Dave and Connies Hurricane Katrina Chronicles
Katrina was a truly frustrating event. For years I had been experimenting and learning about guitar amp design and finally when I reached the point where I knew just where I wanted to go with it all, that's right when Katrina hit and decided for us that the next year and a half would be spent on the process of recovery. The worst part of it is that we can't even feel sorry for ourselves being that many people fared far worse.
Here are some pictures I snapped;
First up, a picture of the road leading up to our house after it was extricated from the ravages about a week after Katrina hit. Unfortunately I don't have a "before" shot, but it used to be like driving through a pine forest. Notice the pine forest is stripped pretty bare.
After Katrina hit we were without electricity. We also had no water as the local community water system pumps were electric and there wasn't anyway that the water company could get gasoline to run the backup internal combustion powered pumps.
The roads for 50 miles
were covered with downed trees. Along with the downed trees came the downing of all the power lines and telephone lines. Even all of the Cell phone towers were disabled from either being downed or without electricity.
In essence, we became isolated campers in our own houses. We had to visit nearby ponds to retrieve water to keep our animals alive. Damn!
Horses sure drink a lot of frikken water!!!
Wonder Mouse the horse wonders where his house went. Sorry Mouse, your house has been relocated.
A bit of roof damage. Notice the bent electrical service pole. I had to replace it before the power company would allow the power to be turned back on. Also, difficult to see, but notice the downed power line in the background.
Three weeks later, back in business with the electricity. Pretty amazing when you consider that the lines were downed and roads blocked for at least 50 mile in every direction.
Actually, it may well have been for more than 50 miles, dunno. Fortunately, I had some white asphalt composition shingles left over from when I built our cat shelter. I say fortunate because there was no way to get to town to buy any shingles and when the path to town did get cleared, everybody under the sun ran downtown and scarfed up the local supply in a New York second.
Thank goodness and glory gee ta beezuz, the air conditioning is working again.
Here's another part of the roof that got a white shingle patch job. Notice the toppled bushes in the field behind the house and notice the horizon which prior to Katrina's tree pruning wasn't visible through the woods. Also notice the square piece of plywood covering something. What it's covering is a square hole I cut through the roof. In the days immediately after Katrina the weather was excruciatingly hot. Usually that time of year, anyone with any sense at all stays indoors in the air conditioning.
That was probably one of the toughest things about dealing with Katrina for us, the lack of any escape from the heat, and also having to do so much emergency work in the mid-day sun. It really was like torture and it made me think about all of the people in Iraq and how they also had to do without electricity in mid-summer after we invaded their country. Gawd, that really musta been like some kind of hell on earth.
Oh yes, the square hole on the roof. It was to vent the hot air out of the house. We simply opened up all of the windows and let the natural convection of the hot air rising out of the hole pull cooler air in through the windows. It worked surprisingly well keeeping the house only a few degrees above the outside ambient temperature, WHICH WAS STILL FRIKKEN HOT AS HELL!!
But at least that's better than HOTTER THAN HELL!! :-)
Which brings us to our poor wind ravaged Cat Shelter. Naturaly, as if we didn't have enough problems, one of our horses had to cut himself on a piece of downed tin and almost bleed to death.
About one month and lots of hard work, the cat shelter fences are almost completed, much to the relief (I'm sure) of those particular cats that were confined exclusively to the building for the duration.
An antenna on a rotor system makes an impromptu manually operated solar tracking system for a 60 watt solar panel. Combined with a 12 volt battery and a 100 watt inverter we had enough power to at least have lights in the house thanks to the low power consumption and efficiency of a number of standard light bulb type socketed cold cathode flourescent bulbs which were typically about 14 watts each. Unfortunately, though we at least had lighting, that's about all we had. Still not enough power to run a fridge or anything else with the exception of a small TV.
To make matters worse, we were not alone in all this mess. Staying with us, an elderly couple and six of their cats that had evacuated from East New Orleans which flooded rather severely.
However, at the time we did not know about the flooding. I recall the next evening after the storm scrambling to set up the solar system and getting a small TV to work only to find out the shocking news about the home of our visitors being immersed in water. It wasn't easy to tell our 80 year old lady friend that the house that she had to leave about 6 cats behind in was now sitting in a lake of water. And worse, the water wasn't expected to leave for two weeks and even after that, nobody was to be allowed back into the city. Needless to say, she was rather distraught.
The good news is however, almost a month later when finally people were allowed back in to New Orleans, my wife managed to rescue all but two of the cats who's whereabouts still remain unknown.
Which now brings me to the anecdote about The Stray cats. if anyone has ever seen the band "The Stray Cats" video "Sexy and seventeen" there's a scene where a girl in front of a mirror lifts up a persian cat. That cat belonged to Alice the lady that stayed with us.
Here's how the story goes.
Once upon a time "The Stray Cats" came to New Orleans to shoot a music video and the producer wanted to do a scene wherein a bunch of cats where supposed to chase Brian Stetzer down the hallway of a schoolhouse. A friend of my wife who works in the movie industry contacted my wife to supply the four legged critters for the video. We loaded up a passle of puddys and took 'em down to City Park in New Orleans where the video was to be done at an old school.
Thinking back, we all must have been out of our minds, since the whole affair turned into quite a cat-tastrophe. We were at one end of a hallway just around a corner. Brian was in the middle of the hallway with his guitar, and the camera crew was at the other end of the hallway ready to film the debacle. The idea was that we would release the puddies and they all would neatly round the corner and chase Brian down the hall towards the camera.
Doh!
What *were* we thinking! Of course the poor puddies
where completely befuddled by the situation and reacted in just about every way imaginable, except how we imagined :-) Not being one to easily fold and being a man of means, I lept into action and started tossing puddies around the corner. Which probably did little but confuse them all the more. So, to make a long story short, footage of puddies flying through the air like frisbees was deemed inappropriate and the scene was cut from the video.
Meanwhile, back at another shoot, our friend Alice was having good luck with her Persian . Small surprise here as persians are something akin to a furry meatloaf with ears. They're plyable like gumby and if all you want to do is hoist one up in outsretched arms, a persian is just the ticket. Alices' persian did everything that was expected of it, which was absolutely nothing at all. And that's how her cat made the big time. Of course, it all went straight to it's head. After the shoot, it wouldn't take anything less for dinner than sparrow under glass!