From PEOPLE Magazine
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Saturday I evacuated to my friend's house with my 81-year-old mother and my 28-year-old niece. We packed clothes, food, water, axes, a ladder and flares. I'd covered too many hurricanes where people had drowned in their attics because they couldn't escape the rising water.
On Sunday night, just before the TV went out, a report said, "It's looking better for New Orleans, and the very worst for the Gulfport area." After hearing that, I walked into the other room and said, "I want you to forgive me now, because I think I made a mistake. I'm afraid we're all going to have to fight very hard not to die."
But everyone was calm. At 1 a.m., winds started pummeling the house. By radio, we learned that all three of the emergency operation centers were washed away. Then we lost the radio.
All night I watched a giant pine tree in a neighbor's yard. Suddenly I heard a deafening crack, and I yelled, "Run!" Seconds later the tree smashed through the house. We had escaped to the master bedroom closet; we covered my mother and niece with a mattress.
Looking outside, we watched the house behind us. The roof would lift, the house would expand, then the roof would fall. Finally the house exploded.
We made it through the night. The next day we tried to check on my house. We were stopped by debris. Some women were pointing toward an empty slab. They told us, "Last night there was a house there, and a whole family was in it." One of the women screamed, "Where are the children?" We walked toward them, and I stepped on something. It was a little shoe. There with a leg attached; it was a body, buried in mud. I told them as calmly as I could, "Please don't pull this out; let the rescue crews do it."
I arrived at the empty slab of my mother's house first. It had been wiped clean—but miraculously, in the mud, I found her wedding band. The only other thing I found was my dad's paratrooper bracelet from WWII. Those two items are all my mother has left.
My house...it was completely gone. I knelt down on my slab and said out loud, "I am so grateful that the people I love have lived." And I cried.
Managing Editor
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