August 29, 2025 • 31 mins
It's the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The most important thing to remember: No one is coming to save you.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
This is Emma, and today is the last work day of.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
August.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And you know, since we're in the semi education world,
we start our new year on September the first, so
we have a three day weekend coming up, and that's
gonna be wonderful. And it's raining and it's seventy three degrees,
so that's always a good thing in August.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I am not gonna complain about that.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
However, today I am talking about the twenty year anniversary
and what is it The twenty year anniversary of that
would be Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina may landfall on August
the twenty ninth, which was Labor Day weekend in.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Two thousand and five.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So and you know that that check, that event changed
a lot of things. It was I mean, it was
a Category three when it made landfall, and it didn't
make a direct hit own New Orleans, but it was
(01:15):
direct enough that it caused the damage that caused the
levees to fail, and then that led to the floods,
and that's what what ultimately caused. I mean, the actual
storm damage was more east of that, so it was
in the part of Louisiana thiss east of New Orleans
(01:39):
and Mississippi was just torn up. Okay, But because it
eventually affected New Orleans, the rest of the rest of
the folks who were in the path of Hurricane Katrina
kind of got lost in the shuffle.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
But it was having said that it.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Was a horrific event and because of the aftermath of
Katrina and how people saw firsthand that the government is
not coming to save us, and that's been reiterated multiple
times since then, including Hurricane Helene last year in the
Carolina's in Tennessee. It was in a lot of people
(02:23):
trace their preparedness journey back to Hurricane Katrina. Now, I
what I remember about Hurricane Katrina is that we were
on the last legs of the restoration of the house,
and sister and I had decided it was a three
day holiday weekend, We're gonna paint the enclosed back porch.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, that sounded like a great idea, except.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
That enclosed back porch has one, two, three, has four doors,
and it has I don't remember, I think I counted
eleven windows. Maybe there's a window into the house and
then the it because it isn't enclosed back porch, all
(03:15):
the outside sides are.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Windows.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Uh, and so the house is actually one color with
white trim. And then, you know, so I painted the
back porch to look like the rest of the like
the outside of the house. And then because it's an
old house, and I had done this on the front porch,
so I did it on back porch. The one the
one beadboard ceiling that I didn't do was my sewing room,
(03:42):
and honestly had if I had the energy to go
back and do it again, I would do it as well,
because it's still a porch. It's a sleeping porch, same concept.
It's got the wall of the house and then two
sides of the room or windows, because that's why.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
This sleeping poor.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I would paint the you know, the thing to do
with the old houses is to paint these seailing board
ceilings what they call hate blue, meaning it lets the
you know, evil spirits out or whatever. But it's supposed
to keep you from getting wasped nests and that kind
of thing, which is not true because that happens all
the time. The blue ceiling looks nice and it doesn't
(04:25):
help with any kind of pest control, I will confess
to that. But I do like the look of the
blue ceiling, because that is, you know, the kind of
the traditional way of painting an old house porch.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Okay, So I had and the floor.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
You know, you always normally paint the floor of a
porch battleship gray. So I had a gray floor. I
had a color for the house, a body color. I
had a white trim, and I had a blue ceiling, okay.
And I had four doors, and I think eleven windows.
I would have to go back and count them to
make sure, but I think it was eleven all.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
In one ring. Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
So thinking that we were going to get through with
the house in three days was a little underestimation on
our part, but we did get started. Now, first of all,
it was a lot. You know, this is going to
be a relatively cool weekend for us. We're going to
be in the high eighties, and that's a historical event
that we may have to write down.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
For posterity because that does not happen.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But that was not the case that weekend and the
rest of the fall, And that's one of the reasons
why the hurricane season was so active that year. In fact,
we used up all the letters of the alphabet and
had to go into the Greek alphabet before it was over.
So Hurricane Trina with a K was at the end
of August, so we still had we had Rita and Wilma,
(05:53):
Wilma and we had several others.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So and Kay was in August, so you.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Know, we had a whole bunch of them before that
that were Kay, I mean before Kay. So this year now,
I don't know what the waters and the gulf are,
but that then at least the temperatures around here are
significantly cooler this year than they've been for the last
two years.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
But back to Katrina, so it was hot.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
So that meant it was in the back of the
house faces west. So therefore trying to keep that, you know,
trying to work back there in the with the sun
pouring in through those windows made it really hot. So
it was hard to do it in the middle of
the day, so we had to do it early in
the day.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
We could do we could work on it at night,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Needless to say, we didn't even get a dent in
this in three days, but we did. But that's what
we were doing during Katrina, so you know, and Katrina
didn't really affect us in Texas. It affected New Orleans
and Mississippi and Alabama and that way. Uh, but we
watched it or listened to it on television. And back
(07:04):
then HAROLDO. Rivera worked for Fox News, and so, uh,
the TV was on in the kitchen, which is the
room of the house that the back porch is built
around at least two sides, and so the the TV
was on top of the fridge, and so even if
I couldn't see it, I could hear it. So Haralda
(07:27):
was reporting from New Orleans and we painted all weekend.
