I don’t know if anyone sent in a Katrina reflection to the Clarion Herald; they didn’t give us a whole lot of notice. But I guess I can offer a bit of my own. As some of you know, I was working at the Vatican when Katrina hit New Orleans. But it turned out that I flew into town on the Saturday before the storm on the last Delta flight before the airport was closed for the hurricane. My Dad was having his last week of radiation treatment for a small cancer in his throat, and I took some vacation time to be with him and my Mom.
It was an eerie feeling walking off of a plane into a closed airport. And my Dad told me that he thought we might have to evacuate. The next morning, since I was jet-lagged, I woke up at 4:00a. One look at the weather radar made me know that we had to evacuate. My parents had already prepared the house, so all we had to do was pack the car and drive to Brewton, Alabama, where my family has some property. Because we had room, we invited my friends, Jude Trahant, and Pat & Susie Veters and their sons, to join us. Little did we know how our lives were about to change. Although we all watched the storm on live TV throughout the day on Monday, we thought we had gotten through everything fairly unscathed. That was until Pat & Susie got a call Monday evening from a friend who was riding out the storm in their Lakeview house. I can still remember Susie’s face as she turned to Pat and said: “The water is over our kitchen counters.” That phone call would be the first news about how our lives were about to be affected.
