Originally Posted by
brevity
Thank you.
Long version: I had certain responsibilities that required me to stay rather than try to leave on Thursday or Friday. Once I was free to leave, it was Saturday afternoon and evacuating traffic was crazy. I had the choice of sheltering in place or run out of gas by taking the interstate in either direction. I moved to Louisiana years after Hurricane Katrina, but I've sheltered in place for several previous storms that were not debilitating to New Orleans because they either diminished upon landfall or (unfortunately) hit other areas harder. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
The power went out Sunday at 1pm, when there was some wind but no rain and certainly no landfall. I get text alerts from Entergy (the region's electricity provider) and have reported outages, storm-related or otherwise, by texting "Out" to them. Historically I get an automated reply that says something about how widespread the outage is by the number of people affected. This time the automated reply said, "You have opted out of all Entergy text alerts." Took me a while to figure out how to log in to their website on my phone and opt back in.
The house has a gas stove that requires electricity to ignite, but operating on the loose theory that a burner that is already on would stay on during a power outage, we decided to keep three burners running shortly before the electricity went out. They stayed on, retaining a hot food and water option that might not have been available otherwise. The early power outage was the impetus to prioritize filling up various random containers with water, which of course went out later that afternoon.
After years of Verizon I'd switched to AT&T about three weeks ago. The good news is that I'd upgraded to a phone with a much better battery (a proper doubling, from iPhone 6 to iPhone 12). The bad news is that I got rid of the landline, which may have come in handy when the AT&T network went down from 8pm Sunday to 3pm Monday. No idea if Verizon had the same problem.
A life without power is kind of like a farmer's life, still ruled by sunrise and sunset. Sunday dinner and cleaning before dark, candles lit and distributed to the bathrooms, flashlights at the ready. I had a fully charged laptop with the sole purpose of movie playback, but I rested upstairs while others watched. I nodded off but soon awoke around 9pm to notice the closest bathroom candle had flamed out, so I reluctantly got up and walked around the upstairs. I started hearing a dripping that was louder than the rain, and I followed the sound into the empty-at-the-time bedroom of the house's youngest occupant. A quarter of the room's ceiling had split open and there were 3 or 4 bullet-sized holes shooting out water onto the floor. The bed was already a loss. I looked around and noticed about 100 stuffed animals primed for destruction, along with countless other belongings. I got an old baby basin and a few trash cans to start collecting water, and then went downstairs to request an additional person's assistance. I think they could tell from my calmness that the situation was bad. Two people were enough for the job, as we saved or salvaged the plush menagerie, school books, and whatever else we could before the plaster started to fall on me.
It was a dark and stormy night. I woke up about once an hour, grabbed a flashlight, and looked for further damage, especially in the room directly below the damaged upstairs room. Moderate water damage in the ceiling corners, some water on the ground from a dripping seam above the window. The good news is that the rain ceased around 3am. The following morning I saw a lot of roof shingles on the lawn, but then noticed that most of them came off a neighbor's house. A very small part of my roof above that bedroom lost shingles, and the rain must have been a direct hit to cause that kind of localized damage. I listened to the car radio to make sure that the storm had passed, because at the time I had no other source of information.
The youngest occupant's spirit was broken upon seeing that room the next day. We finished retrieving items and cleared the room enough to keep an open floor, which we cleaned and lined with large plastic trash bags. Two of our number lasted a day longer, leaving on Tuesday to stay with relatives of relatives in Jackson, Mississippi. The rest of us, me and two elderly parents, left Wednesday in a classic personal conflict between "I can't take you anywhere" and "We really need to leave".
A well-connected neighbor helped me find someone willing to place a tarp on the roof, and loosely ran point while the job was done Thursday. Having rejoined a connected world, I have looked into FEMA assistance but can't complete the application for some technical reason at their end. Entergy has assessed less than half of its overall problem and hasn't even sent an update in over 24 hours. It's not even talking about restoration yet.
The circumstances, to me, were both fortunate and unfortunate. The storm was bad, but it could have lingered, or been followed by subsequent rainstorms. I was stuck in powerless heat but had enough resources to get by. I could have evacuated everyone and avoided the daily turmoil, but might have come back to a house in far worse shape than it is right now.
So I guess that's it. I'm now among the displaced. Mentally, I'm caught in a place between feeling lucky for what I left behind and feeling dread for the tasks that lay ahead.