For about two years after Hurricane Katrina, not a day would go by without memories of the protracted nightmare interfering with my daily thoughts. I had grown up in New Orleans, and in a horrific four days spanning from August 29th to September 1st, 2005, most of what I knew about life had crumbled down. I stayed with my family, maybe imprudently, to ride out the storm in a decade-old hotel in the French Quarter. Vertical Evacuation in our own city, we thought, would be better than the ceaseless hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic to some squalid roadside motel further inland. We would all regret that decision later, as a surreal scene of food shortages, power outages, looting, unrelenting heat, and the post-apocalyptic landscape of New Orleans took ahold as our new reality.

Water began rising in the streets, and like a shot in the dark, we trekked back blindly to whatever would remain of our house in Uptown — anything would be better than the disintegrating conditions Downtown. The New Orleans Police, the Louisiana National Guard, the State itself had fallen into confusion and disarray. A radio station broadcasting from Baton Rouge warned of a scourge of criminals, gangs, and looters who were bent on mayhem. Nobody wanted to second-guess these reports, and a survivalist mentality fell over what we once had called the Big Easy.

Neighbors put up signs such as this one to ward off strangers who veered on to our block:

Our house had, by the roll of a dice, been spared from the devastation. We spent one gut wrenching night holed -up in the house before fleeing the city in a family friends’ ditched Toyota Camry.

We were the lucky ones. Others were not so lucky:

So many people I knew had their homes and neighborhoods inundated with up to 14 feet of water or otherwise skewered by falling trees, debris, and sheer wind.

Adding to it all was the failure of government officials at all levels to take the rebuilding of New Orleans seriously. (1115 has documented it well in the past six years).

With the East Coast reeling from the damage of Hurricane Irene, we can only hope that the new Disaster-Response line-up of President Obama, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and FEMA Director Craig Fugate have learned from the mistakes of their predecessors.

Of Interest: 1 Dead in Attic, Chris Rose