Movement To Contact, Part II

I took me three days to get to the NOLA area, but I spent most of day two and the first half of day three just trying to haul ass and get off the road, so I didn't take any pictures of significance. Let me just say, though, that Texas is FREAKING HUGE! I knew this, of course, but I'd never driven across it. It's a beautiful drive, but I'm not particularly looking forward to the return trip.

There were signs as far West as San Antonio that said the I-10 was closed East of Baton Rouge, with no access to NOLA at the time. I had heard as much already, so I kept driving through. Baton Rouge had supposedly taken some damage from the storm, but it wasn't really that bad, so they were housing thousands of NOLA refugees in some of their larger, convention center-type buildings. In fact, during the first week following the hurricane and levee breaks, the population of Baton Rouge reportedly doubled, making it now the largest city in Louisiana.

As I drove through town, I saw random groups of people, some carrying a few things, just kind of wandering or sitting around. I asked a cop if there were any NG units around and was directed to the LSU campus a short way down the road.

The only NG at LSU yet was a single squad of MPs from KY (this was a fun sentence to write). They were mostly new to each other, compiled from units all across their state because so many of their fellow soldiers are currently overseas (Afghanistan, I was told). Their squad leader was an E-5 (SGT). They had been in NOLA briefly a couple of days before, but had been sent back out and were awaiting orders, just sitting around. They had no idea what was going on or what they were supposed to be doing, which is not necessarily a strange thing, it being the military. They told me that they were still under (KY) state control rather than Federal, which seems stupid, and probably the reason they were being so poorly used. I knew that I didn't want to just hang around campus with them indefinitely, so I took off, heading south on a small state highway to come at NOLA from underneath, figuring that since this was the least damaged part of town (called Jefferson Parish), I might be able to get in more easily.

At this point in the trip, I was seeing very little evidence that there had been a hurricane at all. A little bit of sheet metal roofing torn off here and there, some downed power lines, and lots of piles of dead branches that had fallen off trees in people's yards stacked along the road for pickup, was the extent of the damage I observed. The worst destruction so far was an abandoned trailer that had been smashed by a falling tree.









I saw a few big, broken trees and stopped to take a picture of one of them.



It's pretty obvious that the damage wasn't that bad though, because many of the houses in the area were trailers, and almost none of them looked to have suffered at all.



It was a neat back road. Lots of little townships and “Parishes,” which is Louisiana-ese for “County.”

I saw a sign for a NG armory a little further down the road and turned off to see if there was anyone there I could link up with. The place was deserted. I figured they were probably all in NOLA already. Right next to the armory there was a typical, small-town LA graveyard, all ramshackle and random. I have always felt that these have so much more character than straight, “dress-right-dress” cemeteries with identical tombstones and manicured grass. I stopped and took a few pics there before moving on.











There's a little college just past there that had another refugee station set up. It was pretty small, probably only a couple hundred people. A gaggle of local police and a few NG (probably from the armory) were standing around making sure things stayed peaceful. This made sense, because NOLA apparently has a pretty big poverty problem and a high crime rate. When I was passing through Houston, the local radio stations were talking about how roughly 15,000 people had been moved to the Astrodome and the surrounding area. There were reportedly a bunch of them who had been causing trouble and several arrests had been made. Every refugee center I've seen has had some sort of police or NG force around to make sure it didn't get out of hand.

It was dark by the time I got up to the NOLA area, so I figured I'd see how far I could get before being turned back. Not very, it turns out. At this point, the authorities had decided to let residents of certain parts of town back in to collect what they could, but they were checking for proof of residence and requiring that every car's tank was full (no gas is available in NOLA). The closest gas stations to the checkpoints that were still operational had a pretty heavy NG and police presence, because there had apparently been long lines, people cutting, and a bunch of fist fights. I turned around right before the checkpoint just to avoid the hassle and that's when I headed to the bar mentioned in my last post.

When I left the bar, I drove to a church parking lot (I figured no one would bother me there) and tried to get some sleep. It didn't really work. It was sweltering in my car and I made the mistake of cracking open the windows. The mosquitoes kept me awake until I gave up and started driving at about 4 AM to try to locate a Marine observation station I'd found listed in a telephone book at the bar. It was located south of NOLA on Baratarra Bay. As the sun was coming up, I finally started seeing some really serious hurricane damage, which I'll detail in my next post.