(Dobbs) You've Seen One Hurricane, You Haven't Seen Them All
But looking back at other hurricanes can show you what's ahead for the victims of Ian.
I’ll never forget what a woman told me in New Orleans, the day after Hurricane Katrina blew through. A woman who had lived in the Lower 9th Ward, her neighborhood drowned when a levee ruptured. A woman I helped rescue from the roof of her two-story home where she and her family had shivered for ten terrifying hours after the water rose into their attic. A woman who had nothing material left to her name except the wet shirt on her back.
But for that woman, on that day, material possessions didn’t matter. Because on her shoulders, she carried a little boy. Her little boy.
I quote her from my notes of the coverage. “We lost everything. The house under water, the car was covered, everything. So we start from scratch, but thank God we got out with our lives, that’s the important thing. Those things are just material things, can always get that back. But you can’t get your life back. You can’t get your family back.”
A man we plucked off another rooftop had the same sense of hope. “Like starting all over from scratch, you starting all over, but you got to be thankful, you know, that we have each other. Long as you have life, you know, if there’s a will there’s a way. You know, we’ll make a way.”
That is the story of a hurricane. Katrina then, Ian now, and all the rest. They inspire an indomitable human spirit. People will weep, people will suffer, people will scream, but they will not forget what matters most. Having covered a score of natural disasters, I have no doubt that despite the ravages of this storm, such spirit is manifest today in Florida, all along the path of Hurricane Ian.
But these hurricanes also take a horrible human toll.
It’s too early to count but it’s not inconceivable that before Ian leaves Florida’s shattered shores, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, even potentially millions of people are going to have to go months without a home. The ones they had are under water. Their places of work, their schools, their markets, their highways, their cars, their doctor’s offices, their checkbooks, their marriage licenses and birth certificates and computers and televisions and clothing and furniture--- it’s all submerged and saturated.
And when the water drains away, there will be mud. And mold. Multiply that by the thousands of homes now uninhabitable, you know it won’t all get fixed tomorrow.
Each hurricane has unique characteristics, not just meteorologically, but in what it leaves behind. Yet all have certain characteristics in common. Because whether you’re in the eye of the storm or along its outer edge, every hurricane is fearsome. Whether you have a large house or a small apartment, every hurricane is destructive. Whether you were smart enough to evacuate or defiant enough to ride it out, every hurricane is life-changing. Whether it’s a Category Five storm or a Cat Four, its impact lasts long after the winds die down and the waters ebb away.
That’s how it was with Katrina, which took aim at New Orleans. But not just New Orleans. Like Ian in Florida, Katrina was ruinously wide. Wide enough not only to leave parts of New Orleans in rancid shoulder-high water, but to wipe parts of Biloxi, Mississippi, 90 miles away, off the map.
I’ll never forget three images from Biloxi.
The first is a convincing illustration of a hurricane’s force. There were three colossal barges— each of them two football fields long— that housed casinos. They had been tied up in shallow waters alongside hotels (which is how they got around laws against gambling on Mississippi soil). As you’ve heard about storm surges in Florida, the storm surge in Biloxi floated those barges several blocks into the city before the water carried them back out. One rammed into a five-story brick apartment building, bringing part of it it down.
The second is a convincing illustration of a hurricane’s devastation. Countless houses blew away, whether to another block or another county. With my cameraman, I walked up to one couple just standing still, looking dazed. They were staring at a house sitting obliquely angled on a concrete slab, which in that part of the country serves as a foundation. I asked, “Is this your house?” The woman said “No, it’s not our house. This is our slab, but it’s not our house.”
The third is a convincing illustration of the resilience of the human spirit despite what a hurricane has wrought. My cameraman and I had been surviving on crackers and chocolate bars for a few days when we heard that a Waffle House on the north side of Biloxi had found a generator and laid their hands on hundreds of eggs and called in some staff and was open for business. We cut a beeline to the restaurant. It was mobbed, but we saw two guys getting up from their seats at the counter and we grabbed them, which gave us a view of a large black man turning scrambled eggs on the griddle as fast as he could move. While he was serving up some plates, a slender white waitress came up behind him, said a few words, he turned toward her, and with tears flowing down both their cheeks, they embraced. Both probably had lost whatever they owned, but there they were, helping others, helping us.
That was Katrina then. It’s probably Ian today. It must be. It’s how people are.
But that also doesn’t change the reality of what people have lost. Within days, those who left will begin to come home. Probably they took a few days’ clothes and a few days’ medicines and a few days’ money for a few days away before the “all clear” would sound. But what they will learn is, there is no “all clear.”
There has been too much loss to forget. There will be too much time to repair. They will get their lives back. But those lives will never be the same.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
I can't believe you still got this written even when traveling. Looks like you're having fun! Enjoy!
Thank you Greg.... important reminders from earlier catastrophes