Wiedmer: Katrina still haunts a decade later - Chattanooga Times Free Press
Ten years ago today, Kevin Spain looked out a window at the New Orleans Times-Picayune's main office. It was a Monday morning, the outer bands of Hurricane Katrina having first unleashed her fury on the Crescent City several hours earlier, in the dangerous darkness of Sunday night. "We'd lost power," said Spain, who had left this newspaper's sports department three years earlier to become the night sports editor at the Times-Picayune. We'd made it through the night. But now the wind was growing stronger and stronger, the hurricane's 100-mph-plus winds at the height of their destruction. "I looked outside and there was a tree, maybe a foot in diameter, a mature tree, and it was bent over to the ground for maybe 20 seconds. I'd ridden out other hurricanes since we'd moved there, but this was different. It was enough different that his wife Sharon reluctantly had piled their young sons KJ and Cam into their Chrysler minivan at their home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie on Sunday afternoon and driven 483 miles to Kevin's parents' house in... "She wasn't going to go," Kevin said. ' It took her more than 14 hours to get to my folks' and it usually takes about six, but they made it. ". Yet by early Monday afternoon, the winds having died down, the rain gone, the danger apparently past, Spain thought New Orleans had made it,... "Jeff Duncan and I were sent out to talk to the people who'd stayed behind, who'd ridden out the storm," he said. Source: www.timesfreepress.com
