The Aftermath Tuesday, the day after, the sky was clear and it was hot. Heat index was 107 degree. We heard via FM radio that "help was on its way" to MS but that New Orleans was in deep do do! The levies were breached and the entire city was slowly but surely filling up with Lake Ponchatran. But we had our own problems. Our neighbor across the street is a Lt. in MS Marine Resources and his wife a long time school teacher. He had the only cell phone around that worked. We both put out our portable generators and by gosh they both started on the first pull. Got them hooked up to a couple of Ref/freezers and we were invited to join them in a little ride around where ever we could get to in Diamondhead. Within a mile radius of our homes we found many houses that had been swamped by water. It seems that if you were near any rill, bayou or any other natural body that was at sea level, the surge just fingered its way up that waterway and rose to surge height. I have a golfing friend whose house has a tiny rill about 30 feet from it, but unfortunately the rill is only 8 feet lower than his house. We never see more than 6 inches of water in it as it is a hazard that runs across a couple of the holes on the golf course. His house ended up with over 8 feet of water in it. We went down another street and saw where 8 houses right in a row had been decimated by a tornado. We have a condo complex bordering one of the holes on the golf course and with the exception of shingles and felt paper off the roof, they looked fine till you got to the middle of the complex. There, a tornado had cut 4 units out, almost like one would cut a piece out of a cake. I could tell you a hundred more stories, but will not do so as we hear the storms aftermath got great coverage by TV. Speaking of TV, my US TV dish was destroyed, but our Foreign TV dish looked OK so about 3 days after the storm we plugged a set into the generator and watched the coverage of the damage assessment via TV from NHK Tokyo. To continue reading AK's Katrina account, click Help here, or in the frame on the left. |
