For many, a double-whammy
Posted: Thursday, September 22 at 04:08 pm CT by msnbc.com
LACOMBE, La. -- The blog baton is about to be handed off to our colleagues in Houston, but we wanted to leave readers with a sense of the frustration and heartache caused first by Katrina and now by Rita.
Shelley Stiaes will share her temporary trailer home in Lacombe, La., with her son and her parents, who had evacuated from the area before Hurricane Katrina to Houston, which they now flee in advance of Hurricane Rita. (David Friedman / MSNBC.com)
This story started during our interview yesterday with Shelley Stiaes, the assistant manager of the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Center. She’d gotten a cell call while we were driving around and it turned out to be her mom phoning from a suburb outside Houston.
You see, mom evacuated from Slidell, northeast of New Orleans, just before Katrina hit and headed with her husband and their grandson, Shelley’s son, to Houston, where they have friends.
The reason for the call: They wanted out of Houston and wondered if they could stay with Shelley.
“How much room do you have in the trailer,” Hyacienth Stiaes asked her daughter.
“Not very much,” Shelley replied. “It’ll be crowded. We may be a little on top of each other but come on.”
Shelley used to have a real house in New Orleans but it’s still under a foot of water and she’s living in a trailer at the southeast Louisiana headquarters of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
We called Shelley this morning to see if they’d made it. They left the Houston area at 3.30 a.m. for what normally would be a five-hour trip, but had only made it to Beaumont, Texas, by 7 a.m.
We called Shelley’s mom around 10 a.m. and they hadn’t made it much farther across the Louisiana border since much of that part of the state was joining the Texas evacuees when Rita shifted slightly towards the border.
For a time it seemed like Rita was following them. “Friends in New Orleans said we were bringing the hurricane with us,” she jokes.
They weren’t alone either but in a three-car convoy of 12 people, the rest of whom were heading to friends or family in Mississippi.
As a few raindrops clued us in to Rita’s approach, we waited for the trio at the trailer, where Shelley showed off the tight quarters. “I might go sleep in my office,” she says.
Shelley tells us she hadn’t had time to retrieve anything from her house, not even photos of her 17-year-old son or her parents, because she had been out of town when Katrina evacuations started.
It’s 1 p.m. and the trio still hasn’t arrived. Once they do get here, and assuming Rita doesn’t send enough rain or storm surge to do more damage, Hyacienth will finally get to see the ruins of the home they left behind.
It will be the time to rebuild, but it’s hard to get motivated.
“It’s frustrating, for one thing,” she says, choking up when asked about the Katrina-Rita double-hammy. “And I’m just about to give up.”
Shelley says the hurricanes have created two types of locals: “those with nerves of steel or those with a nervous breakdown.”
Her parents, she adds, are the former.
With this last posting, we hand over reporting duties to Bob Sullivan and Andrew Locke. Our own task, reporting on environmental issues, was hamstrung a bit by Rita as cleanup crews and emergency officials retreated and/or scrambled. But the digression also gave us an opportunity to listen and write about some of the personal tragedies. We know Bob and Andrew will come across and report other stories of frustration and heartache.
A shocking sight from on high
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