And what but what happens in Texas a lot of times,
and this happened in Katrina, is that a lot of
people that have the means to do so and have
you know, RVs and that kind of thing, they will
(07:48):
pack if it's like a hurricane is coming and they're
evacuating the coast, Uh, they will pack up their RV
and they will come stay in like a state park
in Texas so that they are you know, out of
the hurricane zone. And then once it's over and they
can they will go back. Well, the problem with this
(08:09):
was after the hurricane hid and then that next week
when the levees broke.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
These people didn't have anything to go back too, and.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So you know, then they're in something of a dilemma
because they're living in a state park in there, RV.
And at least, you know, some of them probably tried
to go back to see if they had anything left.
But it was it was you know, that was the
part that I remember the most, the aftermath of Katrina
(08:41):
as it related to us.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But what but a really a.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Really strange thing happened while I was painting the back porch.
I looked up at one point and there is this
gigantic white dog staring at me through the back door,
and I, you know, I'm like, hello, dog, where did
you come from? So I go out to see about
(09:07):
the dog, and the dog is real shy, I won't
have anything to do with me. And then I look
and then I get to looking around and there's not
one of them, but there's two of them. It was
two snow white. I mean, they didn't have anything out
of them but white. So I think they were great Pyrenees.
They were huge, I mean, biggest dogs I'd seen lately.
But you could tell they were very they were distraught
(09:33):
and they were together. They were not and they were
not going anywhere that they didn't go together. Well, I
gave them, you know, I got something to put some
water in. And at this point in time, we didn't
have any dogs because our most recent dog had passed
away and it was about a year and we had
not gotten another one yet, so we didn't have any
dog food or anything to feed them. And so but
(09:56):
I did fix them a pan of water. So I
took some water and I put it out there, and
one of them would not come get water, but the
other one did. And then they settled down and they
laid under the side porch because the deck there is
kind of open, and they laid there in the dirt
on the side porch, and they slept all day long.
And all day were like, well, we can't keep these dogs.
(10:17):
We don't how many dog food we're gonna do these dogs.
And so finally towards the end of the day's sister said,
I'm going to town and get some dog food because
they need something to eat. So while she's gone to
get dog food, they disappeared and we never saw them again.
And I've often wondered if they were refugees from Katrina
and somehow nether they got separated from their people because
(10:41):
they appeared to be on a mission and going somewhere
and they had just they were exhausted, so they laid
down to rest before they kept going. So I always
wondered what happened to those two dogs after they left us,
because they were you could tell that they were very upset,
and it was it was a sad thing.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So back to Katrina.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
If you look at what happened in Katrina, first of all,
it hit a major city, so that was that. And
you know how people in the prepper sphere say that
cities are consumers, not producers of goods, and that you know,
when those goods run out, they run out and then
people are and so the problem was these people were stranded.
(11:24):
And I did a couple of episodes on a Netflix
series that we watched called Five Days at Memorial, and
it was about Memorial Hospital, which was downtown New Orleans
and what happened to the patients there.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Because in all of their and they.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Had this huge gigantic disaster preparedness notebook for the hospital,
the one scenario that they had never planned for, apparently,
was for the hospital to beflow and have to be
evacuated which is really kind of ironic at this point
in time, because New Orleans is literally below sea level.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It sits in a boat. And if you and it's
the levees.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
That keep the water from coming into New Orleans, well,
if you had a hospital or any other kind of
structure in a place that was below sea level, it
would stand the reason the most important thing that you
would prepare for would be a flood.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
But apparently they did not.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And so if I don't remember what episodes these are,
I'll go I'll go back and put it in the
description scene know I how to scroll and look for them.
It talks about the five days and what they did
and how.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The end result was.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
What end result was about forty something people died, and
some of those people died.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
At the first or along during the.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Top five days, and a fairly large number of them
died at the end, and the the understanding is they
were helped to die. So it's an interesting watch from
the standpoint of being in a hospital or having a
loved one in a hospital, and being in a disaster and.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Being in a major city.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Okay, and there's several characters in the show. For example,
there's an elderly woman who is in the hospital and
I want to say maybe with her daughter, and her
son and his wife are somewhere else and are there
(13:41):
in Louisiana, but they're out in the country and they
have a generator and all the all the stuff, and
so at one you know, of course, the phones start
because they don't have electricity, so they don't have a
way to charge their phone.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
So you know, their phones are going out.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
They don't have any way to communicate, and that was
another part of the problem is that they could not
get anybody to answer them as they tried. I mean,
they tried email, they tried call in, they tried you
name it, they tried doing it, and they could not
get anybody to respond to them. So they were literally
(14:16):
cut off from all communications. So that's one of those
important things that preppers talk about is communication. But eventually
the daughter of the woman gets a hold of her
brother and says, you have to come get us, and
so he and his wife start that direction and they
(14:37):
drive as far as they can and they get to
a fire station, and the fire station they explained to
you know, there's a whole bunch of people at the
fire station who are waiting to go into New Orleans
to help, but nobody's given anybody any kind of direction.
Now that is where things end. And I mean, you know,
(14:59):
this is not the go These are just normal people
who want to help, and in his case, he's trying
to get his mother out.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So they find they find some guys.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
With some boats with almost like those swamp boats you
see in the Everglades with the big motor on the back,
and they go into New Orleans. And now, first of all,
the guys say, we won't go in dark as we'll
get shot. So they go during the next day and they,
you know, take these boats and they see how bad
New Orleans is because you know, nobody on the outside
(15:32):
except you know, the folks. I always wondered what these
crazy people with the news agencies were doing because they
were you know, I know about Fox News. They were
standing on it with a bunch of people who were
standing on an overpass. Well, okay, so you're assuming that
the people from the news agency have supplies like water
(15:55):
or whatever. Are you not sharing with these people that
are standing in the brool and hot sun. I mean,
there were a lot of questions I had about the
news media coverage of Katrina. But that's a rabbit hole anyway.
