Dragoness Eclectic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dragoness_e) wrote2005-09-03 11:14 am
dragoness_e) wrote2005-09-03 11:14 am
Entry tags:
Riding Out the Storm
Where do I start? The day of the storm? The day before?
We decided it was time to do something when Katrina was a Category 3 storm heading for the Lousiana coast. Originally, they'd projected its path as crossing the Panhandle of Florida,but those projections kept being revised westward and more westward, until the projected path stopped--over Jefferson Parish. Right over my house. The nightmare scenario, where hurricane-force winds push Lake Ponchatrain over the levee and into the city.
Tropical Storm Cindy, a few months before, was a wake-up call. It had been a strong storm, some say really a weak category 1 hurricane, but it had ripped right through Metairie, rather than being off to the west or off toward Mississippi, like such storms usually are. It did a heck of a lot of damage for such a "weak" storm--tree branches, whole
trees down, roofs damaged. The difference? We'd been directly under it. And now a category 3 storm was on the same track. Not good.
We evacuated to my mother's house on the Northshore. She lives on high ground, doesn't flood, and far enough inland not to worry about storm surge. We planned to ride out the storm there, and go back after the storm to pick up tree branches and file insurance claims for whatever roof damage we might have sustained. Likely enough, the storm would swerve and hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, like they always did. We
only figured on a day or two away from home, and packed accordingly.
On my mother's TV, we watched the reports as the storm intensified to Category 4--with further potential for strengthening. The projected track stayed stubbornly over Metairie/New Orleans. Should we evacuate to further north, or ride it out at mom's? We debated, but mother didn't want to leave, and I felt the house could take it, and I didn't
want to get caught in the evacuation traffic.
Late that night, they promoted Katrina to Category 5. Double plus ungood.
The first rainbands were already over us Sunday afternoon--mild, just summer thunderstorms at first, remote outliers of the storm. As the storm progressed, the wind and rain intensified, with decreasing lulls between bands of the storm. If you've seen weather satellite images of a hurricane, they look rather like galaxies, with spiral arms of cloud. Those arms are the rainbands--between the arms, it's calm. When you get close to the middle, there aren't any gaps between the ranks of storm anymore.
The wind and the rain picked up all night. Strangely, there was no thunder or lightning all night, just wind and rain. Some of us slept through the whole thing, but I slept fitfully at best. There was a steady cascade of pinecones and small branches bouncing off the roof. Every now and then came the much louder 'thud!' of a big branch hitting the roof. Power went off about the middle of the night. Worse yet, by morning, there was no water pressure. We still hadn't gotten to the worst of the storm.
Monday didn't really dawn. The grey lightened a bit to a dim twilight, and stayed that way. No sun, no sky, just an oppressive grey filled with wind and spray. Looking out the windows, which were covered with rain, I could see that the street was full of water. Couldn't see very far up the street--the spray filled the air like fog. The half-dead tree on the median had snapped and fallen across one side of the boulevard, top laying in the yard of the house two doors down. We debated whether it had hit their house or not, but couldn't see past the fallen branches, and we weren't about to go look. That was only
the first big tree to fall.
Mom and my daughter slept in. There wasn't really any reason to wake them up, as we weren't going anywhere in the height of a raging hurricane, and if they'd slept as badly as my husband and I, they needed the sleep. We watched the trees out various windows.
If you've never been in a hurricane, the air is full of spray. There's too much wind to have normal rain--the raindrops are torn into fine mist and driven before the wind. Other, more substantial things are also driven before the wind--pine cones, tree branches, tree limbs,
other debris. There's a famous picture from older hurricane books of a long board driven clean through the trunk of a palm tree by hurricane winds. If you value your life, you stay inside under cover and hope nothing large comes through a window, the roof, or the walls. You hope your roof stays on, because if it goes, the rest of the building goes. Even emergency rescue won't come out in a raging like this.
