http://image.weather.com/images/maps...us_600x405.jpg
When I look at this projected path, I can only increase my prayers for all those affected by it.
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http://image.weather.com/images/maps...us_600x405.jpg
When I look at this projected path, I can only increase my prayers for all those affected by it.
Many thoughts and prayers for those in Katrina's path.
I know it won't be as strong, but Andy and I are heading for Atlanta, GA. this upcoming Wed. evening. He's worried we'll be driving right into her.
Tonight Katrina will hit us at 75 m.p.h. winds plus major rain!
http://image.weather.com/images/maps...us_600x405.jpg
Good grief-KY is completely yellow (where I live)-we're going to get drenched this week :( But we need it bad
prayers to all in Katrinas path.
Prayers to all in Katrina's path.
If anyone wants to give a donation to the red cross to help the hurricane efforts, call 1-800-HELPNOW or you could contact your local Red Cross.
They are saying that it looks like New Orleans has dodged the bullet again, at least the French Quarter. The west side is getting lots of water though. One of the levee's in the 9th ward has failed. The Superdome has a couple of holes in the roof but the people are still safe.
Mississippi is getting hammered too. They are getting the worse side of the storm. Still lots of storm to go yet.
Alabama is having lots of flooding too.
:(
Prayers are coming...:( We're supposed to get pounded with *rain* tomorrow, but that's definitely not as bad as New Orleans...:(
I just saw the news. Katrina made so much damage :eek: :eek: ;
They also said that the hurricane slowed down now... . I hope it is true!:confused:
I know, and I heard there's 6-8 FEET of water in the roads!:(
I haven't been able to watch the news at all and i'm not sure I want to. Hurricanes are so depressing and upsetting. I hope, although very wishful thinking, no one is critically injured.
:eek: :( :(
that's more than what I thought! I don't think I wanna look up news now..
take care everyone!!! ((those who posted here too))
Yes, so far no one's beenkilled, but alot of people have lost their homes - so sad! I haven't heard from my friend in Mississippi, but I;m hoping she's safe. Prayers for all those affected, and all the animals, pets and wild.
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so sad.. :(
I really hope everyone's ok!!
okay our town is under curfew later on tonight. We are going to go to our coliseum which the Red Cross has opened up for.. We got our leashes and fish bowls and clothes to take with us.. its going to be a long night. i'm so nervous.
You're gonna be ok. :) Good luck and post when you can.
Extra prayers going out for you and your family, petslover! Hopefully you can return home soon. Better to be safe!
The Devastation is Horrible...There is quite a bit of loss of life...So Sad!!!!!
They showed horses standing on a strip of ground about 8 ft. wide by 60 ft.long.....but it was dry.....
They are saying it might Surpass Andrew as to the cost of repair....
So SAD
♥ ((((((((((((((HUGS)))))))))))))) ♥
Its very scary. Around midnight my time the news showed 55 deaths already. :(
Lots of prayers being sent to those affected by Katrina.
My thoughts and prayers are with everybody affected by this horrific disaster. God be with all of you. I am willing to help with whatever I can and I believe that so many people will need help when all is said and done. I can't watch the news without tearing up. It's absolutely devastating.
Terry, Daisy and Delilah
The news is really devastating. I guess I should not watch so much....but it is heartbreaking. Before the hurricane - most of the coverage was about what could happen to downtown New Orleans...but it looks like the saddest damage was in other parts of Louisiana, other states and Mississippi in particular. I pray all I can - but seeing the people and all they have lost:( I just saw a broadcast talking to an older man and he was crying as he described his losses - then told about holding his wife's hand as the water enveloped their house - and now she is missing:) So many are wandering the streets in a daze.
I've been watching the coverage on CNN. Oh my gosh. :( It is ripping my heart apart! I couldn't believe the amount of water......the homes are completely submerged! Those poor people. Such devastation. :(
My prayers continue for those in the path if Katrina.
I agree Poppy. I made myself turn off the news for now - there are just so many *unknowns* that I don't know what to pray for. One man named Jackson saved his children but his house is gone and wife is missing...he was holding her hand :( ....So, I have just asked God to comfort and strengthen.:( :(Quote:
Originally posted by popcornbird
I've been watching the coverage on CNN. Oh my gosh. :( It is ripping my heart apart! I couldn't believe the amount of water......the homes are completely submerged! Those poor people. Such devastation. :(
That man is Harvey Jackson. I saw that on CNN late this morning. It is so sad. Even the reporter was crying.Quote:
Originally posted by sirrahbed
:( I just saw a broadcast talking to an older man and he was crying as he described his losses - then told about holding his wife's hand as the water enveloped their house - and now she is missing:) So many are wandering the streets in a daze.
