Book drawing winner

Margaret from Illinois won the book drawing for Gumbo Justice in a random drawing of everyone who left comments on the Katrina blogs. Thanks everyone for reading!

Hurricane Katrina Anniversary- Part 3

This is the last segment of the Hurricane Katrina Anniversary. If you post a comment on any of my Katrina blogs, you will be entered in a drawing for a signed copy of Gumbo Justice. I will be doing the drawing over the weekend, and will post the winner then.


Katrina Anniversary Bog- Part 3

Two close friends of mine stayed in New Orleans for the hurricane, coincidentally, each the Godfather of one of my daughters. Both had very different experiences.

Danny stayed at his house in mid-city. His house was raised, and didn’t flood. After a few days without electricity, he would have left, but an elderly neighbor who lived around the corner from him refused to leave, and he wouldn’t leave her behind. The police and National Guard tried to strong arm him into leaving, but he had provisions and was happy to stay and watch over his belongings and his neighbor. He ventured out frequently. With no electricity, it was the darkest dark he had ever seen. Gunshots were frequent. Occasionally, bodies floated by, including one in a police uniform. There was little to be done with no phone service, no way for police to retrieve the bodies, and no place to put the bodies until they could be carted away for autopsy.

Robbie also stayed behind, in his house in Lakeview, on Canal Boulevard, a street name that would prove to be appropriate after the 17th Street Canal failed. Robby, like Danny, had the means to leave. Unlike Danny, Robbie didn’t have a neighbor to look out for, but did have a cat, and cats weren’t welcomed at shelters or most motels. When Robbie’s house began filling with water, the first thing he did was grab his cat and put her in a cat carrier. He ended up swimming back and forth in his driveway with the cat carrier over his head, until he finally made it to a set of raised railroad tracks.

From the tracks, he tried to retrieve his furniture, now floating past him. He managed to save a few pieces and put them on the tracks, but it was pointless. He ended up leaving it all behind anyway. He also saw people floating by, screaming for help, beginning to drown. He tried to help them, but they were too far away from the tracks, and there was nothing he could do. He ended up making a very long trek to the Superdome, through water up to his chest, holding his cat above his head.

Outside the Superdome, he was greeted by an eerie sight- a line of cats and dogs, sitting and staring, confused, waiting to be retrieved by their hopeless owners who felt forced to leave them behind. When he tried to enter the dome, he was told he could not bring his cat in, nor would he be allowed to bring her with him when the buses showed up to evacuate people. So he left, and went to Danny’s, not prepared to relegate his Fluffy to that line of sad, abandoned cats and dogs waiting for masters who would never come back for them.

Danny’s elderly neighbor eventually agreed to leave, and when she did, Danny left as well. The safety issues were less important to him than the comfort issues, and he was ready for civilization again. He managed to contact someone by text message to meet him on the interstate, and he walked. Robby also eventually met up with his family in Baton Rouge, where he spent some time in the hospital, covered with boils from a staph infection he caught from the flood waters. He was one of many treated for what they were terming Katrina rash.

I returned home exactly 2 weeks after the hurricane to minor roof damage, with working electricity and water service. Phone service and cable took a little longer, but we got them back pretty quickly. I was more isolated back home with no t.v. or cable for a few days than I had been in Houston, and it was an uneasy time. Only a few men in our neighborhood had returned, and had not brought their families back yet, and my two girls and I were pretty much alone all day while my husband, a contractor, supervised a team from Texas repairing roofs. There was a silence like I had never experienced. Ours was the only air-conditioner running, and then when the cable service was restored, the only t.v.. We had to drive two hours to Thibodeaux to find a grocery that was stocked with meat and other freezer foods, and where we didn’t have to wait in line an hour just to get in the door.

