And Now A Report From Our Man In The Field
Posted on | September 4, 2005 at 5:55 pm | Comments Off
Got this yesterday from bandmate John, on the front lines (or, more like the middle lines) of the Hurricane Katrina disaster (Vicksburg, Mississippi), and am posting it here with his permission. I found it interesting, so I hope others do too. Take it away John…
HOW WE SURVIVED HURRICANE KATRINA FROM REALLY QUITE A LONG DISTANCE AWAY
By the time it got here, it was about a category 1 hurricane, but still it’s my first so I guess it counts. I don’t think even the old-timers here can ever remember a hurricane reaching all the way up this far north, they’re usually mere tropical storms by the time they get here. I can’t say it’s really the worst storm I’ve been through. It didn’t really rain all that much, and I’ve endured much more severe winds when I lived in Boulder. But the trees down here aren’t used to 70MPH gusts, and a lot of them fell over.
The day before Katrina made landfall, I thought that we might lose power (which has happened before, but never for so long), so I ran to Wal-Mart with a shopping list that included D-batteries (for flashlights and a portable fan that Lucille has) and lamp oil. We have 3 oil burning lamps (and they’re actually called hurricane lamps) that we bought mostly for decoration but they do function, and we’re used them before in the past. Well Wal-Mart was slap out of both of those things, but I did eventually find them at a Fred’s dollar store. Off-brand D cells, and while Fred’s was out of lamps, they did have some bottles of oil. Good thing I found them, as it later turned out.
Monday was the storm. That morning, Lucille drove over to Tallulah (20 miles away) and picked up her mother to spend the night. She lives alone and her house is surrounded by a lot of very tall trees, so we thought she’d be safer here. About 1:00PM we lost power. About an hour later the neighbors across the street’s power went. The peak of the storm here was around 4:00PM, and the wind was coming straight from the north (being on the west side of the hurricane). Two of our north facing windows leaked a little water, and we had to mop it up with some towels, but otherwise the house came through unscathed. (I’ve since inspected the windows and can only find some very tiny cracks in the caulking, but I guess that was enough. It’s kind of like the whole north face of the house was being pressure washed.) Around the peak we noticed that we had no water pressure. Apparently the power was out at the treatment plant and the water tower had finally run dry. Around 7:00 PM the water came back. They must have gotten their emergency generators working. When it got dark we lit up the lamps and candles and played a game of Mousetrap. The house was still pretty cool (it not being very hot during the actual storm) and it was still raining when we went to bed.
Tuesday morning we got a look at the aftermath. We’d heard a couple of klunks during the storm but weren’t sure what made them. In our yard our lawn furniture got blown around, but didn’t damage anything, and each of our two ancient brittle redbud tree’s lost a large limb (of course, not the one’s I’d been meaning to trim off). Otherwise just a lot of leaves and twigs on the ground. Our neighbors across the street to the east have several enormous oak trees, and it’s a good thing the wind was from the north, because they lost some huge limbs (almost two feet in diameter), one of which pretty much demolished their driveway gate. They spent all Tuesday chain-sawing it up so they could clear a path for their car. I’ll tell you, if we ever get some strong winds from the east, one of those trees is going to topple over, bridge the road, and smash into our house. I didn’t do anything about the downed limbs in our yard because 1) my chainsaw is electric, and 2) I don’t like doing yard work in the heat unless there’s a nice air-conditioned house to cool off in at regular intervals. They weren’t hurting anything anyway.