This entire thing is beyond horrible!
I watched CNN until 2 am. There was a second breech in one of the levee's walls. Now they think there may be a total of 4.
Boats were taking people off of roofs but had to stop and leave lots of them up there because it was too dangerous to continue in the dark because of all the submerged cars, live power lines that were down and stuff.
There have been several fires that can't be put out.
30 people in one apartment complex have been killed.
New Orleans is now under Martial Law.
There are few roads out, not much food or water, gas for rescue cars and other cars is running low.
LA, MS, and AL are all just devistated.
I wish I could comfort everyone with a hug and make it all go away for them. :(
The mayor of one of the towns (Gulfport, MS I believe) just said "this is our own tsunami."
Two people have died in the Super Dome and there is no power. The outside temps will be 91 today. They said the restrooms are deplorable. I wish they could get those people out. I can't imagine the conditions inside there. :(
Just wanted to check in on everyone to let you know we are all safe here. Thanks everyone. It didn't get as bad as they thought in my town, but alot of trees did fall and power was out for awhile. and stuff is blown everywhere..
I really feel for all those who got it worst. God Bless all of them.
Thanks for checking in and letting us know you are ok!Quote:
Originally posted by petslover
Just wanted to check in on everyone to let you know we are all safe here. Thanks everyone. It didn't get as bad as they thought in my town, but alot of trees did fall and power was out for awhile. and stuff is blown everywhere..
I really feel for all those who got it worst. God Bless all of them.
Pam, I agree, I wish they could get everyone out of the Super dome too. It's being surrounded by water now that the levee's are failing. I can't imagine being in there with all those people and no fresh air or ac in 90 degree heat. :(
It is so hard to imangine such incredible devastation.:( I'm
praying for all the familes & pets who are trying to survive day
to day. Sure makes my petty problems pale in comparison.
God bless them all.
I saw that. :( He was crying and the reporter was crying, and as I listened to both of them, I started crying too. Poor guy, I just can't imagine. Just think if this happened in the old days, before we had technology to forecast and evacuate in time. The whole area would be wiped out. Thank God at least MOST of the people were able to get out, but the thought that they will come back to nothing rips me apart. The videos kinda remind me of the storm at the time of Prophet Noah.....just how flooded it is. They need Noah's ARK!Quote:
Originally posted by sirrahbed
I agree Poppy. I made myself turn off the news for now - there are just so many *unknowns* that I don't know what to pray for. One man named Jackson saved his children but his house is gone and wife is missing...he was holding her hand :( ....So, I have just asked God to comfort and strengthen.:( :(
Oh, Liz, you couldn't have said it better! My problems? What problems? - and shame on me for even thinking I might have a few!Quote:
Originally posted by lizbud
It is so hard to imangine such incredible devastation.:( I'm
praying for all the familes & pets who are trying to survive day
to day. Sure makes my petty problems pale in comparison.
God bless them all.
Sometimes it is very difficult to even comprehend what is happening to all of these people. I find that I just cannot watch the television - I just turn it off and start saying prayers for all of those poor people who have lost everything.
:( :( I know it is all so devastating & my heart just wants to go to all.. I do wish they would update us on all the furr babies out there.. There is a big Zoo right off the river there at New Orleans & hope all the animals were able to get to higher ground too.. I just cant even begin to think what all these people & pets are going thru.. Just think last week we were complaining about the heat && now have to state what heat {my world is just fine & cant complain about nothing}..
There's been a influx of evacuees from LA into Houston. The Houston mayor asked all the hotels in the area to give price breaks to evacuees and any price gouging would be dealt with. Hope he follows through on that. Nothing slimier then trying to make a buck off people's misfortune.
They've also opened up numerous shelters in the area for people who can't afford hotels and I'd heard they took in over 400 animals at the Houston SPCA from New Orleans, before the hurricane hit.
I would think that other surrounding cities not effected by the hurricane are also helping out too. And hopefully they'll all continue to help until people can get back on their feet. I can imagine it's going to be awhile before those affected areas are livable again.
Par...
We're getting a few refugees here in Austin, too. However, ours seem to be people with family or friends here.
I hope things get back to normal for these families as soon as possible. :(
Excuse me for being rude, but where are the offers of help from the other countries in the world?
