Mississippi and Louisiana—and New Orleans, in particular—recently commemorated the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Just six weeks after Katrina made landfall, the Louisiana Credit Union League invited members of the press to come to New Orleans to witness the damage and report on the challenges the area was facing more than a month later—and would be facing for many months to come.
I was one of the reporters who participated in that press tour. Arriving just one day after multiple vaccinations were no longer required in order to enter New Orleans, I was the only member of the press corps who knew all too well what we would see long before we got to the city.
That's because I live in South Florida, which is no stranger to hurricanes. Indeed, I had ridden out back-to-back direct hits from Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne just one year before Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast.
But even for me, it was not a case of "been there, done that." Yes, my neighborhood was without power for more than two weeks after Frances (thankfully it was only 72 hours after Jeanne-primarily because all the trees that knocked out power lines during Frances were, of course, already gone). Yes, we sat huddled in our house, watching the glass in our boarded-up windows bow in and out as we listened to what sounded like a freight train barreling right at us for nearly 24 hours. Yes, I was entirely too familiar with the vision of blue tarps covering the wind-torn roofs of house after house after house.
But we didn't have the flooding that decimated New Orleans. We didn't have the storm surge that devastated coastal areas in Mississippi. We still had a habitable—albeit temporarily uncomfortable—home.
Our tour included going inside sludge-filled credit union branches rendered unrecognizable, but it also included meeting people who had gone above and beyond to continue serving members still in a daze at what they had lost.
Among the many people I interviewed during what came to be known as LCUL's Hurricane Tour was Mia Perez, who was the marketing director of GNO FCU at the time. "You see these people drive up to their homes with these U-Hauls they've rented so they can salvage as much as they can," Perez said. "But when they come out, they've got maybe a handful of jewelry and trinkets, and that's it."
Ten years later, it's easy to lose sight of what that really was like. In CU Journal's anniversary coverage (which you can read at
But they did, and 10 years later, many of them still do. And we remember.
Editor in Chief Lisa Freeman can be reached at