The smell was sometimes overwhelming, whether from moldy refrigerators, the rotten food everyone had to bury in their backyards, the stagnant water that had yet to drain from some neighborhoods, or the corpses that had yet to be removed from the flood. Flies the size of small birds came from nowhere, but were particularly nasty at the gas stations for some reason. Gas was another thing we had to wait in line for, and it was a good idea not to go anywhere if you couldn’t gas up near home, because you never knew if gas would be available at the next station. Debris was still a danger, clogging the streets and puncturing tires, and power lines were still down in many areas.

Driving around the un-flooded sections of town was odd. Very few cars on the roads, curfew at dark, and near the area of the breach, the streets were gone, the houses either destroyed or moved by the wall of water. Where streets once sat was nothing but sand. An occasional street sign had not been destroyed, and provided a vague landmark. Houses were crushed, others sat in the middle of what had once been the street.

Stories of shootings and rapes were still prevalent. Some of these were certainly tall tales, or exaggerated versions of true stories, but some of the stories were true, and were covered up, or at least denied to the media. One particularly sad and chilling story was of local icon, Charmaine Neville. She ended up commandeering a bus and driving a busload of people out of the city after the flood, but not before saving herself and a neighbor from the rising waters only to be raped by a stranger trying to get to higher ground. She is certainly not alone in her tragedy.

It should come as no big surprise that mental health issues increased, exacerbated by the fact that most of the mental health facilities either did not reopen, or were closed down after they did because of lack of funding. Murder/suicides also increased, especially domestic.

I definitely didn’t have it as bad as some people, although my way of life was affected. I relied upon public assistance for the first time in my life, receiving food stamps for a two month period as well as a check from Red Cross, something I never would have thought I would need to do. While my credit card companies would wait for payment, the bank for my mortgage and car note expected any shortage to be made up in the next three months, as opposed to tacking the missing payment on at the end of the loan. Why they thought any of us would be in a position to pay extra in the coming months, when many people were out of jobs, is beyond me, but it wasn’t worth not paying it now if I could, instead of having to find extra money a month from now. Not knowing what the future was going to hold, I didn’t want to take the chance. So my Red Cross check went to bills and the groceries were paid for, so until my husband actually got paid– some people needed to wait for insurance claims to pay him– we made due. Unlike most of Louisiana, for some reason FEMA denied me payment. I must have filled out the forms wrong on the internet, but I helped my mother fill hers out and she received her money without a problem, so I’m not sure what happened.

Katrina was definitely a shock to all of us, but we tend to focus on all the bad things that happened– the lack of government reaction, the way some of our police turned into murderers, the way some of our citizens stole big screen t.v.’s on National Television. As a city, we have a lot to be ashamed of.

On the other hand, the good stories don’t make the papers. For every thug who looted a store for a gun, there is a decent person who pulled a stranger from raging flood waters. For every cop who shot an unarmed person in error, there is one who saved a baby from a roof. And for every doctor who overdosed a terminal patient on morphine, there is a guy who refused to leave until he made sure his neighbor was safe.

Ultimately, if you view the lowest point in the life of any person or any city as a tragedy unfolds, you’re going to see a lot of ugly. Hopefully, those who actually experienced it will be able to show the good as well. And God forbid if such a scenario repeats itself, we will all know what to do next time.

Holli Castillo

Hurricane Katrina Anniversary- Part 2

August 29, 2005


The television in our hotel room never went off the day Katrina made landfall. I knew it was probably not good for my two girls, but it was the only news we could get. We watched the tracking on the national news channels and the weather channel, as Katrina stealthily approached. She wobbled every so often, but we were experienced enough with tracking storms that we recognized it for what it was, and knew by the next hourly update, she would be back on course. And she was.


The day before, my kids had been bored. We hadn’t brought toys, because we left sort of on the fly, not believing we would be gone for that long, but after only one day, the girls wanted to play. I took them to the hotel lobby, which had a small pond with two swans in it, and to the hotel restaurant, which had a creepy balloon man I still think was a pedophile. The girls sensed something was wrong with him and my youngest hid his substandard balloon animal in the closet until she decided to pop it. I warned them he might be the bad man we've talked about, and to stay away from him. I didn't have to tell them twice.

