Famliar sights and smells

WVUE: People return to flooded homes to find not much left

Dave Sellars came back to the house he'd been remodeling when Isaac hit.  Sellers had to be rescued from the roof when the water rose.

"It started flooding at ten after four in the morning and by 6:30, there was about six shingles left underneath that window," says Sellars, pointing to a window on the second floor.  "That's the window I came out of the roof on."

Ankle-deep mud fills the homes, the smell of dead grass and animals fills the air.  There is more death here -- tombs from a cemetery nearly half a mile away ended up in David Morgan's front yard.

Also familiar outside this week, the smell of rotting food a few days after the Entergy stricken city gave up on saving the contents of its refrigerators.  This smell is closely associated with Katrina in the memory anyone who was here during that time.

The good news for those of us living behind the federal protection system is this time we had the option of staying home where, unpleasant as the heat was, we could manage the domestic demands of hunkering such as clearing out the rotting food before it ruins the whole fridge along with it.

Of course this also meant we had to dip into the disaster savings in order to re-stock.  Not everyone has a disaster savings (after Isaac we don't anymore) but that's one reason DSNAP is available. I know we didn't consider our household a home again until it contained mayonnaise.

Meanwhile here's one more familiar sight around town.  It's a crepe myrtle toppled by Isaac on the Napoleon Avenue neutral ground. Isaac's wind gusts were between 60 and 80 miles per hour.  They ripped up roofs and knocked over whole trees like this one.  But those beads, man they hang on.