So they go into New Orleans. They get to the
hospital and he tells the whoever the administrators are, she's
(16:15):
going with me, and so they pick her up out
of the hospital bed and put her in the boat,
and of course everybody in the hospital was to get
in the boat with them, and they had to. And
in fact, the security guard kind of makes a deal
with a guy on the side that he's going to
jump in the boat. At the end, he's going to
help them keep all these people at bay, and then
(16:37):
at the very end he's going to jump in the boat,
which he did, and everybody that was left watching the
boats leave was obviously very angry anyway, But that kind
of tells you that it gives you and this was
a realistic scenario of how this went over time. So
(16:58):
if you have not watched that sea, I recommend it because.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
It gives you an idea.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Now, they actually arrested a couple of people and file charges,
and I think eventually those charges were dropped. They did
not pursue it because of the fact that basically they said,
if they do this.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Excuse me. It was a doctor and a nurse. I think.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
The argument was, if we actually pursue this, then no
doctor or healthcare provider will be willing to stay in
a hospital during a during a hurricane or an emergency.
They will all pick up their stuff and leave, and
then there will be no medical assistance. So and there,
(17:48):
you know, there's an argument for that.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So they did not.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And the problem wasn't that these people that these two
people helped people die chemically, but because the problem was
anybody that could be evacuated they had at that by
that point. So these people literally could not be evacuated
because if they tried to evacuate them, they were gonna die. Well,
(18:12):
if they were gonna die if you evacuated them, and
you couldn't leave them there because the parish health commissioner
or whoever he was told them that they that they
all had to be out by five.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
O'clock, then what were you gonna do with it?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I mean, you know, they were in a an untenable
situation at that point. So that's the interesting thing about
this whole scenario. Anyway, The bottom line is these were people.
You know, it's the don't be where you don't have
(18:47):
any help. Now I will say that one of the
things that the general public has learned since Katrina is
that people are not coming to help. And what happened
in Helene is you actually had private citizens helping. So
there's a big, obviously veteran community in that area apparently,
(19:10):
and so it was veterans that got together, like the
g Y veterans got together and did stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I mean, people came with their own.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Personal helicopters, funding the fuel out of their own pocket
to rescue people from these mountain towns because nobody was
coming to help them.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
And it wasn't a big city, so you know, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Have news coverage, you didn't have a major network standing
on the overpass interviewing people who were standing in the heat,
because these were very isolated mountain villages basically, you know,
just communities. So if it hadn't been for the private citizens,
more people would have died in Helene than actually did.
(19:52):
But the bottom line is that's where a lot of
people in fact bear Independence says, you know, because I
listen to his channel, he says Katrina, because he was
contracted to do debris removal for Katrina by some bigger company,
and he said when he saw what happened and how
(20:14):
nobody helped people that he realized that we might want
to help ourselves, and so that was his beginning of
his preparedness journey.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I remember seeing this, and I remember Lee.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
I mean, I remember Katrina, but what really got my
attention was the next one, which was Rita. Because Rita
hit Texas, and it hit Southeast Texas, and it hit
areas like Houston, Baytown, Beaumont, Port Arthur.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
It hit those towns.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Uh, and that's where a very large section of the
evacuees from Katrina of were. They were in Southeast Texas,
and so they had already been evacuated once they had nothing.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
They were in the soup. Uh.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
They were in the uh what whatever they It used
to be the Astrodome, but it's whatever is in Houston
now is the Big Arena and the name escapes me
at this point.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
But they were in anything that they could have for
a shelter.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
In fact, I heard a story of some private citizens
that were helping with buses of.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Katrina evacuees.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And I want to say this was in Bytown or
somewhere in that area. And the man called home to
his wife and he said, take take everything out of
my closet. Leave me a pair of shorts and a
T shirt, he said, but you bring everything else because literally,
the people getting on the buses in New Orleans and
(22:01):
ending up in southeast East Texas, if they had clothes
on their back, they didn't have much, and you know,
they're wet, and they were nasty, and they you know,
they'd been in them forever. And so this I mean,
he literally cleaned out his closet.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
So uh.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
But what happened is when when Rita. When Rita happened,
then you had a crisis on top of another crisis.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
So you had people who.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Had already been evacuated, were already traumatized, might already be
separated from their family members, and they were being.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Evacuated again. Uh, and that just made it that much
more chaotic.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I probably have a lot of noise going on because
you can hear my when show wipers could training. So
that's when it got my attention, because that's when there
were As you went south in East Texas, probably one
hundred miles inland, it was.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Like you traveled at your own risk.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
You didn't know if you could get gas, you didn't
know what you were going to run into it was
kind of like a no man's land. Okay. So Rita
made Katrina that much worse, at least in South Texas,
and so then all of those people had to be
dispersed to every part of Texas.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
So you had people.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
In the Dallas area, you had people in the Austin area.
