Online Story Contribution, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

As with every other hurricane I decided to stay thinking it was a false alarm. I have evacuated before and the traffic and hassle didnt seem worth it. I thought the hurricane would never hit here it never had before in the time i lived in new orleans.\r\nI stayed at my apartment in the french quarter and boy was i wrong. Once it hit the wind and rain was scary and the power was gone. Still i didnt think that it was that bad. \r\nWhen it was all over it was relatively calm still no power but no noticeable destuction where i was at. Later when I left my building I saw the chaos people were running around with bags of what i presume were looted goods, water was starting to come into the quarter and i knew something was definetely wrong. After three days me and my fellow hurricane survivors decided we should probably leave. A police officer told us to go to the convention center which we did. That was a very bad idea it was surreal like being in the scene of a very bad movie. We stayed there until we were told to go to the westbank, there were apparently buses taking people out of here there. We got across the bridge and there were buses. They stopped running them almost immediately after we got on one. We got taken to another place on the east bank only about 10 miles from where we were before. We decided to help ourselves and hitchhiked to baton rouge. It was an experience but i still consider myself lucky. I hear stories from people i know in chalmette and st bernard. They thought everything was okay and suddenly the levy broke and they had to get on their roof some of them for days. One person I talked to got his family to the attic and they all drowned but him as he tried to break out of the attic onto the roof. He had to stay with his entire dead family for almost a week.

Citation

“Online Story Contribution, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank,” Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, accessed November 29, 2024, https://hurricanearchive.org/items/show/252.

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