Well, I"m back online, alive and well. Thanks to everyone who posted info during the week or two after the hurricane.
After spending several weeks in a LaQuinta Inn in Valdosta Georgia, me and my Dad headed back to his house in Picayune Mississippi to find that although a bunch of trees were down and the driveway was inaccessable, the house was ok. We got the power turned back on and Mom, the Wife and Kids and Mother-in-Law all came back.
A few days later, I made it back to New Orleans to find my house mostly intact…a few pine trees fell and damaged the roof and made a huge mess, but everything else was ok.
I own a sign company and an office supply store. The building was untouched. Lots of business with signs, but nobody’s buying office supplies. Too many big businesses are not operable here yet, or have completely pulled out of the area.
New Orleans is still like a ghost town. Things are starting to come back but not nearly like it was before. People who are there are cleaning up. Many are preparing to leave and not come back. Many people have lost everything.
I drove down into the “warzone” last Sunday to visit a friend’s parents. Their house had 6 feet of water inside for at least 2 weeks. There’s a very clear line on the walls where the black mold has grown. Many priceless antiques and musical instruments were submerged the entire time. Things just fall apart when you touch them. It was a total loss.
I count myself fortunate that no friends or family members died as a direct result of the disaster.
The looting and violence was probably much worse than what CNN reported. I’ve talked to people who were in the middle of it.
I know people who had restaurants downtown and everything was destroyed by the looters. It seems that just about every WalMart was heavily looted.
There are also home videos circulating of things that happened that the media is denying. I just got my internet back up today and I’m in the process of combing through my e-mails with attachments.
In this situation, all of the law abiding people and able-bodied people left town.
The people who were left here were the elderly, the sick and disabled, the extremely poor people and the criminals.
While the elderly, sick and impoverished people tried to survive, the criminals took over and stole or destroyed everything they could get their hands on.
It wouldn’t be a big deal if people were breaking into grocery stores to get food and supplies…stuff that would probably have to be scrapped after several weeks of no refrigeration or electricity.
But they were going in and stealing plasma TVs and electronics and assault weapons.
In an area not far from where I live, the WalMart was looted and the looters carried off the whole electronics section. Some of them got tired of carrying the heavy stuff and dropped it all on the side of the road. Imagine a deserted road with a dozen brand new TV sets just sitting in the gutter.
My businesses are located in Gretna, which borders New Orleans. The Gretna police sealed off the entrances to the city and didn’t let anyone in that didn’t live there. I found my store exactly as I had left it 3 weeks earlier.
This sort of thing would probably happen in any city if there were no police and nobody left to protect things. The criminals would take over…or really you end up with anarchy. Eventually it comes to an end since there’s not a whole lot to gain by stealing things that have become completely worthless…what are you going to do with a HDTV if there’s no electricity and you can’t set it down anywhere without it getting wet?
Jason, glad to hear that you came out pretty well.
My sis has her home in the Carrolton area, she also did pretty well although the house will need a new roof. Her daughter was just fixin to start first grade, and was placed in class in their “new” temporary home in North Miss. My sister is due back at work in NO on November 19th and will likely have to leave her dauthter and hubby in Miss. to go live there by herself.
My daddy’s g/f, she didn’t fare so well :(. She had four feet of water, and as you say, for a couple weeks so that the house is toast. At least Daddy had kept another home in North Miss so they had a place to go.
I dunno, how other people look at it, but the entire state of Mississippi has felt the effects. If we didn’t have family on the coast, we had friends there. Unless you have actually walked on the ground there, you have no idea how horrible it is. My hubby was blessed to be able to go down to the Coast and help for a week … our city is taking crews down there on rotation to help clean up the debris.
It will be years before things will be “back to normal”. I was reading in the paper yesterday about how two or three Catholic schools banded together and have started up teaching. Their classrooms? A dozen Quonset huts. The canvas kind.
I could go on and gripe but I won’t. As Scarlett would say: “fiddle-le-dee!! Tomorrow’s a brand new day !!”
I know where you’re talking about because I’m Mama Tiger’s daughter and lived there for a couple of years, by the way. I’m not some creepy stalker or something.
I’m glad to hear you and your loved ones made it through the ordeal safely. I don’t think those of us who haven’t set foot in the area can really fathom the scale of this disaster.
Things are getting better, but New Orleans is a place that was very unique and if things are not the same a lot will be lost.
The restaurant had built-in walk-in coolers and everything in there went bad with the power out for 3 weeks. It stinks to high heavens down there…the little Vietnamese grocery next door is even worse. Karl (the owner of Pho Tau Bay) has been doing some cleanup but he lost his newer location on Tulane Avenue to floodwaters and looters and I don’t know if he’s going to reopen. I saw him yesterday driving through the parking lot but didn’t have a chance to talk to him.
A lot of the Vietnamese community went to Texas and opened new businesses there pretty quickly. Most of them are not coming back. We get a lot of Vietnamese business due to our location and we’ve talked to a lot of them and they’ve confirmed this.
The building on our side may be completely demolished, all the way down to the grocery due to the extensive roof damage. No leaks over our unit, but most of the upper portion of the roof is gone…there was a second roof added in the 80s.
Thanks to Everybody Else with your words of support. I’ll continue to try to build the businesses back up. I’m actually RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of moving my family to Picayune Mississippi. The truck is loaded in the driveway and I’ll be leaving shortly. It’s a 60 mile commute, but I"m keeping the house here too so I’ll be able to come in a couple days at a time. We have family in Picayune and they have a much better school system.
We’ve been wanting to get into a bigger house in the country and I took this as an opportunity, so I can’t really complain. The repairs on the house here will start next week and hopefully things will be back to normal soon. My parents will be living here part time.
In case the news hasn’t gotten out, one side of the Twin Spans bridge over Lake Pontchartrain reopened several weeks ago and they’ve finally got traffic flowing pretty smoothly. The other bridge is mostly not there. We now have a choice of US 11 and the I-10 Twin Span.
Things are still pretty quiet over in the ‘war zone’. The population is still nowhere near what it should be.
The Superdome’s roof is almost repaired.
In the suburbs, most businesses are still short of employees. Fast-food restaurants are drive-thru only because they don’t have enough people to handle walk-up business. Banks are still closing early, even on Friday. Almost nothing is 24-hour anymore.