I mean, you had people everywhere. Everywhere there was a
place to put people. They were one of our schools
in our area. There was actually a church camp inside
the district boundaries of their school district, and so a
(23:52):
bunch of Katrina evacuees ended up there and then the
school had to send you know, the school buses out
or a school bus out to pick up the children
there and bring them into the school district. I mean
into the schools too, you know, for education, because I
mean we were literally or schools in in Texas were
enrolling uh Katrina evacuee children. Excuse me, and those children,
(24:20):
uh you know they there were they didn't have any
records that I mean, it was it was a hot
mess as far as the schools go.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
And this.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
These the people that were in this church camp were
you know, basically out of their element. For example, none
of these people could drive or had ever had a car,
and so now they hear they were in rural Texas
and they couldn't understand how were people supposed to get
(24:54):
around here, And so they asked that, you know, they
wanted to take the school buses into town, and the
and the school employees had to say, I'm sorry, you
can't do that.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This is only for the students.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And so they would say, well, how do people get
around here if you don't have a car, And they said, well,
you have to have a car, or you have to
have a friend with a car, because we don't have
public transportation out here in the country. And that was
and they had never had to do that because they
lived in a city and they had city transportation. They
have buses and all kinds of things that could get
them around, and that's not the case in the country. So,
(25:29):
as I said, a lot of people can trace their
preparedness journey back to Hurricane Katrina and the understanding that
the government is not coming to help.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Now I'm gonna say one more thing.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I'm just gonna throw it out there and then we're
gonna stop because I'm at work, and again, I have
a lot to do today because we're getting off early.
This was during George Bush's term, okay, and there isn't
it before George Bush was Bill Clinton. And the reason
I say that is because this is not a political commentary.
(26:07):
But what I'm saying is growing up myself, since I'm
a baby boomer, a big deal growing up because of
the Cold War was the was the Civil Defense Organization.
And the emphasis was on the on having civil defense chapters,
(26:29):
organizations whatever in every community so that it was to
build up the resiliency of the communities. Communities were supposed
to be able to have supplies and have shelters and
have the Civil Defense Organization. Was was a big deal, okay.
And and because of that, you know, growing up, we
(26:51):
had films that we watched and you know, explaining how
important it was to be prepared in case we had
a nuclear blast or whatever. Okay, Well, because we went
so long in the Cold War and we didn't really
have and then you know when during Reagan's time, basically
(27:12):
the Soviet Union was dismantled. So by the time we
got to the Clinton administration, you know, and we thought
the threat was over. Really now in twenty twenty five,
we're talking about nuclear war like it's the next week's
football game. But back in the excuse me, the nineties,
you know, that kind of thing went by the wayside.
(27:34):
So the thought was at that point, well, let's just
centralize all this stuff and we'll put it at the
federal government level and we'll call it the Federal Emergency
Management Administration AKA FEMA. Well, guess who didn't help when
it came to Katrina.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
FEMA.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
So everybody is standing around expecting the government to help,
and the government didn't help. And so that's why so
many people can trace their preparedness back to Katrina, because
it was the first major catastrophe that came along after
(28:14):
we switched from Civil Defense to which was community based,
to FEMA, which is federally based. And at that point
in time, there were nobody. Nobody came, nobody helped, nobody
knew what to do. There was I mean, people just
basically stood around looked at each other. Well, and that's
(28:35):
when normal people, regular ordinary people, discovered that maybe we
might want to think about how we can help ourselves
because this didn't go well. And then since then we've
had multiple other examples that proved the same thing. But
Katrina probably was the first after FEMA was formed.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I remember the first Bush which.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Was before Clinton, so that would be before we had
FEMA when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, and Hurricane Andrew was
probably I think it was a category five when it hit.
I do not think it was category three, which is
what Katrina was. Literally it wiped houses off their slabs
and people were writing there or painting their insurance account
(29:30):
number on their slab so that as the insurance companies
flew over or came through, they could tell whose house
that was and what insurance company was going to pay
for it, and what they did for people. Then, in
that particular instance is that President Bush sent the army in,
(29:54):
and the army sent set up tents and gave people
places to live so that they could good. And Hurricane
Andrew would have a would have been the first hurricane
of the season, so it was summertime and it was Florida,
so but they set up they made almost like tent
cities so people had a place to live because they're
literally it wiped out homestead of Florida, I mean completely
(30:17):
off the map nearly, but there was a response. It's
when we went to having FEMA that we quit having
a response. You know, when we federalized, it wasn't just
something where people said, Okay, well here's the problem this,
we're going to take care of it. Now we have
an administration, we have an agency that's going to do this. Well,
that's where when you when you make more bureaucracy, you're
(30:41):
less likely to be able to get stuff done. I'm
going to say that's an opinion, but I think it's
an opinion based in evidence anyway. Moral of the story,
after all of this, to the best of our ability,
we need to be able to take care of ourselves.
