Life After Katrina

[dicker]

Glad you made it through the storm.

My wife and I have spent many memorable days on the Mississippi gulf coast, mostly in Biloxi and Bay St Louis.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you.


Richard

 

[Bob_Skurka]

You sound like one of the lucky ones. I was on the phone with 2 friends from New Orleans earlier today. One lost his house. The other has two large trees on his roof and another went through his living room window. He doesn't have equipment and simply called his insurance agent. Both of them work at the same company and the company is barely operational, they lost 1/2 of their roof and had several semi-trailers of food destroyed by water damage. Monday 3 of my managers are flying into New Orleans to help out their company, their main mission will be to train new employees. And it is hard to get new employees to show up because they have no place to live. They actually have built a trailer community inside their fenced in parking area so people who work there have a place to live.

The company employeed 200 workers, but less than 65 are able to get back to work, most of them are in Texas or Arkansas, many may never come back. 20% of my friends customers are completely wiped out. Many of the customers are outside of the storm damage area and need goods and may have to shift to differnet suppliers if he can't get his operation up and running. I was told the jobs are there but in many cases the employees simply are gone.

Good luck to all of you down there, we are thinking about you.

 

[Berniep]

<font color="blue"> Given time, ya’ll recover from Katrina, but things will never, ever be the same. Around here, folks measure time very simply; pre-Hugo and post-Hugo. I think you’ll find it will be the same down there.
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I was in Summerville SC at a friends house for Hugo. I was in the Air Force and thought that 20 miles inland would be plenty. Hey I was just a stupid farm boy from Indianna. Hugo was a spring shower compared to Katrina but if there ever was a next time I would make it at least 200 miles. Glad you are OK. Take it easy on the utility workers, those guys are working their butts off even if it doesn't look like it.
The thing I noticed most about post Hugo was the lack of trees. The second thing is the water never smelled or tasted the same again, kinda like it hade musty old pine trees in it, even 10 years later.
Keep your chin up. It really does get better.
We are praying for you all.