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.