Personal Narrative: My Life After Hurricane Katrina

August 28, 2005, at approximately 2:00 pm in Gulfport, Mississippi, was the beginning of the first traumatic event in my life. It was a pretty windy day, and the clouds were moving in. Nobody knew that by the time the sun came up the next day, the landscape, and everything we knew, would be changed forever. Hurricane Katrina was a category five hurricane making its way towards us on the gulf coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. As the day grew older, the air got dense and colder and that taste and smell hit me that said rain was on its way. This day would become the starting point of what would be an interesting year for this twenty-year-old military man who was also trained to go off to war in Iraq.

I had never really seen the destruction of a city before, but when I looked around after Hurricane Katrina had gone, it was astounding. I saw trees missing and uprooted; casino barges were moved onto land anywhere from 100 feet to as much as half a mile away from where they were originally. I could smell the rotting of chicken and other food items that were now sitting in the Gulf of Mexico. Looking into the water behind The Grand Casino Gulfport, I saw an American flag lying in the water, and decided to reach in and pick it up. That same flag now hangs in my bedroom. Walking along the road is tough as there is hardly any road to be seen;

The walls, normally white, were a brown sludge color with a hint of the green mold beginning. The smell made me gag, almost to the point of puking. The floors were still covered with the sludge of whatever the waters brought with them. I felt so bad for the kids, knowing that everything they had, was gone. Knowing how important this place was for them, I went ahead and started my job. I started up the generator on my truck to start pumping water through the hose. My primary job was to spray down the walls and the floor to clear off as much of the dirt and mold as I