The US is always one of the first to offer to help when anyone else has a disaster but when we need help??????????? :(
Maybe it's time to rethink OUR foreign policy?????
Thought I'd share this story, I stumbled on. I got teary-eyed in several places, especially the part with the dog.
Rare strokes of luck mark rescue
By JAMES VARNEY
Staff report
SLIDELL, La. -- As he pushed his skiff past the big boats aground on the interstate highway, Mike Parks feared the worst.
On the horizon, Parks could just make out the catamaran perched atop the twinspan bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. To his left, car antennas poked above the surface of the white caps splashing against a dealership's display windows, and to his right was the vast, watery plain of Oak Harbor and Eden Isles, the upscale neighborhood that at daybreak had contained more than 1,000 houses, a marina and a sprawling three-story apartment complex with scores of units.
The north shore of Lake Pontchartrain -- the one that existed before Hurricane Katrina -- was some three miles to the south. The home Parks and his wife, Melinda, had moved into less than a year ago was about two and three-quarter miles south. It was about 3 p.m. Monday, roughly four hours after Katrina's ferocious eye wall had shaved Slidell and roared off northeastward toward the Mississippi coast.
"Oh, man, oh, man, I just don't know, I had no idea it would be as bad as this," Parks said as he navigated what had once been a golf course fairway. In every direction, Parks saw houses without roofs, with boats smashed through garages and walls, with possessions mean and exquisite spilling into the dirty water that lapped into their foyers and bedrooms.
The tops of street signs provided some landmarks, but what was once an intricate web of streets and canals was now simply a marine wasteland.
"Even if insurance covers it, do we want to rebuild?" Melinda asked.
Parks, jumping out of the skiff now and then to push it across the shallow water over a driveway, shook his head.
"Let's see if there is anybody we can help first," he said.
And so, like a Titanic lifeboat crew, they puttered among the wreckage of Slidell, La., where authorities said Katrina had killed at least two people and left untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of residents homeless.
In knots creeping along the water's edge, or in motorboats that crisscrossed the flooded landscape, people scavenged for scraps of their former lives. Communications were out everywhere -- even fire and rescue crews were having trouble staying in touch with each other. News from New Orleans or Mississippi was non-existent and the blackout over St. Tammany Parish meant that radio broadcasts carried no information about what was happening across the Northshore.
Throughout Oak Harbor and Eden Isles a creepy calm seemed to have settled over the flotsam of forever shattered lives. In canal network cul de sacs, swaths of boards and shingles and bobbing coolers and appliances formed what appeared to be a solid mass, as if one could walk across the wreckage to the flooded homes just beyond. Boats, some of them whacking big yachts, were aground at weird angles, the air filled with the high-pitched thwack and ping of lines whipping across their booms and masts. Cars had been tossed into homes. Insulation foam bubbled around the fringes of ragged, ripped edges of houses.
And then a screaming came across the water. To his right, Parks saw a woman gesticulating wildly from a second floor balcony at her home. Parks, a captain of sport fishing boats and offshore supply vessels who works out of Gulfport, Miss., navigated closer.
The woman, Ann Nash, told Parks her in-laws were trapped in their house nearby. She had spoken to them that morning, as they crawled into their attic to escape the rising storm surge. Parks agreed to check on them.
But the exact address proved difficult to find. So they pushed on further south toward their own house, figuring they could stop by Nash's in-laws on the return. By now, they were certain they would find little, if anything, worth salvaging.
And then, incredibly, when they motored into the canal behind Cutty Sark Cove, there was their home, largely intact, and sitting atop one of the few mounds of grass still visible. Inside, a slippery layer of mud coated the stone floors and had ruined the carpets, but the water had not reached that high and the meticulous cutout and crayoned tigers and balloon vendors on one wall -- the artwork of Aaron and Brady Parks, identical twins aged two and currently residing with grandparents in Baton Rouge -- was intact.
Melinda Parks opened and closed her mouth like a fish out of water.
"I do not believe it," she said, shaking her head. "I am pleasantly surprised beyond belief."
The Parkses quickly surveyed their astonishing good fortune, stuffed Hershey bars and crackers into a Ziploc baggie, and returned to their skiff. This time, rather than leave the search for the Nashes to chance, he picked up Ann Nash at her home and set off once again.
With Ann Nash guiding, Parks returned to a pocket of a canal he'd searched before, but this time the cries from the boat were returned from shore. Jim Nash, 77, and his wife, Odette, 65, had heard the yells before but could not get out of their attic in time to respond.