It's Friday, a holiday weekend. I will not be making
(31:02):
a post on Monday. I'm probably gonna work out on Sunday,
so it might make one.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Then, Uh, talk to you soon. Have a good holiday
Good morning.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
This is Emma, and today is the last work day of.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
August.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And you know, since we're in the semi education world,
we start our new year on September the first, so
we have a three day weekend coming up, and that's
gonna be wonderful. And it's raining and it's seventy three degrees,
so that's always a good thing in August.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
I am not gonna complain about that.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
However, today I am talking about the twenty year anniversary
and what is it The twenty year anniversary of that
would be Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina may landfall on August
the twenty ninth, which was Labor Day weekend in.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Two thousand and five.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
So and you know that that check, that event changed
a lot of things. It was I mean, it was
a Category three when it made landfall, and it didn't
make a direct hit own New Orleans, but it was
(01:15):
direct enough that it caused the damage that caused the
levees to fail, and then that led to the floods,
and that's what what ultimately caused. I mean, the actual
storm damage was more east of that, so it was
in the part of Louisiana thiss east of New Orleans
(01:39):
and Mississippi was just torn up. Okay, But because it
eventually affected New Orleans, the rest of the rest of
the folks who were in the path of Hurricane Katrina
kind of got lost in the shuffle.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
But it was having said that it.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Was a horrific event and because of the aftermath of
Katrina and how people saw firsthand that the government is
not coming to save us, and that's been reiterated multiple
times since then, including Hurricane Helene last year in the
Carolina's in Tennessee. It was in a lot of people
(02:23):
trace their preparedness journey back to Hurricane Katrina. Now, I
what I remember about Hurricane Katrina is that we were
on the last legs of the restoration of the house,
and sister and I had decided it was a three
day holiday weekend, We're gonna paint the enclosed back porch.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well, that sounded like a great idea, except.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
That enclosed back porch has one, two, three, has four doors,
and it has I don't remember, I think I counted
eleven windows. Maybe there's a window into the house and
then the it because it isn't enclosed back porch, all
(03:15):
the outside sides are.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Windows.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Uh, and so the house is actually one color with
white trim. And then, you know, so I painted the
back porch to look like the rest of the like
the outside of the house. And then because it's an
old house, and I had done this on the front porch,
so I did it on back porch. The one the
one beadboard ceiling that I didn't do was my sewing room,
(03:42):
and honestly had if I had the energy to go
back and do it again, I would do it as well,
because it's still a porch. It's a sleeping porch, same concept.
It's got the wall of the house and then two
sides of the room or windows, because that's why.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
This sleeping poor.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I would paint the you know, the thing to do
with the old houses is to paint these seailing board
ceilings what they call hate blue, meaning it lets the
you know, evil spirits out or whatever. But it's supposed
to keep you from getting wasped nests and that kind
of thing, which is not true because that happens all
the time. The blue ceiling looks nice and it doesn't
(04:25):
help with any kind of pest control, I will confess
to that. But I do like the look of the
blue ceiling, because that is, you know, the kind of
the traditional way of painting an old house porch.
Speaker 1 (04:37):
Okay, So I had and the floor.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
You know, you always normally paint the floor of a
porch battleship gray. So I had a gray floor. I
had a color for the house, a body color. I
had a white trim, and I had a blue ceiling, okay.
And I had four doors, and I think eleven windows.
I would have to go back and count them to
make sure, but I think it was eleven all.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
In one ring. Okay.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
So thinking that we were going to get through with
the house in three days was a little underestimation on
our part, but we did get started. Now, first of all,
it was a lot. You know, this is going to
be a relatively cool weekend for us. We're going to
be in the high eighties, and that's a historical event
that we may have to write down.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
For posterity because that does not happen.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
But that was not the case that weekend and the
rest of the fall, And that's one of the reasons
why the hurricane season was so active that year. In fact,
we used up all the letters of the alphabet and
had to go into the Greek alphabet before it was over.
So Hurricane Trina with a K was at the end
of August, so we still had we had Rita and Wilma,
(05:53):
Wilma and we had several others.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So and Kay was in August, so you.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Know, we had a whole bunch of them before that
that were Kay, I mean before Kay. So this year now,
I don't know what the waters and the gulf are,
but that then at least the temperatures around here are
significantly cooler this year than they've been for the last
two years.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
But back to Katrina, so it was hot.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
So that meant it was in the back of the
house faces west. So therefore trying to keep that, you know,
trying to work back there in the with the sun
pouring in through those windows made it really hot. So
it was hard to do it in the middle of
the day, so we had to do it early in
the day.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
We could do we could work on it at night,
that kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Needless to say, we didn't even get a dent in
this in three days, but we did. But that's what
we were doing during Katrina, so you know, and Katrina
didn't really affect us in Texas. It affected New Orleans
and Mississippi and Alabama and that way. Uh, but we
watched it or listened to it on television. And back
(07:04):
then HAROLDO. Rivera worked for Fox News, and so, uh,
the TV was on in the kitchen, which is the
room of the house that the back porch is built
around at least two sides, and so the the TV
was on top of the fridge, and so even if
I couldn't see it, I could hear it. So Haralda
(07:27):
was reporting from New Orleans and we painted all weekend.
And what but what happens in Texas a lot of times,
and this happened in Katrina, is that a lot of
people that have the means to do so and have
you know, RVs and that kind of thing, they will
(07:48):
pack if it's like a hurricane is coming and they're
evacuating the coast, Uh, they will pack up their RV
and they will come stay in like a state park
in Texas so that they are you know, out of
the hurricane zone. And then once it's over and they
can they will go back. Well, the problem with this
(08:09):
was after the hurricane hid and then that next week
when the levees broke.
Speaker 1 (08:16):
These people didn't have anything to go back too, and.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
So you know, then they're in something of a dilemma
because they're living in a state park in there, RV.
