Memoir Final

Christopher Collins
9/24/09
ENC1101- Moody
Memoir

The warning signs were all over. Even those not in the direct cone of impact were told on the news to board up & evacuate. While many adhered to the preparations, many residents in New Orleans didn't have sufficient means to leaving due to an attitude of ignorance to nature, not owning a car or having a place to go, or immobility of traffic and thus had to weather the storm out. Claimed to be the deadliest natural disaster in American history, in 2005 category 3 hurricane Katrina was on a one way path to the Mardi Gras capital of the world; New Orleans, Louisiana. For the first time in its history, the city's famous downtown Bourbon Street stood as lifeless as a ghost town. No music, no lights, no smell of beer and Cajun grilled food, no life, nothing except a wall of darkness approaching the southern tip of such a lively place by the Gulf. As if it were the clam before the storm, an all too quiet stillness approached as the last few minutes of sunshine ended its reign of the sky above. Just as the strike of an awe inspiring thunderous roar from a cloud black as night made its way through the ears of thousands, the streetlights flickered off & on and traffic lights began to swing as if a child being pushed on a swing set were about to go to high for his own good. With most people waiting out Katrina in shelters, the first blanket of rain pounded against the walls like a million knocks on the door from nature as if it were expressing its fury for all to listen. Anxious residents tuned in religiously to hand held radios & TV's for updates from the National Weather Center. Considering the below sea level of the city, the fact that its only protection of flooding from seawater was a series of levees long overdue for maintenance and even replacement for that matter, and a strategic location off the warm waters of the Gulf (which fed the power of this monstrous hurricane) all set up an equation for a disastrous day of reckoning.
Throughout the whole event I watched and listened for updates from its origins as a tropical depression off the coast of the Caribbean to it gaining massive amounts of energy from the Atlantic & temperate Gulf waters to the repercussions of its wake. I have always had a love-hate relationship with hurricane season. For some reason, I enjoyed epic grocery store trips, fortifying our home, visiting the beach and skim boarding the massive storm surge, and biking down ruined streets with mile long gas lines. I can remember all the bad associations with hurricanes as well such as flooding, death, destruction of property, and political agitation; but didn’t worry too much because I lived in a townhouse & had a downhill roof on the west side of our property and most hurricanes came from the east side of Florida. Plus we lived next to a water plant and didn’t lose power often. I remember seeing Katrina’s expected path and seeing that it would go to the Gulf of Mexico then dart back to the Atlantic. Knowing it may hit Florida from the west, my family and I began to prepare for the worst. Luckily, it winded up taking another route and only hitting south Florida as a category 1. The summer sea of the Gulf fueled the storm, which directly impacted New Orleans, Louisiana. A swampy lying metropolitan area like itself rendered defenseless as the hurricane destroyed over 50 of the constructed flood prevention levees and hurdled a wall of water straight for downtown New Orleans. One of the top 5 worst natural disasters in this country’s history, the violent storm brought an unprecedented 1,836 deaths, did over $100 billion dollars in damages and left a whole city on its knees stranded from the rest of the world lying in ruin. The waters from the Gulf engulfed 80% of the city in excess of 14ft high and did more damage than the storm itself! While the jaw-dropping statistics stand for themselves, the hurricanes significance in my eyes lies in the way it exemplified our true vulnerability to Mother Nature and offered a glimpse into a future plagued with intensive climate fluctuation due to global or anthropogenic warming. The record breaking 15 strong 2005 hurricane season stood as testament that as humans release what is now up to 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into our planet’s atmosphere per year, we are reaching an ever-increasing imbalance of our environment that will lead to severe storms and climate change making Katrina seem like a thunderstorm. As overpopulation increases due to a high birth and low death rate and more people move to areas closer to the shore, the situation grows dyer. We as human beings must learn from this wake-up call and combine our knowledge and efforts together to ensure a safer home for generations and centuries to come.
My eyes and ears glued to the television and radio, I felt that I had dodged a bullet and was now watching it strike Louisiana. After the storm, I followed the updates on situations with FEMA and Mayor Ray Nagin in a shocking manner. I remembered how scared I had felt in 92 during Hurricane Andrew in Homestead, Fl. Only 3 years old, such violent nature left a lasting impression on me; I became infatuated with the power of nature. I thought about how many people had to leave their animals behind like my family had to leave our dog Duncan at home in Andrew. I was so worried for him; he was on my mind more than my own safety. The day after Andrew we came home to a pile of rubbish lying in a neighborhood of rubbish piles and to my surprise, Duncan arose from the midst of a trashed house out of the bathtub. He had hidden in the bathtub to avoid the storms fury and I had thought I had the smartest dog in the world! I prayed that animals in New Orleans were as fortunate.
The aftermath of the storm intrigued me probably more than the storm itself. Between the scope of damage of hurricane Katrina, looting, failure of governmental policy, seeing ordinary Joe’s banning together for rescue missions, hundreds stranded on rooftops, the clear lack of initiative in the Bush administration, and seeing thousands stranded on abandoned highways all confirmed my ideologies of human nature and encouraged me to further continue a major in Environmental Anthropology.As my dad and I were pulling boards off our house once Katrina had passed, I recall telling him “These people have been through hell for almost 3 days now and FEMA has still yet to arrive? I know Andrew was stronger but the damage in Louisiana is biblical & frightening to know America’s in no hurry to aid a city with bodies floating in the streets and thousands starving on abandoned/flooded highways.”
In Conclusion, hurricane Katrina meant way more to me than just a disaster. I have never left the state of Florida; and being that it gets more hurricane weather than any other of the 50 states storms have always fascinated me. In fact, just as I started high school, my first day in 9th grade was accompanied with a power outage and a whole day of blackened skies. That was the 2004 Hurricane Season that produced nine named hurricanes, 5 of which made landfall (Charley, Ivan, Frances, etc.) off the coast of Florida. This increasing intensity and frequency of hurricanes has driven my pursuit to understand people; and why & how we interact with our surrounding environment and to one another. It opened my eyes to the blunt realistic problems facing society today and led me to embrace a path of education to someday help me make a difference.