Brad's Story Page 1 of 2

This is Nancy's husband Brad. Here's what I remember...

Before Katrina...

Boy this storm is not looking good. I am part of a management team at work that does a conference call every four hours during the weekend right before it hits. We've send a copy of our computer master tapes to Chicago just in case, and are preparing for the worst. I have to drop off a couple of calls because I'm busy boarding our house up.

During Katrina...

We heard several large thumps from the ceiling and were concerned that the roof was pulling away. We found out later it was just bricks from the chimney flying off and hitting the roof. We found bricks scattered across the yard later, up to 200 ft from the house.

On time I heard a huge racket coming from our front porch. I peeked out the front door and saw a large sheet of house aluminum siding wadded up into a ball about four feet in diameter. It was caught by our porch railing and the wind was slamming it into the house and the railings. I wanted to get it off the porch before it destroyed everything around it. The wind was so strong I knew Nancy wouldn't let me near it for fear of it hitting me with a sharp edge and cutting me, so I didn't mention my plan to her. I waited until she was in another room putting a bucket under a leak. I timed my attack for a lull between gusts but none came, so I finally just waited until the metal ball was paused for a moment then jumped it. I grabbed it and immediately threw it to the front yard. I was amazed to see that it didn't touch the ground. When it cleared the porch it got the full force of the wind and sailed up and away from our yard! We have no neighbors with aluminum siding so this piece must have traveled awhile like that to find us. I'm glad Nance didn't catch me doing this, she'd have karate kicked me!

Nance and I tried standing on our porch flattened up against the house to watch the storm, but it didn't work. Rain was flying horizontally and hitting us so hard it drove us back inside. (Not to mention we were seeing large chunks of debris missiles flying by, any one of which would really make a bad day out of this if they got too close) I'll blame Nancy for this whole adventure; she's always liked watching storms. :)

As the winds started to lessen, we went outside to make a quick survey of our house. We had several large areas that were missing all of the shingles/tarpaper, and there were a couple of porch rail supports that shifted, the chimney was shorted than I remembered it, but no heavy structural damage. We had lots of damage to wooden fence and shed. I was thinking at this time that Katrina hit us about as hard as Georges a few years prior.

Calvin and I went for a walk around the block to survey the damage. The storm was ongoing as we walked, but winds were down enough that I felt safe. As we walked it quickly became clear that this storm was no Georges. We saw many trees down as usual, but this time we also saw homes missing large areas of roof, exposing the rafters. One home looked ok in front, but the rear half of the home shifted a few inches from the front half. I saw at least a dozen neighbors whose metal garage doors buckled or completely caved in. When we got to the end of our neighborhood and started towards the neighborhood beside ours I was amazed at the damage. This neighborhood is new, with all houses made with aluminum siding. We were walking north and it looked like a lumber yard we were walking towards. The South side of every home was stripped bare of siding, in some cases they were stripped of the plywood also. One home had a second floor bedroom above a carport before the storm; the carport had to make room for the bedroom which had a great desire to become a first floor room. It succeeded. As we climbed past debris we saw others starting to come out and stand in their yards. We stopped and talked to everyone we saw, making sure they were ok.

Calvin and I go on our roof and make what patches we can with what we have. Storm is almost past us by now.

After Katrina....

A day after Katrina I tried to drive to my company headquarters for news. I got to the entrance to our neighborhood without much stress; there were trees in the road but not enough to block the entire street. At the entrance I surveyed my options. This is a 4 way stop so I had three exits. Looking South I see many large trees and a few power poles laying in the street, it's blocked. Looking North I see dozens of power poles snapped in half, the top halves with the power lines are all over the street, it's blocked. Looking west it seems relatively clear so on I go. This option goes into another neighborhood but they have many entrances from roads so I'm sure I can get through. After about 500 ft I find my way blocked by power lines laying across the street. I'm not sure if I'll survive going over them, boy won't Nance be mad if I survive the storm and do something this stupid the day after! So I wait for another, more stupid person than me. Eventually here he comes in another car. He survives driving over the power lines so I follow. As I weave around downed trees I'm often cut off and have to backtrack to another street, but eventually I find my way to a major road and I'm free of this maze. It took me an hour to drive half a mile. I drive down to my company, which is a couple of blocks from the beach. I'm amazed at the destruction; the lobby has a few feet of broken glass and office debris. Many windows are broken. I find a few coworkers that rode out the storm inside the building. They dashed from floor to floor during the storm, trying to find a safe place to be. We plan on meeting the next day at another company building a couple of blocks away. I go home and start what repairs I can.

