Re: OT: Me and Hurricane Katrina

Dear MP;
      Glad you're ok.
              Best wishes;
                       jmt

Matt wrote:
(Cough!...gag!...spew!) Is this thing on?... Well for those of you who don't know or remember, I live in Hattiesburg MS a quick 90 minute drive north of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Looking at a map you can see we are on the highway that Katrina took when she came to visit a few weeks ago. Seems like only yesterday... mainly because my hometown STILL looks like a bomb went off! You can't imagine the damage this little storm caused. The television reports don't do it justice and distorted what was happening down here. Not all of us degenerated into madness like New Orleans, but we suffered similar levels of damage. Yes, my house got damaged; no it was not totaled. Two of my neighbors got much worse.
My next door neighbor had a tree fall through her roof. It also smashed her less-than-one-year-old central air conditioner like a beer can. Her neighbor had a pine tree cut the back end of their house off. And that is how the most damage occurred in town. Trees just destroyed homes and businesses like crazy. Power poles were either broken in half like toothpicks or pulled out of the ground like Goliath picked them up and set them down. My house got a lot of shingle damage and got a ton of water in the front room. We have a bay window that protrudes from the back of the house and luckily that is where the most damage occurred on the roof. The water poured in as if we had installed a waterfall feature over our dining room table soaking the carpet underneath, but it was isolated there.
During the storm, we made the decision to cover the hole after my wife ran out and saw where the damage was. I grabbed an old army tarp that the previous owner had left and that I could never quite part with. I ran outside and got a ladder and then had to take my t-shirt off because it was so soaked it was too heavy for me to move in. I climbed up on the ladder and started trying to lift the now soaked tarp while my wife stayed on the ground pushing it up to me and handing me nails. I managed to nail three nails (I had roofing nails from last year when I built my music building) before I had to give up and go inside. The tarp had a metal grommet with an old knotted rope on it and the wind blew it so that the grommet hit me in the head and the rope whipped the back of my neck. On top of that, the wind was blowing so hard that the rain felt like I was being sand blasted. It was like standing in a car wash. When we got inside my ears hurt. I was afraid Dawn and I were going to suffer permanent hearing damage. My 5 year old daughter was hysterical convinced that mommy and daddy were going to die. We calmed her down and it took two more times out in this hell to get that tarp up. I lost my favorite hat and found it on the other side of the house the next morning. Every tree we had was damaged in some significant way and the mess was substantial. A fifteen foot pine branch broken off in the pointed shape of a spear, was driven 18 inches into the ground. So deep in fact that I couldn't pull it out. I kept thinking if that had jammed into my chest while I was out there or worse yet my wife's. Thankfully none of the trees hit the house or the music building. My construction work actually survived unscratched. My house was a mess. Our power went out mid-day on Monday and was not restored until Thursday. Jesus, it was hot! The hurricane cooled everything off for about 12 hours and then the heat came back with a vengeance. We had no water for two days and all our food was ruined.
We neighbors all gathered together at one man's house who had a generator and with an antenna we could get local news as the station had switched to generator power the night before. It was hard to fathom what had happened. The local news couldn't tell us much and ended up just spreading rumors because any info was better than nothing. They got better after a couple of days. I managed to find two generators and bought them after standing in a hellacious line only to discover I couldn't get gas. I actually waited in line for seven hours at a gas station only to get turned away empty handed. You would think that would have bothered me, but I was shaded and there was a breeze blowing and I had a book so it wasn't that bad.
The scariest part for us was when my daughter got heat exhaustion. She was lethargic all day and when we were waiting in line for gas she started throwing up. By some miracle the gas station had power and I negotiated with the owner to let me get her inside in the A/C and drink apple juice and eat beef jerky. Otherwise, I don't know what we would do. I was in line with a doctor when getting the generator the day before and he told me that anyone with heat exhaustion or a heart attack or any such thing was toast. There was absolutely nothing anyone could do. We have two hospitals in town and they were in desperate shape. It is amazing how important water and power are. We consider ourselves incredibly lucky. Because we live behind Lowe's and Wal-Mart, our power was on soon after theirs'. The east side of town still doesn't have phone service and many of those people went without power for a couple of weeks. Many people had to literally be carved out of their house by the local chainsaw gangs because their trees had blocked them in. They were trapped in their own house.
Gas was rationed and we were under curfew for two weeks. All this happened right in the middle of my busy band season compounding my difficulty. The farther north I go the more of a disconnect I notice. People just don't get it. They are sympathetic, but don't understand why we aren't back to normal like they are. I am sure that disconnect is felt by people farther south regarding us. One family of New Orleans musicians put on a show for the Red Cross in the same Wal-Mart parking lot they had been living in (in an RV) for two weeks. They were prepared to stay two more weeks, but were considering just moving to Hattiesburg as "everyone has been so nice to us". Hattiesburg has grown by fifteen thousand people overnight. A massive population explosion for our community. The schools were bursting at the seams before the hurricane, now I don't know how they are managing the inflow of new students. Even rural communities have refugees moving in.
