Katrina - 20 Years Ago On This Board - Finding Patty G's People
It was a long story from long ago on here....but kept some of the thread posts and it is truly hard to believe it was twenty years ago...
Long story short....for over a week, a group of folks that knew each other on these ABB message boards worked together behind the scenes and off the website to try and find any word about the fate of Patty G's kin after Katrina hit New Orleans.
...then we went public and sent out messages on this ABB message board hoping to use the greater hive mind to help in tracking some of the names of Trish's missing relatives....
That was when Bhawk found an article...get this...by a newspaper reporter from Pittsburgh....who was covering the Katrina refugees that ended up in Texas. In her article, she randomly came aross a 14-year old named Rebecca Fournier, 14, and her grandfather, Richard Hancock. In the article, she told their story, saying,
"Fournier told me that after climbing down from their roof, the two took a small boat to high ground and then got on the back of a tractor. They took a ferry to Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from the French Quarter in New Orleans. There, they boarded a charter bus last night amid people fighting to get on it, "
After that was posted, Patty G's initial response, "Oh my God, I can never thank you guys enough. I will write more later, but now, I can't stop crying!"
Unfortunately, both the links to the message posts and the article have sense disappeared.
Sadly, it appears that Rebecca, who miraculously escaped the flood waters of Katrina at 14 years of age, died just three and a half years later in a car wreck back in Louisiana when she was just 17.
Man...where did the time go???
In 1967 I visited a friend in New Orleans and stayed four days. They told me in 1967 if a big hurricane came up from the Gulf New Orleans would be washed away. The city was too low or below sea level or something.
Between then and Katrina I was under the impression the Army Corps of Engineers had installed locks and levies to prevent that kind of flooding.
Were they overwhelmed like the watertight compartments on the Titanic?
It gets a little more complicated than that. In parts of downtown New Orleans, the was receding a day or two after the storm blew in. But then, the water started rising again. What happened was the flood levies gave out, letting an incredible amount of water into those sunken, trapped neighborhoods. The easy answer was that the levies were poorly made and gave out. Some say a runaway barge hit a levy giving it just enough of a crack to let water in and widen. Others, though, claim they heard a couple of explosions that night, with the theory being to save rich folk's land and houses, they diverted the flood into the poorer neighborhoods. Who knows?
On Netflix I watched a three part series on Katrina, Eye opening to say the least. Outright disgusting what was done after the levee’s failed.
Spike Lee did a great job on this…
