Operation Eden
one man's photos and essays, of a very small town in Mississippi, after Katrina.
One of the things that I remember about surviving a major natural disaster is all the stuff that never makes it to the national (or even regional) media. Stuff that, none the less, is important to those who live in the area.
After the 1994 Northridge quake, some Marriage Encounter friends of ours were without running water for a couple of months. They lived in the neighborhood known as Granada Hills, just above the site where a gas main exploded in the middle of a residential street. They were lucky, their house was relatively intact and was habitable. But for months, they hauled in bottled water for drinking, and flushed their toilets with buckets of water from their swimming pool, and used buckets of the same water to rinse off with, water their plants, etc. They were lucky, and they knew it, because they had a safe place to live and were only minorly inconvenienced.
I knew of families who lived in tent cities in the public parks for weeks or months. Many of our neighbors ended up bringing extended family whose homes were demolished into their own homes, which were only somewhat damaged. We ended up giving away some of our bottled water to neighbors and to total strangers. We were blessed, and we knew it.
It's been 11 plus years since the quake - and most of the time I don't even think about it much. But I think that Katrina has been giving me some PTSD - I've been having flashbacks at the oddest times. One cannot live through a major event like this and not be unscarred.
I hope and pray that the survivors of Katrina will get the help that they need to become whole again, both in environment, mind, body, and soul.
