Monday, August 29, 2005
The power is back on!
Of course the residents of the 40,000+ destroyed homes in Mobile and the refugees who saw part of the Superdome's roof ripped off in New Orleans aren't going to be singing the same tune. We were fortunate that it tracked so far to the west before turning north. They were fortunate in the fact that New Orleans did not suffer a direct hit or a hit to the west which would have put the worst part of the storm on their heads. I think that the gulf coast made out as well as it could have.
So here is the story of hurricane Katrina as experienced here in northeastern Pensacola.
The Marine Corps issued an evacuation order late on Sunday morning, anyone who lives at 30’ elevation and below was ordered to leave and anyone else assigned to the base who wanted to leave could and didn’t have to be back until Wednesday morning. My friends and I chose not to because the highways were already jammed with people evacuating from
The rain started at about 9pm and the wind followed shortly thereafter. Our power flickered a couple times then but was on without interruption for the rest of the night. It finally died at 3:45 in the morning, I know this because my cell phone was chirping as it went from battery power to charging as the power went off and came back on. I woke up a few times during the night as my roommate’s dog whimpered and stirred and a few more times as the wind and rain beat against the door to the patio from my room.
I woke up this morning at 7:15 to call my squad leader to let him know I had survived the night and went back to bed. I woke up again at 8:50 to the platoon commander calling me because the squad leader had not called him. Apparently my whole squad had left voice mail messages on his phone and he had not gotten any of them. Geez, what a pain in the ass. I have to wonder, what would they have done if the cell phone service had died? Very few of us have land lines and those that do likely have cordless phones which require power to operate. I’m not going to bring it up though, they might make us bring a sleeping bag and rack out in one of the hangars for the next hurricane.
Katrina made landfall today at 0600 as a category 4 storm near the Louisiana/Mississippi border. The weather here got progressively worse as the day went on, but in spurts as bands of rain and wind came through. The worst weather here came between 1030 and 1530. I was going to go out and shoot some video of the trees whipping around in the wind and rain but I kept wanting to wait until it got bad. Well it never really got bad so I never got any video or pics. I spent the majority of the day reading a Robert Ludlum novel and napping.
The great thing about living in an apartment complex though is that we are on city water and we had hot water the whole time. I took a hot shower this morning; I definitely was not expecting that to happen.
So now I’m just hanging out on the couch watching images of the devastation taking place in