One of the trees in the back yard leaned badly; I thought it was already uprooted and hung up in an adjacent tree. My husband peered out another window at it, looking up at the tree tops. Yep, it was hung up in the top of another tree that the wind had driven it into. When would it fall?
There was a strange, long, lull. Was this the eye of the storm, or had it passed? We had no way of knowing--what track had the storm actually taken? No TV, no Internet, no phone, no cell phones, no communication. Local radio stations were mostly offline, and the one that we found wasn't talking about the storm's track, they were talking about whatever phoned-in reports they could get--they were as cut off as the rest of us.
Still, good old WWL 870AM, mirrored to all the Entercomm-owned FM stations did an amazing job. I think Garland Robinette was up all night and most of the morning. Their power came and went, their phones came and went--sometimes they couldn't dial out to get information from emergency officials, sometimes people couldn't dial in (those that had phones, I don't know how)--but they kept at it. It could be heartrending, like when someone called in that they were trapped in their attic with rising floodwaters to their chest during the height of the storm, and Garland had to tell them, "I'm sorry, there's no way anyone can get to you right now".
But where was the storm? I had no idea. We watched the mailbox; it was a weathervane, twisting in the wind showing us every change in the wind direction. My husband ventured out during the lull--it was eerily calm. More trees were down on the one side of the street. A carpet of tree branches and leaves all over the yard. But then the rain and the
wind started up again. Had that been a lull between rainbands, or the eye of the hurricane?
If it was a lull, the storm was moving away from us and would soon be gone, if the rainbands were far enough part now to have lulls between them. If that was the eye of the storm, the wind would be just as ferocious as before very shortly--though the storm would indeed be moving away from us. I didn't think it could be the eye--the winds hadn't seemed strong enough or destructive enough for a category 5 storm--no windows blown out, and the roof wasn't trying to come off.
The mailbox changed direction. The winds reversed the direction they'd had before the "lull"--it had indeed been the eye of the storm. Had Katrina gotten much weaker somehow? We wondered. Watching the trees, we realized, too, that the tall pine trees all around the neighborhood, indeed all around town were breaking the force of the wind. They were a very effective windbreak--at a price. Many of those trees snapped and fell across roads and houses.
The wind changed direction, and pushed the hanging tree trunk off the other tree, and it finally fell, leaving a shining gouge out of the bark of the other tree. We weren't quite sure where it went, because it was far enough away from the house to vanish behind the azaleas and other plantings. (Shrubs rode out the storm quite well. Trees toppled all over, rose bushes were sadly broken and denuded, but the dense thickets of azalea and camelia survived intact).
The occasional lull appeared; the storm was definitely moving away from us, and the southwest side of the storm was weaker than the other end had been. We went to wake up mom. Just after she'd gotten out of bed, a trememdous crash shook the roof. Mom jumped. I looked out the bedroom window at the branches dangling where there had never been any branches and said, "I think a tree fell on the house".
(Not the first time I've heard a tree fall on a house, but that's another story for another day. The other incident involved a bungled tree-cutting, not a storm).
All we could see were branches at this end; it dawned on me that the tree had come from the front of the house and was laying across the entire width of the house. I went around to the front and looked out the window. Sure enough, one of the neighbor's trees had uprooted and fallen on our roof. Not good.
Eventually the wind died down to a stiff breeze (gale) and only a little spray, and we ventured out to look around. Everywhere we looked, pine trees were uprooted or snapped off like twigs, laying on yards, crushing roofs, blocking streets. The streets were flooded, but starting to drain already. (I mentioned this was high ground). The
neighbor's tree had smashed part of the eave and possibly damaged one of the ridgelines, but had not holed the roof. We were in much better shape than some of our neighbors--the house up the street at the corner had two trees crushing the roof. Not that our neighbors knew--they'd all had sense enough to leave the Northshore for parts further north before Katrina came blasting in.