And at least, you know, some of them probably tried
to go back to see if they had anything left.
But it was it was you know, that was the
part that I remember the most, the aftermath of Katrina
(08:41):
as it related to us.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
But what but a really a.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Really strange thing happened while I was painting the back porch.
I looked up at one point and there is this
gigantic white dog staring at me through the back door,
and I, you know, I'm like, hello, dog, where did
you come from? So I go out to see about
(09:07):
the dog, and the dog is real shy, I won't
have anything to do with me. And then I look
and then I get to looking around and there's not
one of them, but there's two of them. It was
two snow white. I mean, they didn't have anything out
of them but white. So I think they were great Pyrenees.
They were huge, I mean, biggest dogs I'd seen lately.
But you could tell they were very they were distraught
(09:33):
and they were together. They were not and they were
not going anywhere that they didn't go together. Well, I
gave them, you know, I got something to put some
water in. And at this point in time, we didn't
have any dogs because our most recent dog had passed
away and it was about a year and we had
not gotten another one yet, so we didn't have any
dog food or anything to feed them. And so but
(09:56):
I did fix them a pan of water. So I
took some water and I put it out there, and
one of them would not come get water, but the
other one did. And then they settled down and they
laid under the side porch because the deck there is
kind of open, and they laid there in the dirt
on the side porch, and they slept all day long.
And all day were like, well, we can't keep these dogs.
(10:17):
We don't how many dog food we're gonna do these dogs.
And so finally towards the end of the day's sister said,
I'm going to town and get some dog food because
they need something to eat. So while she's gone to
get dog food, they disappeared and we never saw them again.
And I've often wondered if they were refugees from Katrina
and somehow nether they got separated from their people because
(10:41):
they appeared to be on a mission and going somewhere
and they had just they were exhausted, so they laid
down to rest before they kept going. So I always
wondered what happened to those two dogs after they left us,
because they were you could tell that they were very upset,
and it was it was a sad thing.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
So back to Katrina.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
If you look at what happened in Katrina, first of all,
it hit a major city, so that was that. And
you know how people in the prepper sphere say that
cities are consumers, not producers of goods, and that you know,
when those goods run out, they run out and then
people are and so the problem was these people were stranded.
(11:24):
And I did a couple of episodes on a Netflix
series that we watched called Five Days at Memorial, and
it was about Memorial Hospital, which was downtown New Orleans
and what happened to the patients there.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Because in all of their and they.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Had this huge gigantic disaster preparedness notebook for the hospital,
the one scenario that they had never planned for, apparently,
was for the hospital to beflow and have to be
evacuated which is really kind of ironic at this point
in time, because New Orleans is literally below sea level.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
It sits in a boat. And if you and it's
the levees.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
That keep the water from coming into New Orleans, well,
if you had a hospital or any other kind of
structure in a place that was below sea level, it
would stand the reason the most important thing that you
would prepare for would be a flood.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
But apparently they did not.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
And so if I don't remember what episodes these are,
I'll go I'll go back and put it in the
description scene know I how to scroll and look for them.
It talks about the five days and what they did
and how.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
The end result was.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
What end result was about forty something people died, and
some of those people died.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
At the first or along during the.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Top five days, and a fairly large number of them
died at the end, and the the understanding is they
were helped to die. So it's an interesting watch from
the standpoint of being in a hospital or having a
loved one in a hospital, and being in a disaster and.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Being in a major city.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Okay, and there's several characters in the show. For example,
there's an elderly woman who is in the hospital and
I want to say maybe with her daughter, and her
son and his wife are somewhere else and are there
(13:41):
in Louisiana, but they're out in the country and they
have a generator and all the all the stuff, and
so at one you know, of course, the phones start
because they don't have electricity, so they don't have a
way to charge their phone.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
So you know, their phones are going out.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
They don't have any way to communicate, and that was
another part of the problem is that they could not
get anybody to answer them as they tried. I mean,
they tried email, they tried call in, they tried you
name it, they tried doing it, and they could not
get anybody to respond to them. So they were literally
(14:16):
cut off from all communications. So that's one of those
important things that preppers talk about is communication. But eventually
the daughter of the woman gets a hold of her
brother and says, you have to come get us, and
so he and his wife start that direction and they
(14:37):
drive as far as they can and they get to
a fire station, and the fire station they explained to
you know, there's a whole bunch of people at the
fire station who are waiting to go into New Orleans
to help, but nobody's given anybody any kind of direction.
Now that is where things end. And I mean, you know,
(14:59):
this is not the go These are just normal people
who want to help, and in his case, he's trying
to get his mother out.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So they find they find some guys.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
With some boats with almost like those swamp boats you
see in the Everglades with the big motor on the back,
and they go into New Orleans. And now, first of all,
the guys say, we won't go in dark as we'll
get shot. So they go during the next day and they,
you know, take these boats and they see how bad
New Orleans is because you know, nobody on the outside
(15:32):
except you know, the folks. I always wondered what these
crazy people with the news agencies were doing because they
were you know, I know about Fox News. They were
standing on it with a bunch of people who were
standing on an overpass. Well, okay, so you're assuming that
the people from the news agency have supplies like water
(15:55):
or whatever. Are you not sharing with these people that
are standing in the brool and hot sun. I mean,
there were a lot of questions I had about the
news media coverage of Katrina. But that's a rabbit hole anyway.
