Anyone have any Hurricane Katrina stories?

[gdubya]

I believe the best way to learn and be prepared is the hard way. We can all learn from the past and what was good/bad, what we wished we had or did beforehand to be prepared. Anyone in here have a good story from Hurricane Katrina or any other catastrophic event? Thanks

 

[dantheman]

Katrina was a miserable experience . After the Hurricane we were sent to work in Chalmette and Michoud . A lot of devastation .

 

[Magdump]

Some folks had the perfect opportunity to shine and instead showed their true colors and victimized a bunch of unfortunate people, behaving like they were off to war. Those victims won’t be victims next time. That’s about all I retained from Katrina.

 

[gman3214]

My Dad had his house looted from out of state guardsmen. He too was Louisiana guardsman coming back from Iraq/Afghanistan when it hit. Top off it off he told me "they took away all our guns" fear that looters would've been shoot since they were mid way through their deployment.

edit: read only the title

 

[Kraut]

Tons of random stories, but one of my favorites pertains to a charity group. After the first few days, when Red Cross started setting up shelter operations and initial supply deliveries of water, MREs, and ice started arriving, a caravan of volunteers arrived from Texas, members of an organization called Mobile Loaves and Fishes. They are a Catholic group, and (at the time) their main gig was nightly feeding missions of the homeless in Austin. They arrived in pickup trucks with trailers, and had pallets of canned goods, bushels of fresh produce, cases of water, and supplies for a huge round of their normal operation of making up sandwich meal bags for distribution. They flagged me down and explained what they were looking to do, and my first instinct was to direct them to our Patrol Commander who was kind of steering supplies towards the shelter being run by the Red Cross, but they explained that they actually don't work well with the Red Cross due to tight bureaucracy issues within the Red Cross and their inflexibility. The Red Cross wouldn't let them distribute any perishable food items at their locations, and they acted weird about what foodstuffs people could have individually stored/held while in the shelter. Instead, they asked to be directed to some space to set up, and to borrow some tables, and then to be shown to where there were people in need. We got some tables from the city barn, set them up in an empty lot, and one of our reserves and I jumped into the assembly line with them to put the bags together, basic sandwich with some condiment packs, crackers/cookies, pieces of fruit, water, and a juice. They fixed up hundreds of these, and we then escorted them through neighborhoods on the South end of Slidell. All water/MRE/ice drops had been in the Walmart parking lot to that point, at Gause and I-10, and unless these people had some form of transportation, they weren't getting over there to get any of that, and there had been no established method to spread that stuff around efficiently. In some of the neighborhoods that we, as police, normally considered the worst, we encountered nothing but sincere gratitude and lots of selflessness ("I'm good, but there's an elderly lady down that street that can't get around, and she's gonna need some if y'all can go there.") The volunteers burned through those bags in no time, and were handing out the produce and canned goods a full crate at a time. They also dropped some pallets of items at a parish run shelter that the Red Cross wasn't administering. When empty, they packed up to return to Austin to reload and look for the next place to help. I've donated to them several times since, especially when Houston was rocked with flooding a couple years ago. They have expanded from a feeding ministry to also starting a program to work with the homeless to get off the streets in a supported housing village. I'm often skeptical of charity solicitations, but this group is on the front lines of their mission for real, day in, day out, and along with the Little Sisters of the Poor, will always get priority for my charitable giving.

 

[Magdump]

Kraut! Found their site online. Gonna send them a donation. Well done sir.

 

[pandabear]

I lived through it with countless stories. You want the good ones, or the bad??

 

[dantheman]

I lived through it with countless stories. You want the good ones, or the bad??

The only good one was the money . Tons of overtime .

 

[foz1359]

Northshore -we were called on to clear the road to get to some folks that were stuck at the Primate Research Center (aka "monkey farm") so I rigged out a trailer with propane tank, 15kw genset and hired my logger friends to cut our way down Three Rivers Road and into the PRC. Old growth pines were strewn everywhere and I learned in about 15 minutes how to run the loader. Learned a lot more such as -fuel line has to be properly sized for the genset, old log loaders can sling a stump pretty far, lumber mill won't take wind twisted logs. Southshore -my little brother and his boss bought a USMC humvee, some fatigues, made some ID's and made their way through numersous checkpoints down to the Bellsouth Bldg so they could refuel a generator that was keeping some critical data up and running -they also refueled the ATT genset because it was critically low. Little brother learned that if you have enough money (wealthy boss) you can do just about anything and if flash your military ID upside down you'll get asked a lot of questions you weren't prepared for.

