We made it out alive, a little terrified, but alive. At first I was like, this isn't so bad, it's like a baby thunderstorm in Arkansas. I played some Dominoes, started eating poptarts way too early, and looked out the window. At about 12:00 the power began flickering on and off every couple of minutes. David and I went out to look at an electrical pole that was swaying dangerously close to our house when we heard this surge of electricity reverberate and green light shot out of the transformer. That was the end of the power.
David went outside to check on the gate because it was banging back and forth. He came back shouting something about the fence and my car. I shouted back "just tie it with a ratchet strap." He yelled " No! not the gate, the whole fence." I looked out and saw the enormous sheet metal privacy fence shifting back and forth about 4 feet from my car. I ran outside in the rain and grabbed my keys, David opened the gate and Ryan (our friend from New Orleans) shouts, "GO GO GO GO!" The back of our fence flies up in the air and slams down on the ground. I'm screaming and simultaneously burning rubber on our gravel driveway to get out of the fence. After this terrifying adventure, we go back in the house and wait for the other side of the fence to fly at the house and chop the roof off. Fortunately this never happened, but we need to pour concrete all around the fence because the wind and rain washed away most of the holes it's buried in.
Inside our house it didn't seem too bad outside. When it finally calmed down, we went out in the street and saw a power line snapped in two down the block, another one flat across the road, a tree down across the street that took the back end of the roof off and half a dozen trees with jagged, split limbs and piles of branches and debris around them.
The radio said it was the worst hurricane to hit Baton Rouge since Hurricane Betsy in 1965. Schools are definitely closed until Monday and about half of Baton Rouge won't get power for 4 weeks! We threw away everything in the fridge after Tuesday and by Wednesday it was so wet and muggy in our house that our soggy clothes and clogged up sink were beginning to sour. Just in case we are in that 4-weeks-without-power group, we decided to head to Little Rock and stay with David's parent's until Monday, get some sleep, put on dry clothes, and not eat poptarts. We just got in and we're about to go to bed. I'm totally exhausted from putting the fence back up with David this morning and cleaning up the yard.
I wanted to let you all know that we're safe, and we're very lucky. Our friend Jimmy's ceiling caved in, so he is going to stay with us for awhile. So many of the houses we saw on the way out of town have trees inside them, not just in the back yard. We can drive down our street; we can drink our water, and we have a place to go.
