HURRICANE Chronicles 2005
4 weeks, 2 hurricanes …
An excerpt reprinted with permission of Morris & Dickson Co., Shreveport, November 2005Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005
Lake Pontchartrain -- Less than 12 hours before Katrina slammed ashore just east of New Orleans, Morris & Dickson drivers Shannon Dumas and Ray Porter were headed north on the causeway in a diesel-powered Dodge Sprinter, accompanied by fire trucks, police vehicles and one desperate driver riding a flat tire all the way across. The 26-mile span across Lake Pontchartrain is a nail-biting drive even in good weather, but this night it was downright hairy.
“We was rocking pretty good,” admits Porter, 54, a veteran driver and man of few words who nevertheless conveys a sense of the peril they felt in the wind and driving rain. Gusts were approaching 50 mph. “You didn’t know how long it was going to take you to get out,” he recalls.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had called for the first-ever mandatory evacuation of the city at 9:30 that morning and outwardbound traffic was still heavy late that afternoon. Gas stations were selling out of fuel, ATMs were running out of money and residents were frantic to get on the road and out of town.
“At this point we knew we was going to be cutting it close,” Dumas recalls. “Is it going to get any worse?” he wondered. “Are we going to get off this bridge?”
Dumas, 35, has spent the last three years in the shipping office, but he has seven years of driving experience. He’s one of the backup drivers Morris & Dickson turns to when poor weather is in the offing. “I know what I’m doing, and if we get there in plenty of time we’re not going to be in any danger.” He and Porter, a former oil field hand, had both made runs to the Gulf Coast the previous summer in advance of Hurricane Ivan. “We leave the day before, load up for the major hospitals … give them the meds basically to make it through until we can get back to them,” Dumas says.
They had already made special deliveries to East Jefferson General Hospital in Metairie and to Children’s Hospital in uptown New Orleans, helping the pharmacies stock up in advance of the storm. They were headed next to hospitals in Covington and Slidell on Pontchartrain’s north shore, and then east to Gulfport, Ocean Springs and Pascagoula, Mississippi . . .
