Maddox is the director of the Tammany Trace, and she like most parish employees rode out Hurricane Katrina at the Emergency Operations Center in Covington, fielding calls from emergency personnel and those out in the storm seeking help.
“I remember clearly a call from a man caught in large building in Slidell off Old Spanish Trail. I am not sure if I took the original call but I did take one of his many calls. The phone would disconnect before he could finish his speaking and he was hard to understand. He stated the building was shaking and felt like it was going to collapse. He had no place to go he was stuck. Please send help…A call came through that someone in the Eden Isles area was on their rooftop and needed rescuing. Eden Isles? That is where my fiancé has a house. Luckily he was with me at the EOC. He is usually really stubborn and won’t leave during storms but something told him to take this one seriously...”
 Parish President Kevin Davis unveils the parish’s new Katrina Web site. (Staff Photo by Suzanne Le Breton) |
The parish began working on the Web site on Aug. 29, 2009, the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
Davis said he felt the five-year mark, which is one month away, was an appropriate time to release this tool to the public.
The Web site includes a timeline, which has a large percentage of events as recorded by EOC call takers like Maddox during the storm and its aftermath. It includes pictures submitted by fire stations, local media and businesses.
It is the by far the most comprehensive Katrina site in existence and the only one to have a large percentage of actual chronological events pertaining to St. Tammany.
The site can be found at www.stpgov.org/katrina or by clicking a link on the parish Web site.
It tells the stories of those who stayed and shouldn’t have, those who volunteered to answer phones and ended up saving lives, those that evacuated and returned home to find everything lost and the public servants who faced the challenge and triumphed.
The site includes a section for the public to both read other’s stories and submit their own, whether it be from events of the storm as a resident or as a volunteer.
Davis said in addition to St. Tammany Parish residents, he wants those who came from other states to help to also contribute, as they are as much a part of the St. Tammany Katrina story as the people who live here.
He said this site is a tool to share the process of what went down during those days leading up to, during and after the storm, as well as a healing tool.
In St. Tammany Parish alone, over 48,000 homes were damaged; almost 20,000 by flood waters, the eye passed directly over the eastern portion of St. Tammany Parish, and many still five years later do not know what happened during that time in other areas of the parish.
In the introduction to the Web site, Stymiest wrote: “Residents of Slidell often have no idea of the storm’s damage in Folsom. Some in Mandeville do not know that the eye covered the greater Slidell area. The communities of Covington, Sun, Abita Springs, Madisonville and Pearl River may not know what happened to their neighbors. Now is the time to tell our story.”
The only thing that is removed from the accounts included on the site is personal information.
“We corrected no typos, errors of misstatements,” Davis said.
“The threads of this story have been woven together as they unfolded…Time may have proven some of the comments inaccurate, but they were believed to be true at the time and are included here for a richer telling of this story,” Stymiest stated in the introduction.
Davis said many, especially those in parish government, have pushed back the emotions, have tried to put it all behind them, have not shed the tears.
He thinks this Web site, while it may reopen old wounds, is a necessary part of the healing process.
“To move forward you have to look back,” he said, adding that he thinks five years is a good time to do that. “I think this is a good process for us to go through.”
“The healing process continues to occur, and this is a way we can all contribute to the process. The Web site is a tribute to the triumph of our parish and the wonderful people who played a role in that triumph.”
“No planning could fully prepare us for the devastation Katrina wrought. Nothing, however, makes me prouder than the heroism displayed by first responders and citizens alike,” Davis wrote in his statement on the Web site. “We fought back and we arose from the winds and flood waters stronger than ever…We were in the eye. We not only survived, we triumphed.”
“Hopefully, this will be the last Hurricane Katrina Mission of St. Tammany,” Stymiest wrote in a release announcing the Web site.
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