I was starting my freshman year at Tulane University in Fall 2005, actually moving into my dorm on August 27, 2005 when the rumors started circling around that a hurricane was supposed to be heading towards New Orleans. My mother and I had been visiting the city for a week, staying in the French Quarter, seeing the sites, even taking a day trip out to Waveland, Mississippi to go to the beach. We had heard slightly disturbing news about a smallish hurricane called Katrina that had just crossed the Florida peninsula and was heading into the Gulf of Mexico, and though the news worried my mom, I was more dismissive of any threat. We had lived in an area that got hurricanes before and had never experienced anything worse than a small tropical storm. \r\n\r\nWe got to my dorm early so I pick my side of the room and start setting things up. My mom ran around outside, locking up my bike and getting our riverboat cruise tickets and doing anything else that may have needed to be smoothed out. I was setting up my room and meeting my new roomate, a girl from North Carolina, and her parents. It was about this time the mother of the girl that lived across the hall mentioned a rumor she had heard from her husband, who was running around the school, getting things done like my mom. She had heard something about the school shutting down for a little while to accomodate the hurricane, something that had apparently happened many times before. There was talk of going to Houston for \'hurricane parties\' or camping out at Mississippi State University at Jackson. The dorms were to be shut down and everyone had to leave. I was just about done setting my side of the room up the way I wanted. My mom came back to tell us that she had heard similar rumors, and not long after the RA came by to tell us that the school would be shut down until the following Thursday to comply with the city-wide voluntary evacuation order. Talking with my roomate and her family and my mother, we decided the best (and most cost effective) course would be for me to go with my roomate to her home in North Carolina and my mother see my grandmother (who had joined us in New Orleans) to her plane and leave herself soon after. The day we were supposed to be back at school, my roomate, I and her friend (who also attended Tulane) were going to take a small, cheap regional plane flight back to New Orleans. The school informed the students that anyone who didn\'t have any way to evacuate the city would go to Jackson, Mississippi.\r\n\r\nAfter stopping to get some lunch and sweets (and stopping to ask several people what they normally did for storms and whether they would be leaving--they weren\'t), we drove through Saturday, stopped in Georgia, and then most of Sunday before arriving in North Carolina. It took us a while to get out of the city, but once we crossed the Twin Spans Bridges, we were through the worst. My mom, on the other hand, was in the car three or four hours getting my grandmother to the airport and then spent another twelve hours getting to Jackson before she was finally able to start making her way back home to Colorado. Contraflow was in effect, so she couldn\'t go through Texas. On the way to North Carolina, we heard ever more disturbing news reports on the radio, describing the growing size and strength of the superstorm. It was aiming straight at New Orleans.\r\n\r\nBy Sunday afternoon, as we went to get supper, the storm had started to abate slightly, much to our relief. By this time the school had let us know via emergency website that school would not resume until a week from the following Friday. Unwilling to impose on my hosts, my parents and I proceeded to make plans for me to fly home until I could go back to school. On Monday morning, we got up early and watched the storm coverage all morning. We followed online at www.brendanloy.com and watched the CNN and Weather Channel news reports on TV. We were hearing some pretty horrific things coming out of New Orleans and Mississippi--rape and murder in the Superdome and the Convention Center, looting, the destruction of the Twin Spans, the obliteration of Waveland and the rest of the Mississippi coastline. We had reason to be hopeful that New Orleans would come through Katrina okay because a puff of wind from the Mid West had redirected the hurricane to the Mississippi/Louisiana border. Incidentally, it was heading for Jackson, where those unable to leave the school had headed to with Tulane. My mother was safely out of reach of Katrina.\r\n\r\nThen the news of three separate levee breaks, one on Industrial Canal, one at the London Avenue Canal, and one at the 17th street canal, was broadcast. I went home on Wednesday amidst rumors and little real news from the flooded and now \'lawless\' city of New Orleans. We had nothing to go on; first the school was flooded, then it wasn\'t, the Garden District was burning, then it wasn\'t, etc. We found out much later that there was flooding on the Uptown campus and the downtown med school campus was shut down due to extensive damage from Katrina and the resultant flooding. The school was shut down for the semester and I found myself in a school in a nearby city. \r\n\r\nOn January 17, 2006, Tulane University\'s Uptown campus opened its doors for students again. Classes started and the freshman Orientation Deja Vu went off without a major hitch. The city is still hurting badly, without a doubt, but there is renewal all around as stores and restaurants open every day. Mardi Gras (my first!) was incredibly fun--I went to as many parades as I could and met many wonderful, strong people who had survived the awful aftermath of the storm and were still determined to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and move back to New Orleans as soon as they could. I am so happy to be back down here.