Hurricane Katrina – Four Year Anniversary – Part II

The Quail Ridge House - shingles and garage door missing. Hurricane Katrina, Gulfport, Mississippi.

[Click here for Part I.]

August 28-29, 2005

The wind blew briskly as we climbed out of our SUV at Granny’s house in Quail Ridge. Our girls, Natalie and Michelle, were fine with evacuating, but Steven, like his father, wasn’t keen on the idea.  If he could have had his way, we would be riding out Katrina at our own house in Bayou Oaks.  Notice, I said Bayou Oaks.  Hurricanes and bodies of water are not a good combination ever.  I don’t care that we were not in a flood zone.

Personally, I didn’t think ten miles up the road was far away enough. I hate hurricanes; I prefer as much distance from them as possible.  The fellas in my family, on the other hand, seemed ready to don Superman capes to fight the apocalyptic wind in hand-to-hand combat.  Testosterone, I am convinced, carries a side effect of uncontrollable attraction to insane adventure.

My childhood experience with Hurricane Camille was enough adventure to last my lifetime. In fact, I would have preferred to be as far away from Gulfport, Mississippi, as possible back then.  Little Bryan’s smart mom and dad had whisked him off to Laurel during Camille, so he didn’t seem to have a grasp of reality about how awful sitting in the middle of a major storm can be.

Nathan, four-years-old at the time, took it all in stride. This was just a trip to “Janny’s” house.  He ate spaghetti and watched cartoons until the power went out.  Then he went to bed.  Nathan still slept a lot back in those days before his heart surgery.  As the winds increased to the point of howling, I was glad he could sleep through it.  I would have hated for him to spend that night like I did through Camille…wild-eyed and frightened.

The night got hairy quickly. After the power went out, a steady dripping sound began to blend with the constant roar of the wind.  Soon, every light fixture in the house began to drip and then pour rainwater, a sure sign that we had lost ridge vents and shingles.  While my mother tried to rest in the east bedroom, the winds escalated from loud to ferocious, and then she heard a powerful ripping sound from above.  She ran to the other side of the house to tell me she felt certain a tornado had ripped out a portion of the roof.

As I watched Nathan sleeping, a little Hurricane-Camille-deja-vu took over, causing me to worry that the house might deteriorate to the point of caving in on us. How would I protect Nathan?  Then a horrendous clamor of metal exploded above the roar of the winds.  “The garage door is coming apart,” Bryan called from the washroom where a windowed door allowed him to see the calamity.  “Watch Nathan for me,” I told my mom as I rounded the doorway to see for myself.

The entire ceiling over the garage was swollen with rainwater and bursting at the seams; and the garage door was a mangled piece of metal, buckling and banging in the wind. We should have left the state.  I felt like screaming, I told you so! Before I could launch into a tirade, Bryan and Steven slipped out the door and began trying to tie down the wildly flailing garage door with a long nylon cord.  My mom was a nervous wreck.  “Karen,” she said, “you’ve got to get them back inside!  It’s too dangerous!”

Mad as I was, I still didn’t want any harm to come to my guys. “It’s not important!” I yelled through the roaring wind.  “Come back!”  Bryan muttered something about trying to save our SUV from getting pummeled by the door.  The words were barely out of his mouth when a powerful gust busted down two storage room doors, blowing the one closest to Bryan off its hinges.  The explosion of wind lifted Bryan and Steven.  I could hardly believe my eyes.  They hung on to the flying door and tried to secure it back to the doorjamb!  Remember what I said about testosterone?

“Bryan, forget about it!” I yelled.  “Come inside!” They continued to struggle in the maelstrom of wind and water, determined to reattach that blasted door.  Who do you suppose won that battle?  Bryan or Katrina?  That wretched woman jerked him against the wall like he was Raggedy Andy.  In the process, his finger was slammed between the door and the doorjamb.  He winced, he finally let go, and he pulled himself together.  As he walked inside, he stiffened his face, I suppose to maintain dignity–would have made a perfect “I’m good” commercial.

As the evening progressed, the chimney came crashing onto the patio; now water and ash were pouring down the flue.  Dawn was breaking as we sloshed across the carpet and competed for a view through a small gap in the the window’s plywood covering.  The wind was still full force all these hours later; an assortment of debris…shingles, siding, branches, fencing…flew through the air.  Trees danced wildly, sometimes uprooting or snapping.  I wondered, shouldn’t this storm be slowing down by now?

While we gawked at the unrelenting tempest, Natalie’s cell phone rang. “Mom and Dad,” she said as she hung up, “Taylor’s house is flooding; they’ve moved up to the second floor.”  Flooded?  That seemed impossible.  Bayou View doesn’t flood; at least, it didn’t flood during Camille which was the worst hurricane in the history of the universe.

Or so we thought.

Tomorrow:  Hurricane Katrina – Four Year Anniversary – Part III

Karen Blakeney

Tags: Gulfport Mississippi, heart surgery, Hurricane Camille, Hurricane Katrina, Karen Blakeney, Nathan