So they go into New Orleans. They get to the
hospital and he tells the whoever the administrators are, she's
(16:15):
going with me, and so they pick her up out
of the hospital bed and put her in the boat,
and of course everybody in the hospital was to get
in the boat with them, and they had to. And
in fact, the security guard kind of makes a deal
with a guy on the side that he's going to
jump in the boat. At the end, he's going to
help them keep all these people at bay, and then
(16:37):
at the very end he's going to jump in the boat,
which he did, and everybody that was left watching the
boats leave was obviously very angry anyway, But that kind
of tells you that it gives you and this was
a realistic scenario of how this went over time. So
(16:58):
if you have not watched that sea, I recommend it because.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
It gives you an idea.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Now, they actually arrested a couple of people and file charges,
and I think eventually those charges were dropped. They did
not pursue it because of the fact that basically they said,
if they do this.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Excuse me. It was a doctor and a nurse. I think.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
The argument was, if we actually pursue this, then no
doctor or healthcare provider will be willing to stay in
a hospital during a during a hurricane or an emergency.
They will all pick up their stuff and leave, and
then there will be no medical assistance. So and there,
(17:48):
you know, there's an argument for that.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So they did not.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
And the problem wasn't that these people that these two
people helped people die chemically, but because the problem was
anybody that could be evacuated they had at that by
that point. So these people literally could not be evacuated
because if they tried to evacuate them, they were gonna die. Well,
(18:12):
if they were gonna die if you evacuated them, and
you couldn't leave them there because the parish health commissioner
or whoever he was told them that they that they
all had to be out by five.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
O'clock, then what were you gonna do with it?
Speaker 2 (18:26):
I mean, you know, they were in a an untenable
situation at that point. So that's the interesting thing about
this whole scenario. Anyway, The bottom line is these were people.
You know, it's the don't be where you don't have
(18:47):
any help. Now I will say that one of the
things that the general public has learned since Katrina is
that people are not coming to help. And what happened
in Helene is you actually had private citizens helping. So
there's a big, obviously veteran community in that area apparently,
(19:10):
and so it was veterans that got together, like the
g Y veterans got together and did stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I mean, people came with their own.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Personal helicopters, funding the fuel out of their own pocket
to rescue people from these mountain towns because nobody was
coming to help them.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
And it wasn't a big city, so you know, you didn't.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Have news coverage, you didn't have a major network standing
on the overpass interviewing people who were standing in the heat,
because these were very isolated mountain villages basically, you know,
just communities. So if it hadn't been for the private citizens,
more people would have died in Helene than actually did.
(19:52):
But the bottom line is that's where a lot of
people in fact bear Independence says, you know, because I
listen to his channel, he says Katrina, because he was
contracted to do debris removal for Katrina by some bigger company,
and he said when he saw what happened and how
(20:14):
nobody helped people that he realized that we might want
to help ourselves, and so that was his beginning of
his preparedness journey.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
I remember seeing this, and I remember Lee.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
I mean, I remember Katrina, but what really got my
attention was the next one, which was Rita. Because Rita
hit Texas, and it hit Southeast Texas, and it hit
areas like Houston, Baytown, Beaumont, Port Arthur.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
It hit those towns.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Uh, and that's where a very large section of the
evacuees from Katrina of were. They were in Southeast Texas,
and so they had already been evacuated once they had nothing.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
They were in the soup. Uh.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
They were in the uh what whatever they It used
to be the Astrodome, but it's whatever is in Houston
now is the Big Arena and the name escapes me
at this point.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
But they were in anything that they could have for
a shelter.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
In fact, I heard a story of some private citizens
that were helping with buses of.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Katrina evacuees.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And I want to say this was in Bytown or
somewhere in that area. And the man called home to
his wife and he said, take take everything out of
my closet. Leave me a pair of shorts and a
T shirt, he said, but you bring everything else because literally,
the people getting on the buses in New Orleans and
(22:01):
ending up in southeast East Texas, if they had clothes
on their back, they didn't have much, and you know,
they're wet, and they were nasty, and they you know,
they'd been in them forever. And so this I mean,
he literally cleaned out his closet.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
So uh.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
But what happened is when when Rita. When Rita happened,
then you had a crisis on top of another crisis.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
So you had people who.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Had already been evacuated, were already traumatized, might already be
separated from their family members, and they were being.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Evacuated again. Uh, and that just made it that much
more chaotic.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
I probably have a lot of noise going on because
you can hear my when show wipers could training. So
that's when it got my attention, because that's when there
were As you went south in East Texas, probably one
hundred miles inland, it was.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Like you traveled at your own risk.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
You didn't know if you could get gas, you didn't
know what you were going to run into it was
kind of like a no man's land. Okay. So Rita
made Katrina that much worse, at least in South Texas,
and so then all of those people had to be
dispersed to every part of Texas.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
So you had people.
Speaker 2 (23:30):
In the Dallas area, you had people in the Austin area.
