Former News reporter details Katrina's wrath

Editor's note: Former Desert News reporter Dion M. Harris gives her first-person account of evacuating from New Orleans and being a Hurricane Katrina refugee.

When I left home on Aug. 28, a quiet and overcast Sunday, it was 3:36 p.m., and I didn't look back. I had decided to evacuate three hours earlier, no previous plan considered or intended.

My friend Gordon, a district fire chief, had called me again shortly after I'd awakened, refreshed and finally able to consider traveling after a long but prosperous late-summer week shuttling conventioneers around town — then to and from the airport — in my taxi.

"Friend, I think you should go. It's looking pretty bad," he informed me around 9:30 a.m. It was 10 hours after I'd last seen him on a break from his Magazine Street post amid feverish preparations for the approaching storm, Hurricane Katrina.

We had enjoyed "Native Tongues 4," the fourth installment in the bitingly hilarious series of monologues authored by various Crescent City writers, at Le Chat Noir. We went out for a night on the town Saturday despite increasingly dour predictions of the pending tempest. But the front page of the Friday Times-Picayune, which rested on my kitchen table, had reported that the storm had grazed southern Florida and was dissipating. I clearly remember thinking that Friday morning after retrieving the paper from the lawn: "We're doing good. We're at 'K' and almost through the hurricane season without incident."

I admit I am one of many New Orleanians increasingly complacent to the litany of dire forecasts and suggestions for evacuation. Although we all knew we sit below sea level in a saucer-shaped city with subsidence issues — in an increasingly warm landscape — we succumbed to the Chicken Little Syndrome: one too many bogus calls for voluntary evacuation coupled with the chaos in the Superdome during the 1998 Hurricane Georges evacuation debacle and fresh scars from the 2004 Hurricane Ivan traffic jam.

Many of us had either resigned ourselves to riding hurricanes out or traveling to distant safe houses, only to return in a day or two to clear, sunny skies and vexing little damage at home. For too many of us, the hassle just wasn't worth it. Nothing bad ever happened, anyway.

Until Katrina.

I evacuated to McComb, Miss., where I had a reservation with the deputy sheriff I befriended last year during the Ivan evacuation. I spent the first 11 days after the storm there in a furnished family house that I had all to myself. We lived for six days without electricity in late August, in southern Mississippi.