We also went to the Galleria. I felt blessed when the Disney store had 40 percent off of everything for Katrina evacuees with an I.D.. Not knowing how long we would be gone, I didn’t how far my bank account was going to stretch, something I hadn’t considered before we evacuated. The room wasn’t cheap, anywhere from $99 to $179 per night, depending upon what day of the week, and I was putting it all on my American Express card. I didn’t know then that a little thing on my insurance policy called “loss of use,” would reimburse me, although not in time to pay the bill.

My husband was a contractor, if he didn’t work, he didn’t make money. I have a contract through the state to do criminal appeals, but I had no idea if I would get paid if I wasn’t actually working, and I couldn’t work from Houston. I didn’t worry a whole lot yet, though. Something inside kept me believing it wasn’t going to be as bad as the newscasters were making it out to be.
My husband arrived from New Orleans early Monday morning, in the wee hours, before Katrina hit land. He brought my laptop, and it became my lifeline to the world back home. I connected with NOLA.com, our local newspaper’s website. They have excellent forums for people to communicate with each other and post news, and eventually to post requests for news about missing people, but at first there was nothing to report. My husband and family slept while I watched the news and surfed the internet looking for information.

Early in the morning, we saw the first images from the French Quarter. The worst we saw was a few bricks from the top of an older building had fallen on a car. There was not a lot of flooding, and the wind damage was not as bad as it could have been. New Orleans East had been hit the hardest in the metropolitan New Orleans area, as the storm had made landfall further east than tracked. Slidell, Louisiana, took a huge hit, as did Bay St. Louis and the coast of Mississippi. We felt somewhat relieved.

My husband called one of our neighbors, who was a police officer and had stayed in town. The neighbor, Mike, said we had a little flooding, he and a few other men who had stayed behind pulled debris from the drainage system and the flooding went down. Part of one of my trees had been destroyed, and all of our roofs had damage, but it didn’t sound too bad.

About an hour later, new reports began coming in. Water was rising in the French Quarter from an unknown source. People began arriving at the Superdome, the “shelter of last resort,” with stories of massive tidal wave type flooding, people trapped on roofs of houses, screaming for help, others drowning, swept up in the water.

The first levee that I heard had failed was at the 17th Street canal. My daughter’s school was two blocks away from this canal. Many of her new friends lived in this neighborhood. Through Nola.com, I learned the school was okay, but only because our sheriff’s department sandbagged right along the canal, keeping a lot of the water from going into Old Metairie. New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, and the less affluent areas of Metairie, were flooding.

The time line actually was something like this:

At 4:30 a.m., the Industrial Canal leaked through drainage gates into neighborhoods on both sides of the I-10, creating a minor flood compared to what was to come.

At 6:10, Katrina made landfall at Buras, Louisiana, and a wall of water 21 feet high crossed the Mississippi river levees, flooding Plaquemines Parish.

At 6:30 a.m., the tidal surge built in the Intercoastal waterway and the levees were overtopped, sending St. Bernard under water.

At 9:00 a.m., the surge in the London Avenue Canal rose, the levee panels began bending, and water began leaking into yards, creating a minor flood.

At 9:30 a.m., the east side of the same levee failed, putting parts of Gentilly under water.

At 9:45, the 17th Street canal levee wall panels failed, filling mid-city, Lakeview, and parts of Metairie with water.

At 10:30, the west side panels of the London Canal failed, adding 8 feet of water to the already flooded Gentilly.

Then we heard the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, or MRGO as we call it, a shipping channel, had levee failure, flooding more of New Orleans. The MRGO crosses the Industrial Canal or Intercoastal waterway, and goes through St. Bernard. The Industrial canal connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, separates New Orleans East from the rest of the city, and divides the lower 9th Ward from the Upper 9th Ward. The failure of the levees of MRGO and the Industrial Canal caused the bulk of the flooding portrayed on t.v. and movies, but the 17th Street Canal caused the Lakeview and mid-city flood, while the little known London Avenue Canal caused the decimation of Gentilly.

