Starting from the beginning

Since this blog springs from my desire to share my Hurricane Katrina journal, I will go back and start with the first day I started my journal and work my way back to the current entries.


Aug 28- When we went to bed last night, Katrina was still a cat 2 or 3 storm headed for New Orleans or west of there. When we woke up this morning, the storm had made cat 5 and had taken a jog eastward. It was headed directly for the Mississippi Gulf Coast now. Fortunately we had already had several hurricane scares this year, and we were as prepared as we had ever been for a storm. Brad put up the plywood on the windows and we battened down the hatches. We looked for Mattie the cat to bring her inside, but she did not show up for dinner.

Aug 29-I did not sleep at all this night. I stayed up watching the updates on the storm. Brad woke up at 2:30 AM and joined me. We made coffee to drink and also to pour into a thermos for later. We knew the electricity would be going out shortly. The first hurricane force winds reached us at about 4AM. I went out on the back porch to get our dog Julie and bring her inside. She was not on the porch and I could not see her. I called and called and she finally came running out from under the shed. We brought her in and again searched for Mattie. We could not find her and could only hope she was in a safe place.

As the winds continued to strengthen, a piece of plywood blew off of one of the back windows. Brad and I had to go out in the storm and put it back up. It was terrifying to try to hold the large piece of plywood in the wind, but Brad managed to get it back on the window and secure it. by 6AM we had sustained winds of 115 mph and gusts up to 165 mph. This was as strong as Hurricane Georges already and the storm had not yet made landfall. The hurricane made landfall on the coast by about 7AM. There was several different reports on the windspeed at this point because the storm had actually destoyed some of the instruments that measure the windspeed. I think it was finally agreed later that the sustained winds were up to 165 mph. I do know that it shook our entire house. by 7:30 AM I was afraid that the whole house was going to blow away. The large beams in the Greatroom where we were staying, creaked and moaned under the pressure.

It was very claustrophobic inside the boarded up house, so Brad and I kept going out on the front porch to watch the storm. We would press ourselves up close against the house to keep from blowing away. We saw a young squirrel get blown out of a pecan tree and then cling to the base of the tree for his life. He managed to stay there for several hours but I am not sure if he survived. We had put on our bathing suits to keep from soaking our clothes and the neighbors told us later on that when they looked outside and saw us standing in the hurricane in our swimsuits, they thought we had lost our minds. Small pieces of leaves felt like rocks when they would blow into us, and at one point Brad was hit really hard by something. We noticed a few days after the storm that he had a huge black bruise on his side, but he did not remember getting it. When the metal wall from someone's shed blew onto our porch and almost hit us, we went inside. We still kept opening the door to peek out though. We also had left a peekhole in the plywood on the master bedroom window and from there, we watched the neighbors roof blow off piece by piece. The whole time I was watching their roof blow away, I kept telling Brad that our roof must look even worse. Rosemary called me at some point during the storm and I told her I was terrified that the house was going to blow away. I then told her that I had to get off the phone in case Brad needed to talk to the bank. I would later regret that because the phones went out before I could talk to her again, and she and everyone else would worry about me for several days.

We were on the worst side of the storm, the upper right quardrant and by 8AM the eyewall of the storm had moved ashore. The noise was unbelievable. We could barely hear ourselves talking and yet over the noise of the wind, we kept hearing huge booms on the roof. We found out later that the booms were the bricks from the chimney as it fell apart. We watched as the fence blew away piece by piece and as our entire shed blew away in one piece. We saw sheds and fences from other neighbors blow into our yard. We also lost power around this time. The heat and humidity quickly rose inside the house.

By 10AM the water started to come in through the damaged roof. It first started to pour in through the light sockets in the kitchen and hallway. From there it spread through the ceilings until it had dissolved the sheetrock in places. Finally it started pouring down through the doorframes. Luckily, most of it was over places where there was no carpet. Only one section of carpet was soaked, and that was in my scraproom. We put big bowls under most of the leaks, but the dirty water would splash out of the bowls as it hit them and we had water stains all over eveything. The best thing about Katrina, was the fact that it did not rain for long afterwards like it did with Georges. We had much less damage than we would have had if it kept raining. We had our battery powered radio on and they were reporting a storm surge of 30 ft. We watched as our street flooded but luckily the water never came near the house.

As the eyewall moved past us, the winds started to die down. Brad and Calvin went up on the roof to try to patch some of the holes that were letting water in. There were still very strong gusts blowing through and I was afraid for them. In the photo at the top of this post, you can still see the circular motion of the clouds above them.