I spoke to one client last night from a very rural area. She went nineteen days without power and almost as long with a boil water notice as none of the water was safe to drink. Cable TV and internet for most people is still out. It will be October or November before they are restored. I am lucky. I have mine.
The relief efforts are almost a bigger pain in the ass than the storm was. By the time I find out where the relief is, they close it and move it to a new location. I missed the free food stamps all together. Shame. That would have helped us a lot. I am literally scared to open my credit card bill. Everyone took either cash or credit card if they had power. That card bill is thick and my cash is getting thin! At least I still have a job.
Today our insurance adjustor finally showed up and lo and behold... he was alright. He said I need a new roof and a new carpet. Woohoo! Now if he will make the check enough to actually cover the work needed... We are pretty distrusting of the insurance companies down here now. They were trying to low ball people right and left. My mom is only getting half a roof and nothing for the big water mark on her ceiling. That is a bunch of crap! Her neighbor up the street is only getting a quarter of a roof. WTF? How do you match that with the original? All adjustors are not equal it appears. They finally cleaned some of the rubbish on our street. Limbs and branches and leaves, etc. which have been sitting for a month. It rained for the first time yesterday. So we have a fire ban throughout the county. This stuff is just sitting there waiting for some idiot to throw his cigarette *** into a pile and make us look like a California forest fire. Ah well, things are getting better at least.
Finally, here are some things I learned from this experience.
1. You need water, food, shelter, and some plan for sewage even if it's just a shovel and some lye. Extra toilet paper ready to go. Store up stuff that can keep without being cool.
2. You don't NEED ice unless you have medicine that requires it. You just need to change your work habits. Work in the morning, sleep in the noon, work in the late afternoon, go to bed at dark. Not fun, but it works. Water drinks the same with or without. Beer is a BAD idea. It just exaggerates people's anger and makes them do stupid things to each other.
3. Flashlights, batteries, and gasoline are staples of life believe it or not. Have plenty.
4. Guns and ammo are not really much help.
5. Know your neighbors and make good friends with them. It is very hard to make it alone. It is much easier to make it with each other.
6. Support National Public Radio. The idea that the private sector can take care of it all is just pure horse***! The ONLY radio we could get for over a week was NPR and they gave news and messages 24/7. We would have been in worse shape without them because every other station was flattened and had no back up provision. Also, support your local TV station. That was the only way we could see what happened around town and around the state. It is a bigger deal than I would have previously believed.
7. Have a landline phone that does not require electric power. We had one cordless that plugged into the wall and one old fashioned 1970's push button phone. The cordless was useless, the other allowed us to find family and make sure they were okay and vice versa. Lots of people had phone service, but no working phone. I know one lady who didn't know if her son was dead or alive for over a week until he drove up to her driveway. He had no way to contact her.
8. Satellite TV is better than cable. I had my satellite up and running pretty quickly. Some people in town STILL don't have cable. Comcast was not allowed to even work on their lines until after the electric company got all their grids up and running. Heck, Comcast didn't even have power for over a week and a half. No power, no service.
9. Buy good insurance and know what it says. Cheaper is not always better, better is not always cheaper. Find out who pays out the most money with the least fuss the quickest. It matters. It really really matters. Get flood insurance whether you think you need it or not. Remember all those burning warehouses in New Orleans? I wonder how many of those "accidental" fires didn't have flood insurance and would have been a total loss had they not had an "accidental" fire.
10. Have a reliable vehicle. If all else fails or things are not looking good. GET OUT!!! My best friend is in the National Guard and was on the coast before the hurricane. He said the dead bodies were lying around like driftwood. Men, women, and children killed by the storm and many washed out to sea. They should have left. Some could, some couldn't. I would rather be one who can.
The only reason we stayed was because nobody evacuates from Hattiesburg. Everyone evacuates TO Hattiesburg. We had no idea of what was coming. Even Camille veterans were stunned. We were IMO also victims of the "little boy who cried wolf" syndrome. We were told by the media that every hurricane that came are direction was the big one and all of them petered out, hit elsewhere, or weren't that big a deal. When the big one really came, we just didn't believe it. We do now. I prepared for Rita like it was my last day on earth. All we got was a little rain. I don't care. I'll do it again.
Anyway, I thought some of you might like a first person story about what is going on.

Matt Porter
(By the way, my drums are fine. Gigs are a little scarce right now, but that will come back I am sure.)


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