Is this picture making anyone else nervous? I wasn't in New Orleans during Katrina but Shreveport was bad enough. Steve was down there right after as part of the evacuation effort of the convention center with the police department and he brought back some rough stories and some photos. Nobody wants to revisit that! Maybe Gustav won't take the track they are predicting; we shall hope not! I'm concerned about the rebuilt levees and how much NOLA can take given that they have not yet fully recovered from Katrina. The emotional wounds may not EVER heal for many.
As a teacher in Bossier Parish, I can tell you that we absorbed a lot of students into our school after Katrina. I now know what shell-shock looks like. Many of those kids had such a haunted look in their eyes that it would break your heart. Some of them stayed on at our school and graduated; some moved back to NOLA, some moved and settled elsewhere.
So I'm saying a little prayer for New Orleans today.
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I will never forget what I saw in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And what compounded some of my feelings is that three weeks later I had to go to Abbeville,Louisiana, just southwest of Lafayette, for evacuation efforts due to Hurricane Rita.
Prior to going into New Orleans, the group of law enforcment officers and school bus drivers I was with spent the night in a school bus repair shop in Gonzales, Louisiana (the last town before going into New Orleans off I-10). We shared the facility with the National Guard.
That night, we needed to get gas, and drove into Gonzales and the sight of military vehicles led one to believe we were in the middle of heading off an invasion. I had spent nearly 26 1/2 years in the Air Force and Army (active and reserve. Eight months prior to this I had just gotten off a two-year acitivation with the Army (after my reserve unit got called up), so being around military equipment was nothing new to me. But this was different, this time the mission was real, and I could sense the urgency of the situation at hand.
Numerous times during that period going to and being in New Orleans, I felt like I was in the middle of a movie where the end was coming to the world. Military trucks moving about in haste, large groups of people who had just lost their homes coming from the devastated areas, people with a lost and hopeless look on their faces.
I saw a lot while in New Orleans, but one of the most overwhelming sights was at the airport. Throngs of people. It seemed like millions of them, and they were carrying what little possessions they could gather before having to leave their homes. Sort of like pictures I've seen of war refugees.
The sad thing is these people were being herded on planes that would take off and land God only knows where, but these people believed they were getting flights to where ever they wanted to go.
I would ask some people if they wanted to stay in Louisiana. Some would say yes, but others would say, "No, I'm going to San Antonio. They said I'm going to San Antonio."
I would tell them, "No, there is no guarentee you're going to where ever, they are just herding people in to the planes. The planes take off, and where ever they direct the plane, that's where you end up."
"No, they say I'm going to San Antonio, I'm going to San Antonio."
I wanted to cry. These were decent people who didn't deserve what they were going through.
Some said they wanted to stay in Louisiana and asked where in Louisiana where they going to. I would tell them Bossier City. They would ask, "Where is that?" And I would point at the blue star in the northwest corner of the Louisiana emblem on my police department patch and tell them, "It's here."
We got a lot of them to come back to Bossier City with us.
One lady, and I could tell she was a lady probably in her late 40's or early 50's, and she was an attractive woman. She walked past me, and she was crying, "I can't take this anymore."
She was walking away from me and away from the airport. I stopped her and asked her if she wanted to come with us. She said, "No, I'm going home."
I asked her where are you going home to? New Orleans is destroyed, there is a criminal element that is preying on people, you won't be safe."
She said she was going back to her house on the Lake Front. I told her, "Ma'am, Lake Front is gone, it too dangerous."
She looked at me, smiled, and walked off.
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