My Eye in the Storm: Katrina Close Up

My Eye in the Storm – Katrina Close Up

by

Amy Crimi

Published by Lucky Lamb Publications at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014

Cover image courtesy of NOAA website, remastered by Amy Crimi.

Edited by Larry Gray

All rights reserved

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was purchased for your use only,then please return to www.smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedicated to all disaster workers on every spectrum.

And also to all of the people who make up the support system in my life – this would not have been possible without all of you.

Mostly to my kids, Kayla and Michael, who made sacrifices of their own to make this experience possible.

Introduction

January 4, 2014, Port Orange, Florida

After about fifty attempts to write this introduction and just a short eight years later, I am finally willing and able to publish this memoir of my time away working Hurricane Katrina. The experience for me was life altering, so writing my memories has been a much harder thing to do than I bargained for.

When I did come back home, I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, with no real availability to treat it professionally. I was in a very hard time of my life personally, going through a divorce and financial problems, the mother of two kids, the owner of a home I didn’t know how to take care of by myself, and very overwhelmed. I found myself lost for a long time. To this day, I still have insomnia, and assume I always will. However, my baby pictures are still on the shelf. It took a few years for me to be able to look at them and feel love instead of guilt, but I got there. Many years later, I know I am a much stronger woman for going through this experience, regardless of the emotional scars.

Today, I am in a very different place. I am in the middle, now 42 years old. This is something I always thought would be devastating. If I wasn’t a mother to young kids then who was I? That is the question I am having a blast answering for myself currently. And in the quest to find my answer, I always come back to what I feel my true calling is; to be a writer.

Being a writer used to mean something very different to me than it does today. I felt that I had to get every word perfect, dreaming of a huge publisher coming to my door for no reason at all since I have not contacted them. I have been so scared to chase my own dream, that while I have written since I was a child, I have never really pursued being a real writer, almost as if I subconsciously didn’t feel I actually deserved to allow my dream to be my career.

Then I got to the middle of my life, or what I hope will be the middle. I am surprised the thoughts that this brings, especially for someone such as myself who had kids so young, that at 42, no one needs me to have dinner with all five food groups every night. For the first time in my life, it is okay to pursue something that is for me. For the first time I have realized that being a writer is about showing people your work, having confidence in yourself and your talents, no matter who says what. I finally figured out that the only real failure in this life is not trying to pursue what you love. I choose to not be a failure.

Therefore, I am finally willing and able to show my writing to the world, with a sincere thanks to Larry Gray and Lucky Lamb Publications, who let me go through the editing process in a way with which I was comfortable. This is the first book I am putting out and it is the hardest because it is not fiction. I find a comfort in writing fiction, a love for creating characters and their personalities in the written word. However, this story is my memoir, a way of really putting myself out there in a very personal way to the world. That is not easy, but I think this is a story that was meant to be told. A story that I was meant to write. I feel I was supposed to see this disaster from where I did, so I could tell about it. I didn’t know at the time that in the process, that I would be telling my own story along with it, but without intertwining my story, it would be just a factual textbook.

Everything I have written here is how I remember it, with both memories and the notes I took during my time there. This entire book is only my perception of what happened and I do not claim to have the right or ability to tell anyone else’s story. I have changed all of the names in this book and do not assume to represent what anyone else remembers. I have not embellished or stretched the truth; I have just told you a story of what happened to me at a time that those of us who lived through Hurricane Katrina will remember forever.

I hope to all of the people I met along the way that I do them justice.

Chapter One – Hurricane Katrina Check-in

August 30, 2005

I was deployed to Mobile, Alabama on the evening of August 28, one day before Hurricane Katrina hit. There was no need for the powers that be to wait for the category-four storm to hit before President George W. Bush made a declaration for federal disaster assistance. Damage was imminent. I was going to leave the morning of August 29, but the evacuation of Mobile had begun and this put all Florida inspectors on hold until the storm went through. At first, they wanted us to go to Houston, but even the brilliant higher ups eventually realized that would mean having us all drive through the evacuated areas. I am crazy, but not nearly stupid enough to do that! Finally, I left at 5:00 this morning, trying to catch reports of what I was driving into. I was full of both anticipation and fear. There was nothing in the world that could have kept me away even if a huge part of me wanted to crawl back into my own bed and pull the covers over my head. The only other inspector I knew personally called me at 7:00 a.m. to say he was already passing thru Tallahassee on I-10. His name is Sven and I met him when I went to work Hurricane Dennis last month in Pensacola. He is from Sweden. He is a nice guy who is probably trying to get into my pants, but not obvious about it and I am desperate for friends. He reminded me to stop and bring a few cases of water with me. I also needed to stock up on tootsie rolls. I like to hand out candy to the kids and tootsie rolls are the only thing that will not melt.

My name is Ali and I am a Disaster Housing Inspector for FEMA, under contract to do residential housing inspections after a natural disaster has occurred. I started working for Kobb Inspection Company, the current holder of the government contract, in August of 2004 when Hurricane Charley came through my own town of Daytona Beach, Florida. Through an accident and a little luck, they trained me very quickly and threw me into the field at a time when four hurricanes hit my state. It was a great time to be an Inspector in Florida. I completed 996 inspections for the four hurricanes that hit my home state over the next several months.

I go to homes of victims who have applied for assistance from the federal government for financial help with damage to their residence due to a natural disaster. I assess the level of destruction to determine real property damage, rebuilding the home construction wise in the computer. I also address personal property, such as furniture and appliances, separately. Then I check the need for temporary housing and any purchases made that apply for my program, such as generators and chain saws and the like. Finally, I address any auto, medical, dental, or God forbid funeral expenses. So far, I have not come close to anything that needs a casket; knock on wood really hard.