Parks cut the motor and the skiff drifted on to the back porch, and the grateful, stunned Nash family was reunited. They were surprisingly upbeat given what they'd endured.
"We really thought we could make it, we were told the water had never gotten much higher than the docks even in big storms," Odette Nash said.
Indeed, she had just hung up a cell phone conversation with an evacuated neighbor around 8 a.m. when she looked out her back window and saw the water coming over the edge and charging her house like a train in a tunnel.
"We just scrambled to the attic and prayed and we've been up there ever since," Odette said.
As the now-crowded skiff returned to Ann Nash's house, Parks encountered two St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's deputies in another boat.
"Are you OK?" one deputy shouted across the canal. "What are you doing out here?"
"We're fine," Parks sang back. "We're rescuing people."
"That's just fine. Thank you," the deputy replied. "We're the first boat that could get out here."
"Second boat," Melinda Parks said softly, a smile creasing her face.
The Nashes deposited on higher ground, Parks turned his skiff toward the Oak Harbor marina and, across the horizon, the oddly lumpy line of the twin span bridges that carry Interstate 10 across Lake Pontchartrain. Even from a distance it was clear the marooned catamaran was the least of the bridges' concerns. Katrina had left both the eastbound and westbound elevated stretches structurally unsound.
The same was true of the marina, where boats had been tossed about recklessly. One giant vessel had pierced a three-story apartment building, parked there half inside and half outside the wrecked building. Now, hours into his odyssey, Parks faced less light and more wind, and he needed to return to the Interstate where he could pull his skiff ashore before dark.
And then another voice wafted across the increasingly unruly water.
On a strip of land still left along what had been the lake's north shore, standing among the demolished camps and houses and restaurants that had once faced the water, a man was waving his arms above his head.
Parks crossed over, his skiff slapping on the waves, and found Jim Elorriaga, a New Orleans blues musician who goes by the simpler name of E.L.
"Do you want a lift?" Melinda Parks yelled. "Oh, God, do I," E.L. said.
As the skiff pulled up in some reeds, E.L. began to relate his tale.
Trapped in his apartment along the lake's edge, he had gone first to the second floor and then the roof as Katrina built in fury and the water rose.
Finally, with the water closing over the top of his roof, Elorriaga saw the Sundance sailboat adrift and passing nearby. He said he jumped to a floating refrigerator and from there to the boat, which began to lurch about crazily in the tempest.
Eventually, the Sundance rammed an even bigger boat, and the two of them ran aground in a T. With his belongings and home gone, Elorriaga sat down to wait for help.
"I even lost my dog, Woody," he said in despair.
But, as it happened, the Parkses had seen Woody earlier. He was nearby, jumping among the wreckage floating around a gas storage tank. Elorriaga splashed off and soon was carrying Woody in his arms.
It was nearing 7 p.m. when Parks finally turned north and headed back to the Interstate. By the time he returned, the water had receded enough so that Slidell Fire Department units had been able to set up a command post near where the Interstate meets Lake Pontchartrain.
Firefighters scrambled into the shallows and helped pull up Parks’ boat, and then got a heavy jacket around Elorriaga. The rescue crews were still desperate for information, asking about survivors and the extent of the destruction in Eden Isles and possessing little news about New Orleans or Mississippi.
"It's like St. Tammany is a black hole," one firefighter muttered. "They don't know anything at all has happened here."
James Varney is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune. He can be contacted at [email protected].
I just saw a couple of reports on CNN and believe me devastation doesn't even begin to describe the conditions in New
Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I have no words for it. My heart felt prayers go out to to the people who have lost ones, those looking for loved ones, and people who have lost everything and are asking "WHY?" I'm sobbing as I type this.
And the news just keeps getting worse.
The prisons now have to be evacuated so they have the prisoners in orange jump suites, sitting on a road waiting to be transfered who knows where. They are under armed guard, thankfully.
The Super dome is now unsafe and everyone there has to be evacuated too. But to where?
Several seals were displaced from a zoo. One of them is in a puddle slowling burning to death. (thanks fox news. I didn't need to hear that!!! I'm upset enough all ready!!!)
I don't think I EVER want to see another disaster movie again!:(
I will be making a donation to my local Red Cross.....and hope that it makes a difference.
My heart aches for these people and what they have to face in the coming months. :(
I wonder if we have enough manpower available ,like the
National Guard, to help with coordinating the recue effort &
provide some security for people? As I watch the film on the
evening news, I almost find this level of devastation hard to
comprehend. So tragic.