My husband managed to get the generator running, so we were able to get the refrigerator cold before everything thawed out. We got TV for a bit, but couldn't get any local stations--either offline, or the antenna was too damaged. The satellite dish was knocked a bit askew, so we could sort of acquire stations, but the receiver kept losing the
satellite and trying to re-acquire it. Didn't learn much. Radio still had little info, except that the first hints of the devastation in New Orleans were being reported.
Got out the camp stove and cooked supper. Wanted to use up the hamburger, as it was already thawed, and I suspected the generator would not last, so we had hamburgers. The first propane jug ran out unexpectedly early, and the other one (we only had two) seemed too light for a full jug. Uh-oh. Got dinner cooked, but one thing was obvious: the propane had leaked away over the years of being stored in a hot garage. We wouldn't be able to count on the camp stove for another meal.
No water--Mom had the foresight to fill her bathtub before the storm, but no one had thought to fill the other one. Had to take dishes of water to fill the toilet tanks for each flush. Not enough power in the generator to run stoves or A/C -- and generator fuel would not last all that long. Electricity not expected to be restored for weeks, from the reports on the radio. Local police told us water had been turned off by the city--no doubt to prevent contamination--and would be turned back on "when the flood waters receded". But how long would that be? Southern half of town was badly flooded.
No gasoline to be had, or likely to be had for a while. Generator ran out of gas Tuesday morning, so there goes all the food in the refrigerator. The cool weather that followed the hurricane was gone by Tuesday--it got hot, and very, very humid. No air conditioning. Water in the bathtub going fast. We could scoop up water from the neighbor's pool to flush toilets with, but what about drinking water? With no fuel for the camp stove, we had no way to boil water, and would have only cold canned food to eat.
It was time to leave.
My husband scouted out the neighborhood on foot. The floodwaters had receded completely from mom's part of town, and there was a route miraculously unblocked by fallen pines to the highway. We'd had the foresight to top off all the gas tanks. First, before the rest of us even got up, my husband sent my daughter back to college--a straight, relatively short drive west away from the hurricane zone.
Then it was time for the rest of us to pack and go.
Next episode: Pine Tree Hell
We decided it was time to do something when Katrina was a Category 3 storm heading for the Lousiana coast. Originally, they'd projected its path as crossing the Panhandle of Florida,but those projections kept being revised westward and more westward, until the projected path stopped--over Jefferson Parish. Right over my house. The nightmare scenario, where hurricane-force winds push Lake Ponchatrain over the levee and into the city.
Tropical Storm Cindy, a few months before, was a wake-up call. It had been a strong storm, some say really a weak category 1 hurricane, but it had ripped right through Metairie, rather than being off to the west or off toward Mississippi, like such storms usually are. It did a heck of a lot of damage for such a "weak" storm--tree branches, whole
trees down, roofs damaged. The difference? We'd been directly under it. And now a category 3 storm was on the same track. Not good.
We evacuated to my mother's house on the Northshore. She lives on high ground, doesn't flood, and far enough inland not to worry about storm surge. We planned to ride out the storm there, and go back after the storm to pick up tree branches and file insurance claims for whatever roof damage we might have sustained. Likely enough, the storm would swerve and hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, like they always did. We
only figured on a day or two away from home, and packed accordingly.
On my mother's TV, we watched the reports as the storm intensified to Category 4--with further potential for strengthening. The projected track stayed stubbornly over Metairie/New Orleans. Should we evacuate to further north, or ride it out at mom's? We debated, but mother didn't want to leave, and I felt the house could take it, and I didn't
want to get caught in the evacuation traffic.
Late that night, they promoted Katrina to Category 5. Double plus ungood.
The first rainbands were already over us Sunday afternoon--mild, just summer thunderstorms at first, remote outliers of the storm. As the storm progressed, the wind and rain intensified, with decreasing lulls between bands of the storm. If you've seen weather satellite images of a hurricane, they look rather like galaxies, with spiral arms of cloud. Those arms are the rainbands--between the arms, it's calm. When you get close to the middle, there aren't any gaps between the ranks of storm anymore.