The next day I get a good sponge bath standing beside our pool, that's one of the best baths I've ever had it felt so good to cool down and get clean. I pack a suitcase because I know I'll leave town for my company, if not today maybe tomorrow. We've had a disaster recovery plan for years, and I'm on the team whose job is to get the bank computer systems back up. We do test disaster recoveries annually, so I'm familiar with what we need to do. Nancy, Calvin, and I drive down to my meeting. During the meeting we're all asked who is in a position to leave Gulfport and go to Chicago for our computer recovery. There are several computer dudes here but my hand is the only one raised among the programmers. I tell them my suitcase is outside, the wife is up to holding down the home front, so I can go now. They called my bluff by telling us there is a chartered bus outside ready to get us heading towards Chicago! Ugh! :) A rushed kiss with Nance and we're off. The bus is heading to Baton Rouge, which has the nearest open airport. A chartered lear jet is awaiting us. The bus has a dozen or so people in it. Most are stopping at Denham Springs, which has the nearest bank office space with electricity and phones. Just before we reach Denham, several people say their cell homes came into service! Everyone is calling anyone they can think of. I don't have a cell phone but soon someone hands me their phone. I call my Mom in central Illinois. When she hears my voice she bursts into a half cry/half scream of joy. I tell her we're all alive. (I find out much later that my Aunt Arveda was calling my Mom over and over for news on us, when she called soon after my news reached Mom, she burst out with the news in her office and everyone cheered!) We reach the airplane and climb into a different world.

Brad's Story Page 2 of 2

The jet is very luxurious, leather chairs, inlaid wood, air conditioning, hot food; it's surreal to be on it after leaving Gulfport behind. With me on the plane are Ben T. Computer Operator, Kimbel R. Micro Apps, Milton L. Computer Operator, Ken F. Systems, Eric E. Micro Apps.

As we are checking into the hotel nearest our recovery data center, two coworkers walk into the lobby: Jeff A. Host Programmer/Team Leader like me and Eddie C. Computer Operations Mgr. They beat us to Chicago. Eddie had flown up with the master tapes and was babysitting them. Jeff, who evacuated to Memphis with his family before the storm, had put his family on a plane to Houston where extended family could take them in, and then driven straight to Chicago. He beat the plane crew to Chicago by a few hours. We drop off our luggage (those of us that had any! Ben lost everything in the storm and only owned the clothes on his back), and we're off to work.

We check in to the data center and get to our room. It has about 20 computer consoles all over the place. We settle in to getting the computer systems back up, and then caught up to current day. This takes us about five days to have everything major online and current. A lot of this time is a blur to me now but I'll put down what I remember.

The first priority is getting people on the coast access to their money. The bank atm network is down along with everything else. We quickly find that we can get the atm computer network up but that doesn't help much if the atm doesn't exist anymore, if there's no power going to the atm, if the structure the atm is in is now hazardous, etc etc.

Second priority is getting payrolls posted on accounts. Many local company’s direct deposit payrolls and people count on that money, now more than ever. We held up our first big computer runs to get every payroll we could into it; in many cases people got access to their payroll a few days in advance of when it was due.

Third priority was cutting customers a lot of slack due to the storm. We wrote programs and changes options to stop fees from being charged, like NSF, OD, ATM, Late Charges on loans, etc. We not only stopped our own atm fees but we even rebated any fees charged by out of town banks for using their atms. We also stopped sending info to the credit bureaus so we wouldn't report anyone as past due on anything. We plan on resuming the bureaus later but zeroing out any past dues on loans during the Katrina time, so nobody's credit will be harmed by being unable to pay a loan on time. We know we're losing a lot of income by doing this; in fact millions of dollars, but in the long run our customers will remember this and remain customers. In some cases we couldn't stop all fees from the first couple of runs, but we reversed them out within a couple of days.

We quickly got into a routine of working 26-37 hours, sleeping 2-3 hours then back to work. There is a break room beside our computer room, as I went to it to make pots of coffee I started catching glimpses of what was being reported on the T.V. about Katrina. It was obvious that this storm was much much worse than I imagined. (There was no news in Gulfport after Katrina, since power, phones, cell phones, even radio towers were out)

After about a day, I started stealing moments and emailing friends and family outside to tell them we are alive. I know that Nance participates in a couple of scrap booking forums so I register on one of them (twopeas or something like that, google is my friend). I start a thread there to tell her scrappin friends she is alive. http://www.twopeasinabucket.com/mb.asp?cmd=display&thread_id=1366316

