Episode 66: Hurricane Katrina, Ida & More – Storm Stories & Memories

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Overruled podcast brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law Firm. I am David Vicknair, along with my law partner here in our new podcast studio, which is still discombobulated and all over the place while we get it set up. Brad Scott. Good morning. It’s looking good though. Mom’s doing a good job behind the camera. He is, he is. Don’t puff his head up too much. Thank you, Brad. It’s already too big.

All right, we got an exciting topic to chat about today. We’re going to talk about hurricanes. We are almost August again. Yes, so we’re in the thick of it. Yes. And we have the 20th anniversary of Katrina coming up at the end of the month. Do you feel like hurricane season pushes back similarly to like the heat has kind of pushed back? And I feel like hurricane season now, when we used to, it still starts in June, right? But it used to be more active sooner. It seems like it was. And now we’re having like, I feel like last year there was one lingering storm, like maybe in November.

They moved Christmas up earlier and they slid hurricane season back maybe? That’s how I feel when you go to the store. Yeah. Interesting. But, you know, now that we’re in the thick of it and it is hurricane season and knock on wood, we hope we have no named storms hit the Gulf Coast region or anywhere, this year. We figured we chat a little bit today about some of our favorite hurricane stories. What do you have? Some interesting hurricane stories? I have a lot. I mean, it starts with, the impromptu to Hurricane Andrew, which we thought we were like, cause Tipto, but a lot of people don’t realize Tipto is like 7 feet above sea level. So while in New Orleans, which is a whole lot in the grand scheme of things. It’s not.

But when you’re in New Orleans and you’re downtown right now, we’re probably 7 feet they don’t have. We’re like 2 feet below sea level right now. Is really acute as you saw this morning because you drove over from our North Shore office when you’re driving from Covington or Mandeville and you’re coming over the lake and you see the city like sunk below the water, you really do understand that New Orleans does sit below sea level. But it started with Hurricane Andrew, which my, my parents were like, we’re going to ride it out and I was very young. I was in 92, so I’d have been, seven. And I just remember the boards were clanging on the house and I think after that, when my parents had decided, you know, we’re not, we are high, but like we’re not going to stay for another category four, when Andrew hit, was it a four or five? I think it was a four. But it had a lot of water, so it was a weird one because it hit Florida as a five and it was very compact. Powerful storm. Then it dumped into the Gulf and it was going west like it was headed towards Galveston and Texas. And this all of a sudden boom, turned up and hit Morgan City. Yeah. And so the east side of the eye would have hit Lafourche and Terrebonne Parish. And after that one, my parents were like, we’re not, we’re going to evacuate for the big ones now. And then the other one that really jumps out of my mind is a recent one for Hurricane Ida. I live in the CBD, so we’re in a grid in the city where our electrics underground. And so we’re on the same grid as City Hall.

And so the common belief in my condo building is like, well, if power goes out in the city, you’ll be the first ones back. We’ll be the first ones back or the last ones to ever lose power because City Hall needs power for their operations, all the things to like maintain it in an emergency. Did that logic work? It didn’t. And it didn’t work because there were multiple power stands. I don’t know if I’m probably butchering the real thing you call them, those huge towers that hold overground power lines. Need the ones that the balloons attacked? The balloons? Do you remember the balloon story? The balloon slid into one of those power things and shorted out the city for? I did not. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, I remember that. See, you’re switching topics on me. If we’re going to make fun of the incontinence in New Orleans. Let’s just make fun of the incontinence in New Orleans. I thought we were on I’m in hurricane mindset right now, Brad. Anyways, I think, it was like maybe five or six of those large towers that hold the electrical lines across the river collapsed into the river because of Ida. The storm was so powerful. And so essentially, not only did the people who were connected to power lines through above ground power lose power, but all the underground lines went out because the power feed from across the river fell in the river. So I just remember for Ida thinking, in the middle of the storm hitting, this was a mistake. Because I was at a neighbor’s condo and watching on like the 13th floor of the building, the chandelier like swaying. Swaying inside of a building, a poured concrete building. And I was like, I probably should not have stayed. And then we lost power and promptly left the next morning because, you know, it’s probably not the safest thing to be in New Orleans if you can get out after a hurricane without power because we do experience looting. The cops are on high alert, a lot of challenges in the city when resources are so limited.