The wind and the rain picked up all night. Strangely, there was no thunder or lightning all night, just wind and rain. Some of us slept through the whole thing, but I slept fitfully at best. There was a steady cascade of pinecones and small branches bouncing off the roof. Every now and then came the much louder 'thud!' of a big branch hitting the roof. Power went off about the middle of the night. Worse yet, by morning, there was no water pressure. We still hadn't gotten to the worst of the storm.
Monday didn't really dawn. The grey lightened a bit to a dim twilight, and stayed that way. No sun, no sky, just an oppressive grey filled with wind and spray. Looking out the windows, which were covered with rain, I could see that the street was full of water. Couldn't see very far up the street--the spray filled the air like fog. The half-dead tree on the median had snapped and fallen across one side of the boulevard, top laying in the yard of the house two doors down. We debated whether it had hit their house or not, but couldn't see past the fallen branches, and we weren't about to go look. That was only
the first big tree to fall.
Mom and my daughter slept in. There wasn't really any reason to wake them up, as we weren't going anywhere in the height of a raging hurricane, and if they'd slept as badly as my husband and I, they needed the sleep. We watched the trees out various windows.
If you've never been in a hurricane, the air is full of spray. There's too much wind to have normal rain--the raindrops are torn into fine mist and driven before the wind. Other, more substantial things are also driven before the wind--pine cones, tree branches, tree limbs,
other debris. There's a famous picture from older hurricane books of a long board driven clean through the trunk of a palm tree by hurricane winds. If you value your life, you stay inside under cover and hope nothing large comes through a window, the roof, or the walls. You hope your roof stays on, because if it goes, the rest of the building goes. Even emergency rescue won't come out in a raging like this.
One of the trees in the back yard leaned badly; I thought it was already uprooted and hung up in an adjacent tree. My husband peered out another window at it, looking up at the tree tops. Yep, it was hung up in the top of another tree that the wind had driven it into. When would it fall?
There was a strange, long, lull. Was this the eye of the storm, or had it passed? We had no way of knowing--what track had the storm actually taken? No TV, no Internet, no phone, no cell phones, no communication. Local radio stations were mostly offline, and the one that we found wasn't talking about the storm's track, they were talking about whatever phoned-in reports they could get--they were as cut off as the rest of us.
Still, good old WWL 870AM, mirrored to all the Entercomm-owned FM stations did an amazing job. I think Garland Robinette was up all night and most of the morning. Their power came and went, their phones came and went--sometimes they couldn't dial out to get information from emergency officials, sometimes people couldn't dial in (those that had phones, I don't know how)--but they kept at it. It could be heartrending, like when someone called in that they were trapped in their attic with rising floodwaters to their chest during the height of the storm, and Garland had to tell them, "I'm sorry, there's no way anyone can get to you right now".
But where was the storm? I had no idea. We watched the mailbox; it was a weathervane, twisting in the wind showing us every change in the wind direction. My husband ventured out during the lull--it was eerily calm. More trees were down on the one side of the street. A carpet of tree branches and leaves all over the yard. But then the rain and the
wind started up again. Had that been a lull between rainbands, or the eye of the hurricane?
If it was a lull, the storm was moving away from us and would soon be gone, if the rainbands were far enough part now to have lulls between them. If that was the eye of the storm, the wind would be just as ferocious as before very shortly--though the storm would indeed be moving away from us. I didn't think it could be the eye--the winds hadn't seemed strong enough or destructive enough for a category 5 storm--no windows blown out, and the roof wasn't trying to come off.
The mailbox changed direction. The winds reversed the direction they'd had before the "lull"--it had indeed been the eye of the storm. Had Katrina gotten much weaker somehow? We wondered. Watching the trees, we realized, too, that the tall pine trees all around the neighborhood, indeed all around town were breaking the force of the wind. They were a very effective windbreak--at a price. Many of those trees snapped and fell across roads and houses.
