watching the HBO documentary by Spike Lee “If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise”. Being in DFW, away from Nola since Katrina, I missed all the damn corruption that occcurred. The documentary is 4 hours long, but it is worth your time to watch it. It’s illuminating! It seriously almost made we weep a number of times.
All I can say is damn!!! It’s a truth, that many people don’t wanna see now, and didn’t want to see then. I highly recommend it.
Shutting down Camp Casey in Crawford, having been there almost a month. We sent a lot of the camp’s leftover food, tents and other supplies to NOLA, and quite a few Camp Casey volunteers went there to help.
I was in China, adopting my son. I watching on CNN and BBC international and laid on the hotel room floor and cried.