Remember August 29, 2005

[dreamflower]

This time two years ago, I was hunkered down in my home, with marigoldg‘s mother and my two dogs for company. My husband was a few miles away at work, locked into a hospital one block from the beach. We were waiting for Katrina to come roaring ashore in all her fury.

I look back now in hindsight, and see how foolish I was to stay--though even now, I am not certain that I had any alternative.

For the next several hours, we huddled in the dark, listening to the wind howling like a pack of Wargs, as the rain poured down ceaselessly in horizontal waves. When we finally emerged, many hours later, it was into a world forever changed.

We were lucky. We survived the storm with a roof still over our heads; many others were not so lucky--my husband’s sister lost everything she possessed except for her cat and the clothes on her back. Others lost family members, or their own lives...

We spent the next year recovering, along with everyone else on the coast, from the devastation. But the fear of another hurricane, along with other problems, was one of the deciding factors when my husband was offered an opportunity to move us far from the coast.

I still miss my home of 30 years, but I could not ask him to spend another storm in peril of his life. And as long as the hospitals on the Coast refuse to evacuate, that’s what it would come to, because he’s too conscientious a nurse to abandon his patients.

There are those who are *still* trying to recover from Katrina. My sister-in-law was in her FEMA trailer for 18 months before she was able to find an apartment. But thousands of people still on the coast remain in those flimsy make-shift campers, for there just were not enough places to go around. The three coastal counties still are mostly cut off from one another, as the missing bridges are gradually being reconstructed. And the recovery effort has been hampered by insurance companies, who were from the first, reluctant to pay out what they owed, and who now have placed exorbitant premiums on insurance for any of those who are trying to rebuild their lives there on the Coast.

You will hear a lot today, all about New Orleans, and how dreadful it is there, and how little has been accomplished in rebuilding the city.

But spare some thought for the state that was actually *hit* by Hurricane Katrina: Mississippi. The people of Hancock, Harrison and Jackson Counties, and the area immediately north of that, received the full brunt of the storm.

As I did last year, here are some links:

This is the diary I kept, during the storm and its aftermath--

My Katrina Diary
http://dreamflower02.livejournal.com/77507.html#cutid1

And here is a link to some pictures I took after the storm--

Katrina Pictures
http://dreamflower02.livejournal.com/104916.html

And finally, a fic I wrote, as a thank-you to all the support and friendship I received from my flist.

Hobbit Aid
http://dreamflower02.livejournal.com/84361.html

Remember.

(My thanks to danachan for the icon she made for me to commemorate the day.)