That afternoon I drove Lucille’s mom back home. She wanted to see what had happened to her house. Apparently almost all the roads in Vicksburg were blocked by limbs to some degree, but by that time the road from our house to the highway (a major thoroughfare) had been cleared. On our way there we saw what I think may have been one of the “klunks” during the storm. Four houses to the south of us a huge oak tree had uprooted and fallen directly south into their house. It’s a large Mediterranean style house/antique shop with the antiques in front and the living quarters in the back. Fortunately the tree struck the front part of the house so no one was hurt, but it’s just incredible to see a house with a tree stuck through it. It didn’t flatten the house, it just kind of plowed a notch through it and came resting at a 45 degree angle (somehow the apex of the roof stopped it, I don’t know how as the tree has got to be about 10 feet in diameter). It’s a surreal sight, and apparently the local newspaper thought so too as it was the front page picture on Wednesday’s edition. Anyway when we got to Tallulah we found her house in perfect shape, with just a few small downed limbs in her yard (she’s 83, and even she could easily carry them). And *she* had power. So she was better off than us. It’s probably a good thing she stayed overnight with us though, because according to her wall clock the power had been out there for about 6 hours, and it would have been pretty scary alone in the dark with the storm raging around her. Tuesday night was just eerie. It was a cloudless night and the whole city was dark, the only lights being the headlights of cars moving around the city. I just sat on the screened-in porch and watched. It was like being out in the country with lots of traffic.
Wednesday we just sat around being hot. The house was built before electricity, so it has lots of large windows for light during the day, and it’s got 12 foot ceilings to keep it cool, but it still just kept getting hotter. The house has a lot of thermal inertia, so you keep the windows closed during the day, when it’s hotter outside than inside, and once the sun sets and it cools off you fling open the windows to try to cool off the inside during the night. But it’s still too hot. I guess people just endured it before the 20th century. That afternoon the power came back to our neighbors across the street (they’re on a different grid than us), so we were thinking “any time now”. Fool us. But when they got power I figured that probably some gas stations had power too, so I went out to top off my tank and get ice. I got the gas, and didn’t even have to wait in line too long to get it, but by that time ice was not to be had in the city of Vicksburg. It’s a good thing I did too, as now gasoline is not to be had in the city of Vicksburg. We considered inviting ourselves over to Lucille’s sister Betty’s place, as they had power (in a perverse reversal, since they live out in the country and they’re usually the ones that don’t have power) but by then all sorts of other relatives had descended upon her, and she was reduced to housing some of them in her RV. So we stayed put, and slept in the downstairs bedroom, which was cooler.
Thursday more of the same. The phones had never stopped working, but oddly while people could call us, we couldn’t get a line out of the city until Thursday. I had put the “big” battery in my laptop the day before the storm and charged it up (thinking “you never know”) and although our DSL wasn’t working without power, I found my Bellsouth internet book and looked up the backup dialup numbers. They only listed the major cities, but I decided that Shreveport (175 miles to the west) was probably the least damaged in Bellsouth’s area, and since we have flat rate long distance, it didn’t matter where I called. So we both got on and got our E-mail.
So Friday morning the power came on. Vicksburg has 7 major power grids and I think ours was the last. About 2/3rds of the county now has power. It’s going to take longer for the rest of them, because they’re now down to the individual houses that had their lines downed by trees, and they’ll have to restore them one by one. We still have to boil our water (I guess when you lose water pressure the backflow contaminates it), and a combination of disrupted supplies, locals buying for gas generators, and fleeing refugees gassing up on their way west have conspired to drain Vicksburg of gasoline, but compared to what the people in New Orleans and the gulf coast are going through it’s nothing. The contents of our refrigerator was a total loss, but that was only maybe $100, and we do so little driving that our gas will last at least a week, which by that time supplies will be pretty much back to normal. We spent the day doing laundry (lots of sweaty clothes), washing dishes, and cleaning and restocking the fridge. Since we had to empty the fridge, it seemed like a good time to clean it too, and while we could have washed dishes without the dish washer, we kept thinking the power was going to come on “any moment now”. Tomorrow we’ll clean up the yard and we’ll be pretty much back to normal.
It was an experience, but this was as close as I ever want to get to a hurricane. We were inconvenienced for a few days, but those poor people down south, I don’t know if they’ll ever get their lives back to the way they were. It’s going to be a long time before we’ll have the chance to visit New Orleans again.