Life in Baton Rouge After Hurricane Katrina

Before Katrina had hit, I'd lived in Louisiana for four years - and had previously gone through Hurricane Lily, a storm of lesser notoriety that had caused a considerable amount of damage around the town in which I lived at the time, known as Opelousas. After a series of upheavals that had nothing to do with Lily, I had found myself busing tables in Baton Rouge to try to make ends meet - and there all eyes were glued on the television set over Hurricane Ivan.

"It could be the most devastating storm in known American history," I recall some commentators saying - though it was often difficult to hear as the children at the pizza parlor were cheering with excitement whenever they'd see the name of their schools scroll across the bottom of the screen to indicate that it would be closed the next day. A small building that was intended to house no more than 40-60 occupants was constantly jam-packed with people standing with their plates with the influx of "refugees" fleeing from Hurricane Ivan who saw Mr. Gatti's Pizza as an affordable place to stop in their flight.

New Orleans was jokingly being called Bayou Ivan with the level of certainty that the populace had of the city's destruction. Nevertheless, Ivan proved to be a disappointment at best in Louisiana, and the flight proved to be for nothing - which itself played an integral role in the complacency everyone felt in New Orleans during Katrina. It became an annual ritual, where an announcement would be made of an imminently catastrophic hurricane, everyone would flee, and then the storm would putter out.

Therefore when I was consistently asked why people weren't fleeing by the thousands, it appeared obvious to any resident of Louisiana, this was just going to be another Hurricane Chad, Hurricane Ivan, or any other storm.