It was a disastrous event at so many levels. 

The color map featured at the top of this page, is what someone saw at NASA, when they took in the geographical and meteorological information the day that Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico on her path to destruction of lives, land, dwellings, and after-effects that were everlasting for a wide area, and for some, it changed the direction of their lives – forever.

The NOAA weather service maps depict the “bigness” of the storm.  The image of the approaching mass of clouds shows the stark contrast of the before, and impending after… 

In the generations alive on that date, some had never experienced a hurricane – some had experienced some of the worst on record, yet the “knowledge transfer” had no path to enable preparation for the magnitude of this event — there simply was no infrastructure in place to enable people to be able to do their best preparation work before, or cope with what happened after the storm. 

Instead, people were pushed to their most stressed-out worst – crowd madness – survivalist mentality – The utter apocalyptic nature of such disasters drives out the extremes of human emotion and behaviors. 

The one stand-out fact was that much of the population in the affected areas did not own the property where they had lived, many for generations, some actually descendants of Freedmen, those who were freed from slavery post-Civil War during the period of the gradual adherence to the new laws declaring freedom and prohibiting slavery under the Emancipation and Slavery Abolition legislation that followed the end of the war during the mid to late 1800’s. 

Many were homeless or near-homeless, living in hotels, boarding houses, or on the street – as New Orleans has a warm climate, and winter months do not bear hardships for homeless people’s daily existence on top of the other hardships, as they do in the colder urban areas of the United States.  Homeless and people who live just off the streets are a historical part of the fabric of the area.  In much the same way, the housing has historically, looked the same for many years lending to the cultural experiences of New Orleans contributed by the African-American, Creole, Cajun, and French demographics that were all a part of founding the city through its evolution.  This was all but destructed and set to be reinvented post-Katrina, and it has in the last ten years.

Other images below, show what was happening after the storm.  Poignant reminders… Tragedy was imposed on many who were least likely to recover back to their pre-hurricane “normal” state. 

Some citizens never returned, permanently relocated to their evacuation cities, unable to afford moving back to New Orleans.  They were uprooted with little help afterward, falling into the “property-less, no benefits categories” that many fell under.  They had very short term relationships with FEMA.

FEMA itself was changed by Katrina, as were affected state government agencies who had to provide benefits of some type to people affected by Katrina, and then Rita, who followed, just one month later. 

During Katrina, where we were, in Texas Children’s Hospital, where Rob was being treated for the opportunistic infection that eventually took his life.

There were immediate effects.  TCH was designated a triage and treatment facility – our nurses and doctors were included in the duty rosters for providing care to evacuees who sustained injuries or became ill due to Katrina and her after-effects.  Some of them (most of them) were flown via military transport into Houston, to be relocated to the Astrodome, which was no longer being used for sporting events – but still useable.  The Astrodome itself became a micro-environment where diseases were introduced by evacuees who were ill, and spread to healthy people, including the nurses and doctors who were treating them.  It was a “disaster of disasters” with the feel that the world was ending, as it did for some – cataclysmic does not describe what some people experienced…

Nurses and doctors came from surrounding states to help with treating the individuals who were evacuated to Houston.

Horrific headlines were out there…

We heard many stories from people around us.  We were warned not to go outside of Rob’s room at the hospital for fear of contamination and exposure to undetermined viral diseases, which scarred the hell out of us, as Rob, being a post-transplant patient, was in a very immune-compromised state.  It was not a far fetched fear that he could be taken down by a virus floating around that hospital.  Everyone knows that MRSA is a big problem inside hospitals – infections happen all the time.  It was just plain weird and very scary, especially in light of our personal ongoing intense situation, inside the walls of the hospital.

The atmosphere was thick with what I called “high alert” — anything could happen.  Remember, we were just over four years after 911.  We had been caught with our pants down in that one, with the people in charge not taking things seriously.

The over-correction, of course, had not set in, and we were under a political administration that still was exhibiting the “training-wheels” appearance of “president in training to be a big boy”.  His administration had the look of people who were so distracted that they could not tend to basics – like parents partying in the back yard when the children are running out in front of cars chasing balls in the front of the house.

Again, the president, already in the penalty box with the public, under-reacted and pushed himself further into the low acceptance ratings by the country of which he was supposedly in charge.  Hard lessons for the country to realize that the Corps of Engineers and State of Louisiana had not done their jobs – had cost cut in important infrastructure projects that were designed to protect the NOLA land area and its inhabitants – but woefully failed on so many levels.

What you learn from this is that no matter what, things normalize eventually.  You cannot really know what that means in each situation, but one thing for sure, normal does not mean “back the way it was”.

As humans, I believe that emotionally, when we are in our quiet places in our minds, we reflect on times when things were “normal” which really means relative stability compared to other times, either preceding or post those events.

The old Walgreens on Canal Street still stands with its signage – as I experienced it in 2004, just a year shy ahead of Katrina’s immense destruction, and ahead of one of the most life changing events of my immediate family – the same year Katrina hit us, just a month later, we lost our Rob to that opportunistic infection that changed the way we thought about life, how we acted, and imposed a new normal to us, afterward, which we continue to experience today on these anniversaries of what happened in 2005, in the Summer.