The following anonymously-posted account is re-posted with permission from Mel’s Riser’s “My Solar Village” blog (http://mysolarvillage.blogspot.com.) Some of you might find this account is eerily reminiscent of my novel Patriots:
The craziest thing about the whole Katrina fiasco was that my father in law (technically he’s just my girlfriend’s dad, but we’ve been together long enough that this is what we call him.) I always make fun of him because he keeps his garage stocked with something like 100 gallons of water, a bunch of big jugs full of treated gasoline, food, etc. He also owns quite a few guns. So I picked on him a lot for being borderline nuts even though he’s fairly normal. So when Katrina rolled around I ended up evacuating with them since the woman wanted to be with her parents. It took us 35 hours of nonstop driving to drive to Dallas. It’s usually a four hour drive or so. About twelve hours or so in you had to drive around a car that had run out of fuel every fifty feet or less. They were everywhere. It was hot, too, and we saw hundreds of families standing on the side of the road sweating. A lot had infants and little kids. Even if you somehow did find a gas station that wasn’t sold out of gasoline (probably 9 out of 10 were sold out) the line was literally miles long. About 20 hours in, or a little over halfway to Dallas, we noticed the convenience stores were being looted. The people busted out the windows (we didn’t see who, but they were busted out) and we saw people coming out with any drink they could find. It was pretty much chaos. There was one cop on the scene and he wouldn’t get out of his car. He just sat across his street with his lights swirling and people ignored him. By this time there were so many cars broken down that we spent a lot of our time driving off road. We had a big tarp on the back of the truck with all the gasoline but we were forced to fuel up in front of people. We had enough fuel to fill up our two vehicles three times which turned out to be just enough to get us to Dallas. As we were fueling up crowds of not-so-nice looking folks with empty gas tanks were staring us down. We gave one guy five gallons of fuel because he had two little kids. We were approached the second time we fueled up on the side of the road by a pissed-off bunch of people asking for gas. We told them we needed it. They didn’t care obviously. One younger guy went towards the back of the truck and said something like “I’m taking one, call the f**king police if you want.” and my father in law had to use his pistol to convince the guy otherwise. We were then standing there, funnel in the truck, me trying to pour gas in, him with a pistol in his hand, my girlfriend and her mom crying, and all of the gas-thief’s buddies looking real tough. He just stood there like some sort of tough-guy a**hole. I got the cap back on the jug and we got out of there with our nerves really frazzled. I kept my pistol loaded after that. We went through a LOT of water. It was really pretty hot out there. I slept in little two or three minute bursts when traffic was stopped which it almost always was. Sit for a few minutes, move ten feet. Repeat a thousand f**king times. My leg actually cramped up from break/accelerate/breaking so many times and I had to pull over. This happened to pretty much all of us. It sounds melodramatic but driving actually f**king hurt at that point. To save on fuel I didn’t run my air conditioner so I was also sweating the whole time but we thankfully had a lot of water. At close to 30 hours people got fed up with the traffic and we started seeing cars zipping past us on the southbound side of the freeway, heading north the wrong way. There were still quite a few emergency vehicles heading south so this was a dangerous idea. It didn’t take long until hundreds of people switched to the other lane and headed northbound on it. A half mile or so up we saw the first head on collision. A family headed north had struck a police cruiser heading south at the crest of a hill. They’d never seen each other until the last second, I guess. We saw a lot of these accidents. The swarm beat the police,though, and we were out in nowhere, Texas anyway so there probably weren’t that many police to respond. Eventually the entire southbound lane was just as clogged as the northbound. More so, really, because there were the head-on accidents. The police couldn’t go south or north now so it was a kind of weird feeling of being on your own. So many people were broken down now that you had to swerve not to just hit the people who were out lingering. They had nowhere to go. Our big tarp-covered pickup drew a lot of eyes, too. We again had to fill up in front of hundreds of people. He again had to use his pistol as a friendly reminder that we didn’t wish to be robbed. He never actually pointed it at anybody, he just took it out and held it as a reminder. People just stared at us with hate. I can’t blame them, I guess. But he was watching out for his wife and daughter and I was watching out for her as well. Most people would do the same.