The job is intense, the hours are long, and it is competitive. I learned quickly to fly low under the radar, making sure my inspections are timely and accurate. The outlined procedures in the guidelines that I had to follow were so hard to understand, they may as well have been written in Hebrew. Most importantly, I learned to never, ever make waves. For the most part, you are on your own, given a laptop that communicates with a server somewhere in Virginia. We do everything by computer, voice-mail, and FedEx. I love the freedom of the job and I am great at pushing myself (just ask the poor college professor who tried to give me a B!).

But more than any other aspect of my occupation, I love the contact with America. I have the rarest and most honest opportunity to meet people of all cultures and classes in their own homes. I get to peek inside their world and experience it for a half an hour. Sometimes I stay longer just because they need me to, and sometimes I cannot wait to get the hell out. Either way, I am quickly in and out of each of their lives, taking a new piece of knowledge with me each time. It is inspiring and it makes me feel alive. I know that sometimes after I leave, the people that really deserve it receive much needed help, and that alone gives me the mindset to deal with all of it – the tragic, the devastation, and yes, even the liars.

But so far, until I met Sven, I have been lonely. I drive all over the place, stay in hotels, and eat by myself all the while. I am a small, thirty-four year old woman traveling alone, so I must be smart and safe. That means no mingling in bars or even with my hotel neighbors. Intelligent and necessary, but, still … torture. Especially for those who are probably undiagnosed A.D.D. adults, such as myself.

I know enough of the supervisors that they call me by my name when I check in and get my equipment. I helped voluntarily with a computer problem at the office during the Hurricane Dennis check in, and they have remembered me ever since. Little did they know that I helped with great pleasure because standing in line in a hallway with no air conditioning and many impatient strangers is punishment for those of us who cannot sit still. While I was glad they knew my name, I know better than to get too friendly with bosses. Another lesson personally learned in my twenties.

Therefore, other than Sven, I was the odd woman out. I trusted him, on a scale of one to ten, at a level of one point five – tops.

Some inspectors are friends from way back, forming their own close groups. The ones that have been in the business a long time want nothing to do with the new people. Unfortunately for me, I am the new people to them. There is an overall assumption from this group that I must be stupid. I do not try to approach either the veterans or the rookies. I am here to make money, not friends.

Even if it is desperately lonely that way.

And sometimes, even though I would never say this out loud, sometimes, it is scary too. But I swallow it, keep my head high, and never let anyone smell the fear I hold deep inside, and I move ahead. This is the strength I seem to have been born with. I can only say that it comes from within. It is how I deal with life in general, not just the job. I was a Mom at age seventeen. I figure if I was able to do that, then there is not much I cannot do.

Therefore, I made my way that first year and I loved it. Yet, I found myself dying to talk to someone, anyone who had done this before. Anyone who had an opinion, stories like mine, and the bizarre taste for this unusual profession I was suddenly in. I would kill to have someone I could talk to when I encountered the weird and unexpected, which was often!

Yet, there was no one. While I ran into a few random inspectors out in the field like myself, I always felt as if the competition factor was greater than one of friendliness. My instincts told me to stay professional and distant. And while I am now sure this was the wise and best choice, I am also sure that this kept me inside of the solitude that I detest. I was so ridiculous that I found myself playing Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Greenday a lot that year, singing over and over again, about how I walk alone. So pathetic, I have to roll my eyes in order to type those words!

I worked until March of this year. I felt it was a great start for a rookie such as me. I drove all over Florida and did not complain. I just love doing the job.

There was nothing until this past July and that was when I lost my ass on a deployment to Hurricane Dennis. They sent me to Apalachicola, which I will now forever refer to as the armpit of Florida. I was broke and desperate, and I had to beg for extra work just to break even. Mosquitoes the size of dump trucks were eating me alive; I was driving down roads only a crazy person would attempt and sweating my ass off to the nth degree every single second. Still, there were the inspections from the people that made me learn; the elderly, the sick, the poor, the rich and everyone else in between. Is it wrong to love what you do for a living? The owner of the place I was staying screwed me on it, and I ended up with a better chance of getting skin cancer than of paying my bills that month. We work as independent contractors. This means all boarding, gas, car and eating expenses are all on us. The pay makes up for it, but you have to be able to survive long enough paying your expenses out of pocket before you get a paycheck.

So fast forward to today and here I am – broke, bankrupt and in the middle of a divorce. Paying my bills is up front and center important these days, especially since I am getting the house in exchange for our retirement fund. The mortgage being paid is my lifeline at this point and while it felt strange to know I am on my own again, this time with two kids, truth be told, it’s a huge relief to just take care of things myself again.

Ironically enough, so far my ex has been more of a stand-up guy now than he ever was when we were together. He still lives in my house, just in another bedroom. We are in the middle of a technical legal mess but he is trying to be there for his kids, so I do not stand in the way. If he was not there, I do not know how I would be able to work the way I do, and going to work is the only way I can stand his being there. Even I don’t know how I am handling such a strange situation.

The sky grows darker, thicker, and meaner as I start to approach the gulf coast. Traffic is thinner and thinner until I am the only nut job driving west on Interstate 10.

As I traveled through the evacuated city of Mobile, Alabama, the sheer emptiness all around struck me hard. All the buildings downtown looked abandoned. No cars parked anywhere. The silence was deafening.

Finally, I arrive at the bustling office, where I found the living again, around 2:00 p.m.; hot, tired and worrying about a place to stay. No phones were working in the area and the only place I had been able to make a reservation at before I left home flooded last night.

Inspectors were everywhere, some hugging, and laughing, most clustered into little cliques. I surveyed the crowd before going in. You have to be of a certain breed to do this kind of work and by the looks of the people around me; they all seem to fit the bill, each in their own special way. Everyone here was experienced