Leaving New Orleans at Gunpoint
Todd Lowe is the inaugural guest of the DFA Fall Session?we'll be inviting other guests to speak with the DFA community over the coming weeks. Todd joins us tonight to talk about his family's experiences in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
My name is Todd Lowe. I am married and have 3 children. We rode out Hurricane Katrina without too much trouble and made it through the original sweeps trying to get everyone out of the city. We were stocked to an almost silly level with 75 gallons of drinking water and about six weeks of canned foods at the beginning. We are homeschoolers so we used the time when we couldn't leave the house because of the floodwaters productively working with our kids on various projects. We were anxiously awaiting the silly
militant kicking people out of the city to end so that we could begin cleaning up.
On Sept. 11th we decided we were sick of staying in our house when there was so much work to be done. We went out and got our van started which had been up in the side yard ?just high enough that it took no damage?and we were able to charge our cell phones from the car charger. We were getting full Sprint service and we had been able to call friends and family to tell them
that we were doing fine. The flood waters had been down for a couple of days in the Esplanade Ridge area, but it was quite dirty. There was a fence and some limbs that had to be removed to get the van out of the yard. We met members of the 82nd Airborne who treated us with total respect on the day of the 11th, the night of the 11th, and the day of the 12th.
On Sept 13th, I decided that I should call the mortgage company to let them know that I wasn't going to be sending a check to this month ;) (They, by the way, had deferred my loan for 90 days with no penalties I found out later.) It was about 11:00 in the morning. I had just called the number and was waiting for an operator when I heard loud voices yelling at me from the front of the house and my eldest child yelling to me that there were men outside. I went to the front room of my house with the cell phone still in one hand and
my mortgage coupon book in the other hand. I was greeted by a screaming voice saying "SHOW US YOUR HANDS!" With one hand to my ear, and the other holding the coupon book a few inches from my nose so that I could read the info on it, I wasn't exactly hiding anything. I was wearing only a pair of shorts, so it wasn't like I had a shotgun hidden in my pants.
I walked to the window and they yelled at me to open the front door. As soon as I opened the front door, I had about 15 guns pointed at me. There were several state police officers on the front step along with a harbor police officer, and about a dozen other officers most with rifles pointed directly at my chest and head. Several of the officers started yelling at me to get my hands up, which I did, and they got me out the door and sat me down on the front step of my house. They said they had heard that I refused to leave and then they demanded to see my wife and children and our supplies.
They made me stay on the steps and went through the house with my wife who showed them our perfectly fine children, our flushing toilets, our 50+ gallons of drinking water and our approximately 3-4 week supply of dry and canned foods remaining. They said that everything looked fine but that they did not think it was a safe environment for my children and therefore they were going to take my children from me if we did not immediately agree to leave. As I was not about to turn my children over to a bunch of armed thugs, I agreed to leave.
?Todd
Posted by Hannah at October 15, 2005 05:42 AM