I keep trying to get news to or from Nancy but there is no contact with Gulfport at all. I'm getting more worried as this continues and I watch the news from New Orleans. After a few days I get an email from a lady in Ohio, she's the mother of a lady who lives next door to us in Gulfport. She tells me that she finally received news from Gulfport and it's not good. She says her daughter was able to send a cell phone text message at about 2:00 AM and it got through. She tells me that Nancy is running out of food, water, dog and cat food, gas, everything; she was in a near-riot at a food distribution center so she went home and is now refusing to leave to find these things she so desperately needs. I ask her to pass on to Nance if she is able, to get out of Gulfport. I then start a frantic campaign to get her out of there or get supplies to her. I call coworkers in Denham Springs and ask them if there's any way we can get anything to her. Several ladies in the scrappin forums call or email me to find out more or to volunteer to help. I ask them to mail care packages to Nancy, Calvin, and our cat and dog. I call or email family to send care packages. One brilliant lady suggests, since mail delivery is down in Gulfport, that she mail a package to an office of my company outside the Katrina zone and then my company can get it to her. Around 10:00 PM, as I'm leaving a restaurant to go back to work, I get a call from Nancy! She tells me that a group of bankers visited her earlier this evening and ordered her to get on tomorrows daily bus from Gulfport to Baton Rouge. There she can stay in a hotel, or with bankers, or fly to Chicago or anywhere! Score! But Nance goes on to say that she's not leaving! That hard headed woman! She says she feels she's doing more good for the family by staying, that she can't leave the cat and dog, that she's working with neighbors and they're pooling resources. I use every argument I can come up with to convince her to leave, no luck. Finally I get dirty. I ask her what she had for dinner tonight. She tells me she opened a can of stewed tomatoes and it was delicious thank you. I tell her that I'm returning from a fancy steak restaurant where I sat in cold air conditioning, sipping a cold beer, before diving in to a filet mignon, with a delicious crème brulee dessert. Even this doesn't work, she's staying. She tells me even Calvin wants to stay, she offered him the chance to get on that bus and he'd rather stay too.

A few days later...
We catch up on all computer runs and I fly home for the weekend. I'm walking on air all weekend with wife and son around me. My cat is gone; Nance tells me she disappeared a couple of days after I went to Chicago.

Two weeks or so after that....
On a Wednesday afternoon my presence is requested in Gulfport for a business meeting that will take place Friday between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM. I decide to surprise Nancy so I don't tell her I'm coming home. I make flight plans to arrive Thursday evening and stay until Sunday. When I get to Gulfport I take a taxi home, so the first Nance knows about this is when I come in the front door. I'm not sure which hurt more, the fierce rib-cracking hugs or the punches for not telling her! :)

Nov 11...
Today we returned all computer systems from Chicago to a temporary computer site in Gulfport. I am in charge of it on the Chicago end. During the week prior to the move I have the crew test out every step. We visit the airport (one we haven't used before) where we have two chartered flights planned, a fast lear jet for my crew and the 1st priority tapes, followed by a prop plane carrying our luggage and 2nd priority computer equipment. We do test fittings of the computer cases into our rental suv's and plot how we'll get everything to the planes. Everything was lined up by the day before we leave, I had a schedule and plot map showing how every box would fit and it was a near thing but we had the room. Then chaos! During dinner the evening before we leave, I get a call from Gulfport. Someone down there is sending another computer dude up here to babysit some file servers, and they say he must be on the jet returning. I argue against it and say they can return commercial, they're not bumping one of my guys at the last minute. The guys up here have for the most part been up here for the long haul,it is not right to bump one of them. Well I lost and Robert got bumped. He's not needed immediately on the coast to restore the tapes and file servers and the other guy is. F-bomb F-bomb F-bomb
I move on and we get it done. My schedule had the two planes lifting off at 10:00 AM. Some items took longer than planned, some went faster. We actually lifted off at 9:58 AM so I'm way ahead of schedule! :)

Katrina Cars

If you look on almost any car forum on the net, you will see a warning about "Katrina Cars". There is good reason for this. Flood damaged cars are often reconditioned and put back on the market to unsuspecting buyers. Sometimes the title will reflect that they are salvaged cars, and sometimes the cars are sent away from the flood area and the titles are cleaned up.
There are thousands and thousands of Katrina cars here on the coast. Dozens of new scrap yards have popped up, some of them stretching for miles on end. In some places along the beach, there is actually a tideline of cars like the one in this picture. The government is having to fight to clean up some of the cars that are left. Many owners will not give permission to have their lots cleared of debris and they are threatening to sue if they are cleared anyway. Most people are glad to have their property cleared of the debris at no cost, but many can not let go. They want to hang on to what they have left, even if it is just a pile of debris or a wrecked car.
Although buyers all over the states are being warned against buying a car from within the damaged areas, the used cars that are for sale are in short supply. So many people lost their cars that the used car market is just sold out. We have been looking for a good used car for Brad to drive and there are very few to be found. The used cars lots are almost empty and any car that comes up for sale in the paper, goes fast. We are currently looking well outside the area to find a car.