Surviving Katrina, starting a new life.

• Author: Scher, Oliver
• Position: Hurricane Katrina, 2005

The morning of Sunday, Aug. 28, was chaos in my family's New Orleans home. A Category 5 hurricane was headed right for us, and everyone was running around trying to get ready. My parents told me to pack clothes for a week, since we had decided to ride out the storm in a hotel downtown.

Our Uptown house was right next to the Mississippi River, so my parents, like many other New Orleanians, had decided we'd be safer at a hotel, which we thought would be well-supplied in an emergency. Later that day, my mom, my dad, and I closed up our house and headed to the Windsor Court Hotel.

THUNDEROUS CRASH

That night, Katrina hit the city. We had a room on the 14th floor. At 5 a.m., a thunderous crash woke me up. Suddenly, the entire room went pitch black as the power went out. Dad and I chuckled and said, "Here we go!"

It was pouring outside, and there was water leaking in through the ceiling of our room, which was disturbing since there were more than five floors above us. (We later learned that all the windows above us had shattered.)

Late Monday, the hurricane finally ended, and it was safe to go outside. It was like walking through a war zone. Buildings had collapsed onto parked cars and trees were completely uprooted and knocked over.

BROKEN LEVEES

When my dad and I went out Tuesday morning, we saw several reporters sprinting away from us. They told us to run for our lives: The levees had broken and the Ninth Ward, a low-lying neighborhood nearby, was flooded. People started shooting at us as we ran back to the hotel. Anarchy had fallen upon the city.

Later that day...