These canals lead from the river to the lake. Because of the levee failures, Lake Pontchartrain would continue filling the city until the amount of water outside the lake leveled off with the amount of water inside the lake. That's a whole lot of water.

The day Katrina hit, I spent the entire day back and forth between the computer and the front desk of the hotel. I had only booked the room until Monday, that day, and the hotel said they were overbooked and didn’t know if they were going to be able to let us stay. I had to continuously check with them, while frantically trying to book another room elsewhere in Houston. Unfortunately, Houston was pretty full up with New Orleans people right then.

My mother and I got in a tiff because she complained I spent too much time on the computer and not enough taking care of my children, which I guess she kind of failed to realize was part of the reason she was there. I wanted to yell at her to do something, anything, to help us out. Take the kids for lunch or find us another room or something, but I guess she was so used to having everything done for her she couldn’t even contemplate taking the lead. It was driving me crazy. We were all worried about the condition of our homes, our neighborhoods, wondering if our lives would ever go back to normal, but I was also worried about where we would be spending that night, and the only way I had of checking that out was on the computer. She snipped ALMOST under her breath that she was just going to leave and go rent a car (because of course she rode with me instead of taking her own car), and book her own room and stay somewhere else. I wanted to ask how she was getting to the rental car place, and how was she going to book a room, particularly since there were none available, but I dismissed her bitterness as her own nerves. (I was almost tempted to ask her for half of the money for the room she had already stayed in before she left, at least until I received my insurance check, but that was me being ugly and my frustrations coming to a head.)

The hotel would never commit to more than one day at a time the whole two weeks we were there. Before Katrina, during a category 1 hurricane called Cindy in July, I had decided to start looking for an evacuation house, something no more than 5 or 6 hours away from home, so we could travel to it when necessary, but far enough away to be safe from hurricanes. I had looked in parts of Louisiana after Cindy, but had kind of let it slip my mind until now. I vowed during that hotel stay that no matter what else I did that year, I was going to get an evacuation house, and would never go through that again. I did end up buying an evacuation house the following February, in the hills of rural Northern Alabama, and have never regretted it.

Eventually, we got the room worked out, and the day after Katrina, my husband, his father, and his brother decided they were going to be cavemen and go home and brave it, with no electricity or running water. No one was allowed back in town yet, but my husband is a deputy constable, and badged his way in to town. They all lasted a single night without a/c, but my husband did manage to clean out the two maggot-infested refrigerators at my house as well as my mother’s. Cell phones were still not working in the area, but text messaging was, so we were able to communicate while he was gone.

Our house had roof damage, in my daughters’ playroom and my office, but only a few toys, children’s books and small appliances were ruined. My husband and his entourage came back a day later, and we remained in Houston for nearly two weeks.

My husband went home a day before we did, but I was extremely apprehensive. We were still hearing stories of looting and gunshots, although a lot of that had stopped with the national guard in town, but that brought a series of other problems, such as a curfew at dark. It was particularly scary because police from all over Louisiana, as well as the rest of the country, were in town, in uniforms, trying to keep the peace. But that also meant any impostor could don a police uniform and pretend to be an officer.

My daughter’s Godfathers stayed for the storm, both with different experiences of what happened during Katrina, and will be highlighted in part three, as well as how our life changed after Katrina.

Hurricane Katrina Anniversary- Part 1

On this date five years ago, I was living in a state of blissful ignorance. It was a Friday, and there was a hurricane called Katrina that we were sort of keeping an eye on. I say sort of, because forecasters had it going to Florida. We figured it would hit Florida and weaken as it traveled inland, as hurricanes do, and we might get a few showers, maybe a little wind. We had already thought, as this time, that we had missed the big one.