It’s no point in staying around. 100%. And so leaving to go to Florida for the week, the next morning after Ida hit, it was kind of like eerie, seeing all the damage, not really anything anywhere, no power. But even more, acute of my ignorance was I when I was driving through Gulf Shores and was like, man, this is some, you know, really rough weather I’m driving through right now. And it’s like I was catching the outer bands of the hurricane. Driving with the star. In the panhandle of Florida. So I was like, I really am an idiot. But, you know, that was, that was my most recent memory is the regret of staying after Ida. And, I think that some people don’t realize and as a kid, I didn’t realize this, tragically and Hallene up in Georgia, a group of my friends, were close became friendly with a lady who lived over there from, doing a couple of golf trips over there. And she tragically lost her life, in Hallene because a tree fell through the roof of her house. Yeah, that’s one of the big dangers of the trees and debris and stuff like that, which people don’t think about, but 100%. It’s one of those things. Any kind of storm can blow a tree over. Yep. And so I, I always was kind of like mentally blind to the risk of like, okay, you board up the windows, you have a strong house that can probably outside of a tornado, right? You’re probably going to be okay even in a four, a three or a four, but then like the risk of a tree falling through your roof. It does kind of make prudent sense, I think, to evacuate. Just leave. Like you treat it as a short vacation. Hope everything’s okay. But those are just a few of my, memories of hurricanes, as that Andrew memory as a kid and thinking that we shouldn’t have stayed, even though I didn’t know what was going on.

And then recently with Ida, thinking that, well, I stayed and I shouldn’t have had. That was a stupid, stupid decision. I don’t remember anybody ever saying I stayed, and it was a good idea. It’s usually not the story. What do you think the cutoff is when you should evacuate? Like a three? Or a four? This is the problem. We live right in the middle of the Gulf. When you look at a map, New Orleans and Louisiana, we’re right in the middle. So every time a storm comes anywhere into the Gulf, it looks like it’s heading right for us. That’s right. And, you know, we don’t have a whole lot of confidence in our meteorologists and the predictions because they’re all over the place. You know, don’t Sorry, Scott Pielay, our friend. Just, you know, the spaghetti models. Everybody’s in the zone of the cone of what is this cone of uncertainty. Uncertainty, whatever at some point. So, and the risk always is, you don’t want to leave too early because it’s, you don’t want to risk being unnecessary. And if you stay too late, then you’re stuck on the road basically. So, you know, as a rule of thumb, you know, depends on where it falls, but I like to get out two days before. Two days before. As a rule of thumb for me, because I want to avoid the traffic. I hate traffic. How, big of a storm does it need to be for you to decide to evacuate? A three? Depends on the crowded Disney World and how quickly you want to get there. Because usually they turn into a Disney trip. Anything for like a three? Hurricanes are a really expensive for you? Yes. It’s vacation time. But a three or above, it’s like, I’m not sticking around because there’s going to be power outages. It’s going to be a pain in the butt, just to hang out for a few days. So why not make a trip out of it? Go do something, get out of this harms way if you can. Because it really is the it’s not the really the storm that bothers me as much. Storm comes and passes. It’s the power outages. You can’t find fuel. You can’t go to the grocery store. You can’t get groceries.

Just all the infrastructure kind of shuts down for at least three or four days after a storm passes. At a minimum. And it just, I’m at the point in my life, I don’t want to deal with it at this point. So what is your best hurricane story? It’s, it’s necessarily good stories, but look at my early, think of the trees. You know, my earliest childhood memories of storms is, my mom and dad, always debating, are we going to leave? Are we going to stay? And my mom is a weather freak. She hates the weather. You know, if it’s raining anywhere, I’m getting a weather report on my phone, she’s going to tell me it’s raining, stay inside. But she’d make my dad board up the whole house. And then she’d have my dad cut strategic little round holes in all the boards. So she could see outside in the middle of the night in the dark to see what’s going on. In case of a storm. So I can remember being a kid and I forgot what storm it was, but I remember the wind was just kicking. You know, the boards on the house are shaking. And I remember my mom telling me, it’s time for bed. Go lay down and go to sleep. It was like, yeah. Right. Like that’s going to happen. So, but yeah, usually we, we evacuated from the most part. If it was a three or above, we were heading out. But, as far as memories, I mean, you know, everybody has a Katrina memory and a Rita memory, but just the trying to get out of town and sitting in traffic and driving forever to try to get somewhere. And really, the kind of the, especially for Katrina, when driving back, we went to Monroe, North Louisiana for Katrina. But, you know, I’m, I’m driving back, I think the day after, probably after the storm passed, and just listening to the local radio, WWL, and it almost became like a call center for people that were stranded in their homes and on their roofs and stuff like that. And just hearing the stories and what people were calling in with and everything else, and like, you don’t know what you’re coming back to.

