Chattanooga: Families keep up with news about storm

Thirteen members of an extended family from Terrebonne Parish, La., crowded together on the beds of a Chattanooga motel on Monday, laptops on their knees, checking MySpace for storm updates from friends back home.

Monica Boudreaux, 35, of Chauvin, La., sat with a cell phone pressed to her ear, calling out the details they couldn’t get from the 24-hour news station on the television.

“The whole east side of Houma is blown away,” she said. “Houma Junior High is on fire.”

“Most of the trailers up the road from us are off the blocks.”

“Bourg Supermarket has no roof. It’s gone,” she said.

About 30 members of Ms. Boudreaux’s family rode out Hurricane Gustav at the Days Inn on M.L. King Boulevard on Monday, comforting each other as they watched the spiraling red hurricane graphic head directly toward their home near the coast southwest of New Orleans.

The evacuees are among the more than 200,000 who fled New Orleans as the hurricane approached.

About 185 evacuees are housed at a Red Cross shelter at the Brainerd Recreation Center, spokeswoman Claudia Moore said. The agency opened a second shelter at a Salvation Army facility on Moore Road, where about 25 evacuees are housed and there is room for another 40 people.

The Red Cross also opened a shelter in Dalton, Ga., on Monday.

At the Days Inn, Chad Brunet, 34, a member of Ms. Boudreaux, broke down after learning from phone dispatches that water had breached the levees near his home in Chauvin.

Having lost everything in Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he wasn’t sure he could face the possibility of starting over again.

“Just the thought of not having everything again, I can’t do it,” he said. “And then to have family still there, you’re not sure if they will still be there when you get back.”

It was precisely this scenario that motivated Cherita and Michael Adams to relocate from New Orleans to Hixson following the destructive flooding they experienced after Katrina.

The Adamses, who own Blue Orleans restaurant on Market Street, had recently finished renovating their dream home in New Orleans East when the floodwaters hit.

“I guess the best way to describe it was going into your home that had now become a cave,” she said. “There was black sludge everywhere, fuzz on every ceiling, wall, window. It looked like fur, and it was every color of the rainbow: purple, blue, black, orange, red, pink.”

The only thing they managed to salvage, she said, was her wedding dress and an autographed poster of the Neville Brothers.

Ms. Adams spent Sunday holding a sleepless vigil in front of the television, limiting calls to those from the 504 area code and feeling the same distress she did three years ago.

“I keep thinking in the back of my mind if I keep watching the storm until it passes that somehow or another I’m doing my part,” she said.

But among the painful memories of Katrina, there was also relief at being safe in Tennessee and comfort in the knowledge that leaving New Orleans had been the right decision after all.

“When do you say the city’s just not equipped now? When do you say, ‘I’ll make a new life somewhere else and New Orleans will always be in my heart?’ I can’t continue to be tossed back and forth like the waves in the Mississippi River,” she said. “I can’t do that. I can’t do that to my kids.”

Fellow New Orleans transplants Marilyn and Clifton St. Pierre, of Birchwood in Hamilton County, were also glued to the television Monday, along with seven members of the Loy family from Belle Chasse, La.

The St. Pierres invited the Loys to stay with them while the storm passed.

After it seemed that Gustav had passed them by, the families celebrated the end of the storm with other New Orleanians staying in the area.

They sat on lawn chairs in the driveway, wearing LSU T-shirts and telling jokes as Ms. St. Pierre worked the grill. Despite the laughter and the news that their home might be spared, Lorraine Loy said it was too soon to relax completely.

“There’s a nervousness that hasn’t left you,” she said. “I still feel it.”

The comfort of being surrounded by family and others who understood their experience, however, made the whole weekend bearable for Amy Ricks, a Louisiana evacuee who was staying with her daughter, Lauren, in Ooltewah.

“It’s not enough having shelter,” she said, tears filling her eyes. “It’s having people. It meant a lot knowing that people could really understand what you’re feeling.”