I mean, you had people everywhere. Everywhere there was a
place to put people. They were one of our schools
in our area. There was actually a church camp inside
the district boundaries of their school district, and so a
(23:52):
bunch of Katrina evacuees ended up there and then the
school had to send you know, the school buses out
or a school bus out to pick up the children
there and bring them into the school district. I mean
into the schools too, you know, for education, because I
mean we were literally or schools in in Texas were
enrolling uh Katrina evacuee children. Excuse me, and those children,
(24:20):
uh you know they there were they didn't have any
records that I mean, it was it was a hot
mess as far as the schools go.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
And this.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
These the people that were in this church camp were
you know, basically out of their element. For example, none
of these people could drive or had ever had a car,
and so now they hear they were in rural Texas
and they couldn't understand how were people supposed to get
(24:54):
around here, And so they asked that, you know, they
wanted to take the school buses into town, and the
and the school employees had to say, I'm sorry, you
can't do that.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
This is only for the students.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
And so they would say, well, how do people get
around here if you don't have a car, And they said, well,
you have to have a car, or you have to
have a friend with a car, because we don't have
public transportation out here in the country. And that was
and they had never had to do that because they
lived in a city and they had city transportation. They
have buses and all kinds of things that could get
them around, and that's not the case in the country. So,
(25:29):
as I said, a lot of people can trace their
preparedness journey back to Hurricane Katrina and the understanding that
the government is not coming to help.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Now I'm gonna say one more thing.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
I'm just gonna throw it out there and then we're
gonna stop because I'm at work, and again, I have
a lot to do today because we're getting off early.
This was during George Bush's term, okay, and there isn't
it before George Bush was Bill Clinton. And the reason
I say that is because this is not a political commentary.
(26:07):
But what I'm saying is growing up myself, since I'm
a baby boomer, a big deal growing up because of
the Cold War was the was the Civil Defense Organization.
And the emphasis was on the on having civil defense chapters,
(26:29):
organizations whatever in every community so that it was to
build up the resiliency of the communities. Communities were supposed
to be able to have supplies and have shelters and
have the Civil Defense Organization. Was was a big deal, okay.
And and because of that, you know, growing up, we
(26:51):
had films that we watched and you know, explaining how
important it was to be prepared in case we had
a nuclear blast or whatever. Okay, Well, because we went
so long in the Cold War and we didn't really
have and then you know when during Reagan's time, basically
(27:12):
the Soviet Union was dismantled. So by the time we
got to the Clinton administration, you know, and we thought
the threat was over. Really now in twenty twenty five,
we're talking about nuclear war like it's the next week's
football game. But back in the excuse me, the nineties,
you know, that kind of thing went by the wayside.
(27:34):
So the thought was at that point, well, let's just
centralize all this stuff and we'll put it at the
federal government level and we'll call it the Federal Emergency
Management Administration AKA FEMA. Well, guess who didn't help when
it came to Katrina.
Speaker 1 (27:52):
FEMA.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
So everybody is standing around expecting the government to help,
and the government didn't help. And so that's why so
many people can trace their preparedness back to Katrina, because
it was the first major catastrophe that came along after
(28:14):
we switched from Civil Defense to which was community based,
to FEMA, which is federally based. And at that point
in time, there were nobody. Nobody came, nobody helped, nobody
knew what to do. There was I mean, people just
basically stood around looked at each other. Well, and that's
(28:35):
when normal people, regular ordinary people, discovered that maybe we
might want to think about how we can help ourselves
because this didn't go well. And then since then we've
had multiple other examples that proved the same thing. But
Katrina probably was the first after FEMA was formed.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I remember the first Bush which.
Speaker 2 (29:03):
Was before Clinton, so that would be before we had
FEMA when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida, and Hurricane Andrew was
probably I think it was a category five when it hit.
I do not think it was category three, which is
what Katrina was. Literally it wiped houses off their slabs
and people were writing there or painting their insurance account
(29:30):
number on their slab so that as the insurance companies
flew over or came through, they could tell whose house
that was and what insurance company was going to pay
for it, and what they did for people. Then, in
that particular instance is that President Bush sent the army in,
(29:54):
and the army sent set up tents and gave people
places to live so that they could good. And Hurricane
Andrew would have a would have been the first hurricane
of the season, so it was summertime and it was Florida,
so but they set up they made almost like tent
cities so people had a place to live because they're
literally it wiped out homestead of Florida, I mean completely
(30:17):
off the map nearly, but there was a response. It's
when we went to having FEMA that we quit having
a response. You know, when we federalized, it wasn't just
something where people said, Okay, well here's the problem this,
we're going to take care of it. Now we have
an administration, we have an agency that's going to do this. Well,
that's where when you when you make more bureaucracy, you're
(30:41):
less likely to be able to get stuff done. I'm
going to say that's an opinion, but I think it's
an opinion based in evidence anyway. Moral of the story,
after all of this, to the best of our ability,
we need to be able to take care of ourselves.
It's Friday, a holiday weekend. I will not be making
(31:02):
a post on Monday. I'm probably gonna work out on Sunday,
so it might make one.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
Then, Uh, talk to you soon. Have a good holiday
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The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
The Charlie Kirk Show
Charlie is America's hardest working grassroots activist who has your inside scoop on the biggest news of the day and what's really going on behind the headlines. The founder of Turning Point USA and one of social media's most engaged personalities, Charlie is on the front lines of America’s culture war, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of students on over 3,500 college and high school campuses across the country, bringing you your daily dose of clarity in a sea of chaos all from his signature no-holds-barred, unapologetically conservative, freedom-loving point of view. You can also watch Charlie Kirk on Salem News Channel