And kind of that anxiety you have of, you know, what’s it going to look like? Don’t I have anything left kind of thing. So just that kind of that feeling, that’s what I always associate with hurricanes. That kind of that return trip and, you know, what’s going to be left. Where I lived in for Katrina, I was in Lafourche Parish. Didn’t have as much damage, but then we got hit with Rita, like a, you know, a couple of weeks or a month, a month later. And I remember driving home and the closer I got to home, the more and more trees I saw, the more, you know, devastation I saw. And I remember pulling into my, my driveway and like every single tree was gone. Or in my yard was laying over. Had nothing on my roof except plywood. And it’s just like, you know, what’s going to be inside when we get in there. So that kind of, those are the feelings. But, you know, the happy stories I have from hurricanes is just after the storm passes. Just the generosity of people and just the, you know, the outpouring of help that comes. I remember some people just popping in, like just showing up. Hey, you need to, you need to tarp on your roof, man. Oh, yeah, how much? No, no charge. We’re just coming around, helping people. Most people that came in from out of state. And people who come from out of state just set up with food, distributing from trucks and stuff. And you really see the best of people come out a lot after these storms. Of course, there’s stories of people, you know, bad people doing things they shouldn’t be doing, but you see so much community come out, after those periods, which is really refreshing. Is interesting. You said you, your parents would always evacuate because of a very non-cooned ass thing of occasion to do.

Like a lot of, like, you know, you do the count, I like to I shouldn’t say I like to, but I’ll always pay attention and Grand Isle for hurricane. Like, you know, that, you know, there’s like 20 or 30 or 40 die hards that are not leaving Grand Isle and they’re not leaving. They’re, their escape valve is they’re going to the City Hall, which is on that huge hill at the end of the island, with Mayor Cormodell, and they’re going to ride it out. And in fact, for Ida, which, you know, we talked about Katrina, Rita, all these different storms, Andrew. Ida, I never seen of all the storms that hit Lafourche, Terrebonne, lower St. Mary Parish, Ida was the worst. I’ve never seen that place devastated as much as Ida. Driving down into Tipto, I’m like, whoa. Like driving through Des Allemands, it was like a destruction zone. And, for Ida, there was like 40 people who stayed in Grand Isle. I think there was like 10 feet of water in Grand Isle. I was watching for a lot of the storm as long as it was still showing the feed, they had a camera like on a pole like 15 feet up in Grand Isle, connected to like Fox 8, to WWL, to all the local media. So they could actually get a feed of what was happening in Grand Isle. And you could watch it online. It was like the water kept coming up to the camera and then the camera just disappeared. I always have this image of those diehards that stayed back, they’ve watched four storms, you know, too many times. And they’re trying to get out there in the bubble, go catch the shrimp. Very lucky nobody died on Grand Isle for Ida. I mean, there was like 10 or 12 feet of water. It was insane. So, yeah, well, that’s, that’s the best stories I have. Miles, do you have anything good for us? What year was Andrew? 1992. Okay, yeah. I’ve just I’ve never heard of that story.

Yeah. It was a bad one. It was a bad one. Because, you know, my parents always talked about like Betsy, and like way before, yeah, my time. Camille, Betsy, those are old storms. Yeah. My parents too. But so Betsy, if you didn’t know Betsy, the eye of Betsy came up by Lafourche. Oh, I did not. Yeah. Yeah, I just know. I mean, my parents still talk about that. One Katrina story I have is we evacuated and like you said, the traffic, it took us like eight hours to get to Baton Rouge. We left way too late. And my parents, we all went to a place called Eunice, or technically Iowa. Great catfish. In Eunice. It was great. I loved it. I was in second grade. I had two older sisters, they did not love it. I rode four wheelers all day. I played, like play with animals. This was a vacation for me. It was great. It was like Disney World, except for me. And, my dad and my oldest sister, who was at LSU at the time, were sitting around. And my oldest sister said, hey dad, you should come and get your PhD and go to school with me. And he said, that’s a great idea. I think my mom was going to kill my sister. He actually did it. He went back to school. That was the impetus that started that motion. So my dad got a PhD and took a class with my sister during, in my mom is still mad. That was a long evacuation. Yeah, for him. Yeah, he wished it would have lasted forever. I, yeah, like I said, I actually had pretty positive because where my parents lived, still live, the levy didn’t break. It’s in Bucktown. But they, the pumps, they told everybody to go home, right?

