[OKDXA] Surviving Katrina

[N5PA]

Laurel was the hardest hit area off the coast according to our governor.  We
had 80 MPH plus winds for 11 hours and 125 MPH gusts for 3 1/2 hours.  We
thought it had calmed down when the winds got down to 50 MPH.  It is amazing
to see the top of a 120 foot tall pine tree touch the ground from the wind
blowing so hard.  Laurel, Mississippi is a town of 17,000 people and there
were over 1000 homes totally destroyed and many times that heavily damaged.
We were lucky and only had a couple of trees hit the house and caused some
minor damage and one window on my sun room was broke by a flying limb.
There were 8 people dead here in town and one was a friend of ours.  A tree
fell through their house and killed him and his wife is intensive care.
Tony Pogue, my network manager, lost his father yesterday.  It was not storm
related, though.  He had been getting chemo treatments and evidently it had
been weakening his heart and he started having a hard time breathing
yesterday morning and by the time the ambulance got him to the hospital he
was dead.  They are burying him tomorrow.

There are no utilities in most of the area.  I have no water, no power, no
natural gas, and no gasoline.  It is hot down here with heat indexes over
105 every day.  It is supposed to start cooling down a little in the next
few days, but this is our hottest time of year.  There are no stores open
and there has been a lot of looting.  There were a lot of businesses totally
destroyed by the storm.  The damage is much worse on the north end of town
where I live.  There is not a utility pole standing within a mile of my
house and they are saying it will probably be sometime in October before I
have utilities.

My ham radio tower stayed up through the storm but all my wire antennas came
down and my Force 12 beam antenna is at about a 70 degree angle now and the
boom is bent.  I would imagine the rotator is broken, also.  Ham radio is
the last thing on my mind right now.  We are just concentrating on surviving
from day to day and trying to keep the company afloat.  We depend heavily on
diesel fuel and now even more so.  We are using generators to keep all our
hatcheries going and for all our growers to keep their generators going as
well.

The family survived without harm and we lost about 80 percent of the trees
in our yard.  Most are too big for me to cut with my 18 inch chainsaw.
Without fuel I cannot run it for long, anyway.  My sister's father-in-law
brought me a 6250 watt generator yesterday but I did not get home from work
until about eleven last night so it is still setting in my garage.  I only
have one gallon of gas to run it on so it is not of much good.  Cathy, my
wife, and Allison, my youngest daughter have gone to Brookhaven to her
sister's house to stay.  They are saying that they might cancel classes for
this whole semester at the Jones County Junior College, where Allison is
going and Cathy is checking to see if she can transfer to another college
now.  My oldest daughter Lori and her husband are staying with my
sister-in-law in Memphis and they do not know if their house in Hattiesburg
is damaged or not.  It is going to be a very long and slow process to get
things put back together.  Let everyone know we are surviving.  Gasoline is
our biggest need followed by food and water.  It is very dark in Laurel,
Mississippi at night.  It reminds me a lot of Blantyre, Malawi at night when
we were in Africa.

73,
Alan Clark, N5PA
Laurel, Mississippi