I sent my daughter to school that day, the first Friday of the first week of first grade, in a new school no less. She had attended a Catholic school for Pre-K and Kindergarten, but the first of several magnet schools to come had opened in our parish, and although it meant a half-hour drive every morning and afternoon, when my daughter tested in there was no doubt we would try it out.
My younger daughter, a little over a month away from turning four, stayed home with me every day, having just missed the cut off for Pre-K by three days.

In any event, that day started the same as every other day that week, nothing special. There was no talk of a hurricane, and no provisions had been discussed at the school. Just as we were not busy securing our houses or packing our belongings, the school system was not taking the time to secure the buildings for a big storm, nor send home the plethora of school supplies we had just purchased.

Sometime Friday night, well after school and work hours, the newscasters started to get a little jumpy. One in particular who tends to be a Chicken Little had the sky falling, and soon the other weathermen joined her.

I alternated between calling my mother, who had been living alone for the past six months since my father died, and lived about fifteen minutes away from me, and calling my sister, who had a four-month old baby and a nine-year old. We vacillated, unable to decide if we should evacuate. Many times in the past we had contemplated, sometimes going so far as making reservations, and then deciding to stay put and not leave.

By late Friday night, we still believed everyone was overreacting. My mother tried to talk me out of evacuating. It was assumed if we left, my mother would come with me, and she really didn’t want to leave. My sister’s husband worked for some internet tech company, and if an evacuation was officially ordered, he would be relocated to continue working to keep websites up, and my sister and her children would go with him.

Late Friday night I made reservations. I assumed, as did so many of us, that we would be gone for the weekend, and by Monday when the storm didn’t hit us or didn’t turn out to be as bad as we thought, we would be going back home. We were going to Houston, mainly because it was the New Orleans thing to do. I had been to Houston so many times I knew exactly where I wanted to stay, and what areas I wanted to avoid. I ended up reserving a room with two queen beds and a sofa bed for me, my mother and my two girls, because my husband had decided he was going to brave it out. Our hotel was something like 67 steps from the Macy’s entrance to the Galleria, and had swans in the lobby. I figured if we were going to be stuck out of town for the weekend, we might as well be comfortable.


We waited until the following day, Saturday, and threw together a few bags of our belongings, and hit the road prior to the mandatory evacuation being called. Traffic was fine until we hit Lake Charles, Louisiana, right before the Louisiana/Texas border. There was a wreck, and with all of the people fleeing the state, it put us off schedule by several hours. The normal 5 ½ hour trip took 9 hours. We arrived late that night, but we arrived, checked in, and started watching CNN.

After staying up all night and watching the various news channels, I called my husband and convinced him to get on the road and join us. Katrina had been upgraded to an expected category 5, with a track of a direct hit on our city. He left Sunday evening, and the rain began as he was still making his way out of Louisiana. He ended up at the hotel early Monday morning, mere hours before the hurricane made landfall.

And then we watched the cable news channels and waited.

I’ll post part 2, Katrina’s landfall, on the August 29, the fifth year anniversary.

I have finally learned how to put a photo inside the blog pages today, so if this works out, you will be looking at a photo of my dog and Deaf Kitty, my poor deaf kitten that escaped this weekend and had a hell of a Saturday morning after sleeping under a car in the rain, being attacked by a pit bull, and was finally saved by the pit bull's owner who put Deaf Kitty in a cat carrier, i.e. prison cell for cats. But here goes nothing.

I am thinking of writing a short story or collaborating with my 8-year-old daughter on a book called, The Adventures of Deaf Kitty.

Back from Vegas

I am back from the PSWA conference in Las Vegas and came home to New Orleans to hear the oil spill had been capped, the cap was knocked off by a robot, and they were trying to get it recapped last I watched the news. That's what I get for putting on the news instead of the soaps.

My weather man doesn't love me anymore- he says there is a "system" that will probably be a named storm soon. Early in the year to be watching for hurricanes. The Princeton model, which is supposed to be somewhat accurate, had it developing into a hurricane and hitting New Orleans. Not the time, I tell you.