So nobody was working. So when my dad came back, like a lot of people, they said the fridge is the worst smell they’ve ever had in their life. Oh, jeez. Yeah. I was too young, I didn’t really have to deal with that. But, our house, the whole first floor was done because it got, it only got two feet of water, but the mold climbed. Yes. You still got to pull everything out. So we were pretty lucky, honestly, in that regard. Because when you, was mostly like you’re talking about the same levy, like Lakeview is like 8 feet of water. Oh. And, you know where Station Six is and all that. So the other side was done. But I’m on the Jefferson Parish side and we were relatively fine. So I always think about, I guess, four wheelers. Was the 70s street canal breach? Was it on the Lakeview side? Not on the Metairie side? I thought it was Lakeview side. Yeah. The must be what it was. Yeah. But yeah, talking about Katrina and waters though, we had an office right here on Poydras back then, the old firm I was with. And I remember coming down to the city for the first time, because we’re trying to, you know, set up a temporary office to do things. Back then we didn’t have Dropbox and all the cloud storage. So we had physical file servers. And those are big computers. I mean, they were the size of a file. You know, a small, you know, 2005. Yeah, that was like desktops, right? So I remember, you know, because the elevator shafts had all, flooded. And we were on the, geez, what was the 14th floor, I think. So I remember with flashlights with National Guard people, climbing the stairwell and it was hot as hell. All they could do is imagine that water stunk, had to get into the office. And then we had to figure out how to get the computers down. So we’re making makeshift like backpacks out of rope and stuff, and strapping them to my back and then coming back down 14 stories. Pumping computers out of offices to go try to set them up somewhere to get our data and our client file matters.

And how many months did you operate remotely without cloud pieces? Documents? For Katrina was it like two, three, four months? I don’t remember. I think we didn’t get back to the office like 8, six to eight months or something like that. It was a good bit of time. We set up a temporary office in Metairie, then there was one like in Bat Rouge, I think at one point, but, took a long time to get everything back up and running before they even opened up the buildings. Because all the humidity and the mold and everything else. And like the refrigerators, they had to get out, those things out of there. But it was, oh, the smell. I remember going down to St. Bernard Parish, one of our clients had a business down there. I was one of the first people to get in down there. And like it looked like a moon landscape because everything was covered in that sludge that had kind of crusted over in the sun. And that’s when they were like, you had, you went in on the main road and they had guys in hazmat suits that were literally like pressure wash your car down as you were leaving because they were worried about contamination and stuff leaving the area. It was like the most surreal thing that I’ve ever experienced in my life. And then like, you know, any cyclone fence, basically turned into a gill net. So all the fish were stuck in the fence and stuff like that. The stench. I can still taste it to this day. It’s got awful. So the moral of the story is there’s a category three or four, just evacuate. Yeah. Well, even, what was that hurricane? I guess about a year ago. Now it was only category one. I lost power. That’s where I can never tell. This. And we’re like, oh, it’s nothing. And we stayed. And we were fine. But you lose power category one. I mean, yeah. And it also depends upon how fast they’re moving. Like the ones that are going fast, like are typically not going to be the bigger problems. The slower storms are the slow moving storms that just dump a ton. Which Katrina did. Yeah.

There’s just so much water. The water you can’t really get rid of. Especially in the city. And Ida. Ida was so big and it kind of was not the most fast moving storm, whereas like, I think the year before Ida, we had that Zeta storm that the eye literally came over New Orleans. But it was like, it was moving like 30 miles an hour. So it was just like, it was in and out. It was like, you didn’t even know Zeta. It was like, I barely met you. Well, thank you all for listening along. Some interesting hurricane stories. Any follow? Any final thoughts on hurricanes? Just, you know, we’re right in the middle of the season again. Do your preparations now. Before. We always hear about hurricane preparedness. Do it now. Don’t wait till the storm happens because then it’s a little too late. Well, the minute that somebody says a storm. It’s like, Durnyak’s, Rouse’s, Robaire. Can’t get water. Like just wait. It’s like the line. We even like, week before last that storm was in the Gulf. Whatever storm that was. I went to the store to get water. It was a dollar. Right. No water. Yeah. Everybody runs to get what they think they need. So. But, yes, thank you all for listening. And if you have any stories, share them, please. All right. Thank you all. This has been an interesting discussion and a great episode of the Overruled podcast, brought to you by the Scott Vicknair Law Firm. This is your co-host David Vicknair, along with my law partner and co-host Brad Scott. Thank you, Brad. Thank you, David. And we hope to see you all next time. Thanks for listening along. Take care.

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