‘It wasn’t like we had to clean it up. … There was no building, there was no slab. It was gone,’ the United Cajun Navy founder said.
It was supposed to be a typical Florida storm, New Orleans resident Sherry Grace said.
Twenty years ago, a tropical storm made landfall in Southeast Florida. But it crossed the Everglades and continued to grow over warm Gulf waters.
Less than a week later, Katrina was a catastrophic Category 5 hurricane. It is still considered to be one of the worst natural disasters ever recorded on the Gulf Coast.
Nearly 1,400 lives and countless homes and businesses were lost, and some areas and industries have yet to fully recover.
Some of those who lived through the disaster shared their stories with The Epoch Times.
The National Hurricane Center (NHC) issued its first hurricane watch for the Louisiana Coast on the morning of Aug. 27, 2005.
Grace, her husband, and her two children chose to board up their house in Mid-City, New Orleans, gather their essential documents and belongings, shut off the power and water, and evacuate.
“We told the kids to look at the house because we weren’t sure if we’d be there or if they would see the same thing when they came back,” she said.
The next day, Katrina was a full-blown hurricane with sustained winds reaching 165 mph. The NHC warned of storm surges reaching 28 feet, high enough to breach some of the levees.
On the beaches of Gulfport, Mississippi, Richard Valdez moved his business equipment as rain and wind began to whip in.
He told The Epoch Times that a friend warned him that offshore buoy markers were registering seas greater than 20 feet and that Katrina was set to be worse than the 1969 Hurricane Camille.
He evacuated later that day at the request of his wife.
Further west, outside Waverly, Mississippi, Todd Terrell, founder of United Cajun Navy, a nonprofit that helps with disaster relief, was also trying to find the right opportunity to evacuate his fishing camp.
“You got to remember a lot of the fishermen and stuff waited till the last minute,” he told The Epoch Times.
“You got traps in the water, there’s your life. You got a shrimp boat on the water, that’s your life. And a lot of these, these fishermen, they waited till the last minute, because you never know if the storm moves.”
Others stayed put.
The National Institutes of Health recently estimated that 150,000 to 200,000 people in New Orleans chose not to evacuate.
“We heard some of the old timers saying, ‘We glad we got out,’” Terrell said. “The last people that got out, they’re saying they’ve never seen the water that high.”
The eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the morning of Aug. 29 in southeastern Louisiana. But hurricane conditions were wreaking havoc across the shoreline hours earlier, delivering catastrophic storm surge and spinning out dozens of tornadoes.
That pounding continued throughout the morning, according to the National Hurricane Center, and Katrina was a tropical storm that afternoon.
By T.J. Muscaro
