Thank you for sharing that with me. I agree it was very scary after the storm. We too had Marshall Law down here. When the surge came in, it came up fast. Up to 12 feet in many parts of the parish. The water gradually did receed, but we had to wait till the tide went back out and the water had to be pumped out by generators. All of our pumping stations were destroyed. It took over three weeks for the flood waters to go down. It was thursday after the storm when outsiders finally made it into the parish. The only way in is by bridge or boat. It was about 30 Canadians from a search and rescue team out of Vancouver. For two weeks it was local residents and the Canadian rescue team who saved people. Where I live in the parish, we had a huge oil spill from a refinery. In all of that floodwater we also had 1 million gallons of oil, benzene and the works. We weren't allowed back into the parish until Sept. 22nd and that ended up being cancelled because of Hurricane Rita. We flooded again after that storm and had to wait another week to come back and see our homes. The National Guard did make it down here to the parish, but it was almost two weeks after the storm. We had to gut our houses from top to bottom. Shovel a foot of wet marsh mud out the entire house.Then Murphy Oil came in and cleaned the inside and outside of the house for oil. We did three rounds of mold remediation on the inside. Then let the house sit air tight with humidifiers for one month. We opened it back up and started rebuilding. It took us five months to clean out the house. On Feb 13th, 2006, we started the rebuilding process. Today, we still don't have street lights or street signs. You have to make your own. Land line phones and cable tv won't be back to this area until around October later this year. You can get satellite tv now. Most areas have electricity and gas. Some still waiting. The hospital we had is not coming back, it's been demolished. We do have a health clinic in a trailer. Slowly we do have businesses coming back. But if you have shopping to do, you need to travel to the westbank or the northshore for that. Driving down the highway these days your starting to see improvements. But when you drive into the neighoborhoods it is horrible. Many streets don't have a thing done to them since the storm. The local government predicts that it will be at least 10 years before the parish resembles what it even looked like in the 60's.