Baton Rouge Flood

I'm not native to Baton Rouge. I'm from California, and I've only lived here 3 years. Growing up in California, I'm used to people keeping to themselves. I'm still not used to strangers in the South waving at me, saying hello and asking how my day was, much less the courteous "yes ma'am" I always seem to get. I've also never been through a hurricane, and the worst "disaster" I've experienced is what most Southern Californians would consider a relatively minor earthquake that was more of a traffic inconvenience than anything else. So what I've seen these past few days with the flooding in the Baton Rouge area has been a huge eye opener. My family is among the lucky ones. We left our Prairieville...

This is surviving the flood, from the perspective of a mom with a medically fragile, technology dependent child. Hurricane Katrina During Katrina, we evacuated to Baton Rouge from Ascension Parish. We found out then that we were pregnant with our son, Braden. Hurricane Gustav During Gustav, we evacuated with our medically fragile, technology dependent son to a building and place we believed would be safer and would get power restored faster. Instead, we endured loss of power, taking cover for a tornado, the roof being torn off and water coming in, and a medical crisis with our son. He needed resuscitation; we had done all we could for him. We called ahead to the designated shelter for special needs, and they told us they...

I never thought this would happen to us. Awakened by my husband bringing a bottle to our baby at 4:00am on Friday morning, I was told our street was already flooded. It was already too deep to drive through. We've suspected a drainage problem for a while, and the street had flooded before, so we didn't think anything of it. I was glad to get a little more sleep as opposed to getting up for work. By late morning, the water from our flooded street was now creeping onto our front lawn, already covering the sidewalk. We watched for hours as it slowly fluctuated up and down by an inch or so, gauging by a line on the concrete of our...