[OKDXA] Surviving Katrina

[Jerry Chouinard]

Alan:

Glad you and the family are OK and we appreciate the time you've taken to 
report in.  I personally am concerned with the welfare of Billy KB5FET and 
Betty KB5ICE Gray as those folks are the only ones I haven't heard anything 
on.  If you do hear from them or about them would appreciate any word.

73 - K5YAA

At 02:56 PM 9/3/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>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
>
>
>
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