But back to Vegas. I actually learned a few things that I wrote down this time that I think will help my writing. Small things about pacing to build suspense, voice, and putting characters in the most uncomfortable and difficult places or situations possible. The info came at a great time, as I'm trying to get Jambalaya Justice finished to send it off to my publisher. I actually rewrote the beginning in Vegas, after being inspired by one of the speakers.

Speaking of inspiration, thriller/horror writer Simon Wood was the keynote speaker and spoke about writing a thriller. While Gumbo Justice falls more into mystery, I incorporate a lot of thriller elements to build up suspense, and his talk was quite helpful. Of course, with his British accent I could listen to him recite the dictionary or the phone book and be enthralled, so maybe I'm not the best judge. He was quite charming and approachable, not to mention funny.

That's one thing I have to say about the PSWA conference--nearly everyone has a great sense of humor, and nobody gets bent out of shape if you poke a little fun at their expense. For the most part, the writers who show up are from every level, from the unpublished to those with tens of books, but it's a small enough function with a single track so everyone gets to know everyone else somewhat, and for the most part, everyone checks their egos at the door.

The hotel was also nice, off the Vegas strip but just barely. We could see the strip from our window. More than the hotel, the food at the conference was top notch. Living in New Orleans I hardly ever find food elsewhere that satisfies me emotionally, and I have to say this was one of the first times away from home that I was able to find food I actually consider good.

All in all, the conference and Vegas were quite a treat. Now I just have to worry about what may be coming to New Orleans in the next few months weather-wise and oil-wise. If it gets bad, maybe I can go back to Vegas.

We have so much going on in New Orleans right now I am trying to figure out what to write about.

First and foremost, we have just started hurricane season June 1, and already they are watching something that has a 60 percent chance of becoming a storm in the next 2 days. This doesn't worry me so much in and of itself, because historically there is little chance of a big one hitting us this early in the season. The gulf isn't warm enough and the conditions would never be appropriate.

It does cause me pause, however, because early storms could mean a bad season, which has already been predicted. It also causes me concern because we're not sure of what effect even a small storm could have on the oil situation. How much destruction will oil being pushed into other waterways or entering the tidal surge have on our coast, our farming, our houses?

Second, five police officers, three current and two former, have just been indicted in a Katrina case where the police are accused of gunning down a man, then putting his body in a car and setting it on fire.

The story is bad; what is worse is that I know two of the current officers, and consider one a friend. In fact, he is married to a former co-worker of mine. They met at the D.A.'s Office, while she and I were both assistant district attorneys and he was an officer. He and the other officer I know are both lieutenants, and I find it extremely difficult to believe my friend would violate the law.

Not just because he's my friend and I support him, but because he is a square, a rule follower, a by the book player. He arrested my brother in law years ago for being in possession of marijuana, and I knew better than to even ask him for any kind of a break on my B-I-L's behalf, because this guy is an i-dotter and t-crosser.

I feel more bad for his wife, my co-worker and friend. She actually went to middle school with my husband, years before I knew either one of them, just to show you how small a city of a half a million people can actually be.

So I'm torn between wanting to see justice served if somehow this friend did do something he wasn't supposed to, and not believing he did it, or if he did have some part in it, there had to be a good reason.

Then the writer in me keeps thinking this needs to be made into a book or a movie, or at least included in one of my Crescent City Mystery Series novels. I am working on Jambalaya and it is all laid out so this particular scenario wouldn't fit in, but the third novel takes place during Katrina, and something of this nature was going to be included, so I could just add this in.

Then again, the entire story would make a compelling movie. I can picture it starting with the trial, and hearing each individual person's testimony, and then flashing back to what actually happened until you get the true story. Except right now I don't know the whole story. I may at some point in the future, when the legal issues have been resolved, visit my friend and see if he is interested in opening up and telling me his version of events.

Finally, I am looking forward to the PSWA writer's conference in Vegas this month, seeing familiar faces and making new friends.