So far, all the friends I’ve directly or indirectly heard from made it through the hurricane relatively okay. Of course, it’s the ones I haven’t heard from that worry me. Due to the lack of electricity and the still unreliable landline and mobile phone networks, it’s hard to get the word out from even the people who are fine.
My mother is still in Mobile, Alabama, and is safe. She said that probably the earliest she and her friends would be allowed back into Biloxi would be Monday. They have water and wastewater service at her friend’s brother’s house, but no power. The house across the street has power, though. They spent part of the day at a mall in Mobile, which was amazingly open for business. Anytime it’s August in the South and you don’t have air conditioning, there are worse places to be than a mall.
A friend of a friend just left New Orleans and headed west. He wrote that:
The Uptown WalMart parking lot was littered with shopping baskets, trash, bags, just crazy amounts of debris. I heard on TV last night that the looting was crazy there and that the entire gun section had been emptied. It was very scary riding down this pitch black road, seeing people on the side of the road appear in my headlights, either hitchhiking or pushing a basket of stolen goods or just wandering. It reminded me of Dawn of the Dead.
He said that I-10 from just west of New Orleans to Lafayette was in pretty good shape.