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Richard
and Diane Kennedy:
The Kennedy family after a number of
years had recently finished their house when
the hurricane struck. These are Diane’s
words about their experience
“We all
decided to stay home for the hurricane
because we’ve never had water where we live.
Our power went out at 5:30am on August 29,
2005, it was down hill from
there…Down-stairs was completely submerged.
The next thing we knew the water was coming
in up-stairs. The wind and rain were really
loud… Once the windows broke we had fish
swimming in our house…the water kept coming
in higher and higher. We could not save
anything. We were in the hallway getting
ready to climb into the attic when Richard
said, “Wait.” He realized the water was
starting to go out…When the water was
finally out we had 3 to 4 inches of mud in
the house…that night we all slept in wet
beds right where they were tossed and
landed…There was no way out. We stayed for
three days until our daughters hired an
18-wheeler truck with a flatbed and sent us
a truck with gas tanks in the back filled
with gas. We left on the fourth day.
Everything in our town was destroyed.”
Because of back injury it was hard for
Richard to carry sheet rock to the second
floor of their house and to sheet rock
ceilings — so this was one of our tasks.
They also owned a larger house trailer that
they rented that need to be gutted. The
people who had rented the trailer left and
never returned. There was very little that
could be salvaged. It was heart wrenching to
clean the child’s room that was full of
matchbox cars. I thought of my grand nephew
who has a large collection of matchbox cars
and how he would have felt to have to leave
them behind. We cleared everything except
the refrigerator that was too wide to be
taken out of the door to the trailer with
out removing its door. This refrigerator had
been tied shut since the hurricane and none
of us wanted to find out what science
experiments it contained.
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