Four years?

Mostly Cajun reminds me that four years ago today we were digging out from Hurricane Rita.

Being a deputy, I don't get to stay home when the weather is bad, and that day, the weather was really bad. Horribly bad. Not as bad as the Cajun had it, but bad enough.

I was working a shelter where they had brought 70 geriatric mental patients from a nursing home in Lake Charles. At the height of the storm, all the electricity went out at the shelter and we were reduced to using the only flashlight in the acre (mine) and having no water pressure, no way to cook food, and no climate control. It was an unbridled disaster.

As luck would have it, my relief showed up on time and I was able to go home, grab a shower, get some rack time, and head out the next morning. We had some lawn items that "went away" during the storm, never to return. It blew my fence down, but that's just material possessions. I was able to rebuild my fence.

But when I think of the suffering of those old folks in the shelter, I cringe. They didn't understand why their world had been uprooted and I didn't know who to explain it to them. Nine days later we put them on buses to Arkansas where a new nursing home had been made ready for them. The next day, school opened and we resumed living our normal lives. Which is a whole lot better than the nursing home patients got.

I like the Cajun's take on the matter.

2005 – Hurricane Rita makes landfall in the United States, devastating Beaumont, Texas and portions of southwestern Louisiana. The media is too focused on the perpetually peeved and professional beggar class in New Orleans to pay much attention to people who got up out of the wreckage and debris and went back to work.