And I agree with the post above -best to learn by doing, even if there's some pain involved as you'll never forget.

 

[Born4spd]

Friend was MP.
Said it was worse than Iraq.

 

[Bolt Head]

Reading through this thread is yet another reminder of why I stock what I stock. Hurricanes are the common, repeated threat to normal life. Any "aid" that may come around can only get to so many. Every time I read these things and reflect upon the past, I feel better and better about what I'm sitting on.

What little "aid" is provided during natural disasters/emergencies makes those self-proclaimed socialists/communists look that much more delusional.

 

[Gator 45/70]

Been there, Done that and I will tell no stories or relive this crap.

 

[nolaradio]

Closed on our house on the northshore the last week of June, 2005. Moved in the second week of July. Luckiest move ever. Lost 10 squares of shingles but the tar paper stayed in place. About 150' of wood fence was leaning or blown over completely and lost one piece of siding. We were blessed for sure.
Anything that was move in ready shot up 20-25%. We would not have been able to afford to our house had we waited to purchase.

In October, my parents and I drove to the Waveland/Bay St. Louis area to see what things looked like. We had family that lived there in the past. We loaded up two trucks with ice and bottled water to distribute to anyone we came across. Total devastation there. People in New Orleans had a shell of a house to rebuild. Thousands of people there in MS were either left with a slab or nothing at all. All of it washed out to the MS Sound. We gave away one bag of ice and one case of water. People there were too proud to take anything. We were begging people to take it from us. People living in a tent on top of a slab told us that they are ok. The Red Cross passed by every other day to drop off some prepared food. They had no transportation. Wouldn't accept a ride to get anything they needed, wouldn't tell us what they needed so we could go get it for them. Totally different mindset from what you saw on in the media coming from New Orleans.

 

[John_]

Closed on our house on the northshore the last week of June, 2005. Moved in the second week of July. Luckiest move ever. Lost 10 squares of shingles but the tar paper stayed in place. About 150' of wood fence was leaning or blown over completely and lost one piece of siding. We were blessed for sure.
Anything that was move in ready shot up 20-25%. We would not have been able to afford to our house had we waited to purchase.

Really unfortunate that you lost so many shingles but boy was that a timely purchase! A discount purchase given the August 29th events and aftermath. I lost a square of shingles (over my attached garage) in Laplace and blew down a section of my fence. My house at the time was on a corner and I think the wind was was much worse owning a house on a corner. Same house got flooded 8/29/2012, Hurricane Isaac, and my 1 year old Camry parked in the garage. 14" in the house. That is when I knew I had to leave Laplace, which I did Nov of 2014. I missed the next flood in Laplace, hurricane Ida. I know plenty people got flooded the 2nd time around. The protection levees are still not finished, maybe in 2025 or 26 they say.

The simple fact is there are not many happy stories from Katrina. Massive devastation in east LA and west MS Gulf Coast. Flooding and looting and violence in NOLA. Some of the remaining NOLA finest were actually shooting at the helos in the sky hours after Katrina had passed, puckin useless trash! They looted the Oakwood mall on the west bank and set it on fire.
The US military came into NOLA immediately and made it right, stopped the looting and violence dead in its tracks.

 

[swampfoxx]

My first CHP instructor wrote a book about Katrina. It is named "The Great New Orleans Gun Grab". Here a couple of links to the book:

The great New Orleans gun grab : descent into anarchy : Hutchinson, Gordon : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

224 pages : 22 cm

archive.org

https://tulanelink.com/pdf/arod_gungrab.pdf

 

[Magdump]

My first CHP instructor wrote a book about Katrina. It is named "The Great New Orleans Gun Grab". Here a couple of links to the book:

The great New Orleans gun grab : descent into anarchy : Hutchinson, Gordon : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

224 pages : 22 cm

archive.org

https://tulanelink.com/pdf/arod_gungrab.pdf

It’s a good read. It’s hard for me to imagine any of those affected ever surrendering their God given rights again. Hard to imagine how any of the enemy combatants who moved into the city and victimized so many actually believed they were doing the right thing.

 

[sil-40]

The only boring story I've got was trying to bring my girlfriend's mother supplies because Charity was calling a code 5(?) and she worked in the NICU at the time.

I had to get into New Orleans when they were evacuating and then get back out before the storm (in the evacuating traffic). I had one gun pulled on me and got pulled over multiple times by police. ~14 hours total travel time to get from Baton Rouge to Charity and back.