I’m originally from Southern Pines, North Carolina, by way of the military and Hurricane Katrina, I ended up in San Antonio, Texas. We were actually here, on the 29th when the hurricane hit in the morning of the 29th. So it was before day in the morning that they started advertising that the storm had come through, and it was then that we found out that we were going to be in trouble, in Mississippi.

After going to the base, the local base, Randolph Air Force Base, which was our headquarters, I went there to see if they could connect us back with my base in Mississippi, so we could get some idea of how bad the damage was. We knew that they had sent some people out to check out homes of people who had evacuated, and mine was one of the homes and so I contacted my home station and talked to the people in my shop and found out that everything in my home was destroyed, 4 feet and below.

The most stressful part was walking into the house. I remember looking at my husband and just screaming at the top of my voice just to get it out. We had people that we knew, who had already come to our house, shut off our electricity, because had they not, when we walked in we would have been electrocuted because of all the loose wires and everything that was laying around the house. They boarded up the front of our house as much as possible to keep people from looting whatever was any good in the house. They took care of helping us to clean out the home which is what we had to do.

So you know, just dealing with all of that, with destruction in front of everybody from my house and below was completely destroyed. So that by itself was just hard to deal with. And nothing, we weren’t able to save anything in our home. The only thing we were able to save were a few pictures that sat four feet and higher.

Surviving this disaster has caused me and my husband to be more mindful of our neighborhood. We’re just really outgoing when it comes to our neighborhood. We know our neighbors. We’re very diligent as far as preparing ourselves, as far as storing up things, water… we have that stuff available. So I would say be prepared, storing food, papers being kept protected, personal information that you need. I would say making sure someone has information of people that you want to be able to reach out to. You know, family members, making sure you’ve got those phone numbers and those people know how to reach you