The wind changed direction, and pushed the hanging tree trunk off the other tree, and it finally fell, leaving a shining gouge out of the bark of the other tree. We weren't quite sure where it went, because it was far enough away from the house to vanish behind the azaleas and other plantings. (Shrubs rode out the storm quite well. Trees toppled all over, rose bushes were sadly broken and denuded, but the dense thickets of azalea and camelia survived intact).
The occasional lull appeared; the storm was definitely moving away from us, and the southwest side of the storm was weaker than the other end had been. We went to wake up mom. Just after she'd gotten out of bed, a trememdous crash shook the roof. Mom jumped. I looked out the bedroom window at the branches dangling where there had never been any branches and said, "I think a tree fell on the house".
(Not the first time I've heard a tree fall on a house, but that's another story for another day. The other incident involved a bungled tree-cutting, not a storm).
All we could see were branches at this end; it dawned on me that the tree had come from the front of the house and was laying across the entire width of the house. I went around to the front and looked out the window. Sure enough, one of the neighbor's trees had uprooted and fallen on our roof. Not good.
Eventually the wind died down to a stiff breeze (gale) and only a little spray, and we ventured out to look around. Everywhere we looked, pine trees were uprooted or snapped off like twigs, laying on yards, crushing roofs, blocking streets. The streets were flooded, but starting to drain already. (I mentioned this was high ground). The
neighbor's tree had smashed part of the eave and possibly damaged one of the ridgelines, but had not holed the roof. We were in much better shape than some of our neighbors--the house up the street at the corner had two trees crushing the roof. Not that our neighbors knew--they'd all had sense enough to leave the Northshore for parts further north before Katrina came blasting in.
My husband managed to get the generator running, so we were able to get the refrigerator cold before everything thawed out. We got TV for a bit, but couldn't get any local stations--either offline, or the antenna was too damaged. The satellite dish was knocked a bit askew, so we could sort of acquire stations, but the receiver kept losing the
satellite and trying to re-acquire it. Didn't learn much. Radio still had little info, except that the first hints of the devastation in New Orleans were being reported.
Got out the camp stove and cooked supper. Wanted to use up the hamburger, as it was already thawed, and I suspected the generator would not last, so we had hamburgers. The first propane jug ran out unexpectedly early, and the other one (we only had two) seemed too light for a full jug. Uh-oh. Got dinner cooked, but one thing was obvious: the propane had leaked away over the years of being stored in a hot garage. We wouldn't be able to count on the camp stove for another meal.
No water--Mom had the foresight to fill her bathtub before the storm, but no one had thought to fill the other one. Had to take dishes of water to fill the toilet tanks for each flush. Not enough power in the generator to run stoves or A/C -- and generator fuel would not last all that long. Electricity not expected to be restored for weeks, from the reports on the radio. Local police told us water had been turned off by the city--no doubt to prevent contamination--and would be turned back on "when the flood waters receded". But how long would that be? Southern half of town was badly flooded.
No gasoline to be had, or likely to be had for a while. Generator ran out of gas Tuesday morning, so there goes all the food in the refrigerator. The cool weather that followed the hurricane was gone by Tuesday--it got hot, and very, very humid. No air conditioning. Water in the bathtub going fast. We could scoop up water from the neighbor's pool to flush toilets with, but what about drinking water? With no fuel for the camp stove, we had no way to boil water, and would have only cold canned food to eat.
It was time to leave.
My husband scouted out the neighborhood on foot. The floodwaters had receded completely from mom's part of town, and there was a route miraculously unblocked by fallen pines to the highway. We'd had the foresight to top off all the gas tanks. First, before the rest of us even got up, my husband sent my daughter back to college--a straight, relatively short drive west away from the hurricane zone.
Then it was time for the rest of us to pack and go.
Next episode: Pine Tree Hell