Hurricane Isaac: Before, During and After

At 11 AM on Tuesday August 28th, tropical storm Isaac was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, with winds of 75mph it was predicted to make landfall.
Isaac is hitting the same areas as Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 storm that killed 1,836 people and left countless injured and homeless, did in 2005. In fact, the commemoration for the lives lost during Katrina had to be cancelled because of the impending storm.
Isaac is slow moving and very large. From it’s center it out stretches 205 miles.
“A slow storm can cause a lot more havoc because it can knock down virtually everything if it hovers long enough” said Bonnie Scherther, who lost her home during Katrina in 2005.
The storm is a very serious one. An article from NBCnews.com stated that up to 20 inches of rain could fall and even surge 12 feet tall.
This could put dangerous ammounts of pressures on the levees.
A levee is a man-made embankment built to keep a river from overflowing its banks or to prevent ocean waves from washing into undesired areas, and the more a storm lingers, the more pressure is put on the levees and the more possibility there is that flash floods could occur.
Rachel Otis, a new resident to New Orleans and her family make preparations by purchasing “water, junkfood (what was left on the shelves) and potty pads for the dogs.”  The Otis family brought in all the outside plants, closed the blinds and charged all appliances. They hunkered down to wait out the storm. With TV, card games, baking, sleeping and talking to friends via text and Facebook the Otis’s entertained themselves as the storm raged outside their windows, shaking their house as it went.
When Isaac did finally come ashore on Tuesday August 28th at 7:15 PM with 80mph winds and 11 foot surges as far up as the mouth of the Mississippi river, over 500,000 homes were put out power in Louisiana, and more importantly for residents, an 18-mile stretch of levees at Plaquemines Perish flooded over, causing massive amounts of damage.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, 14.5 billion dollars were put into a 133-mile ring of new and improved levees, floodwalls and pumps, of which the Plaquemines Perish levees were not.
Reviewing the wrecked city after the storm finally let up, the Otis’s were horrified at the level of destruction wrought upon their neighborhood. Trees were knocked down everywhere, some houses were missing half or all of their shingles.
Stores and gas stations began to reopen and lines for gas, food and the ATM averaged half hour. By 10:30 am several gas stations were running out of gas. Power is slowly being brought back to its residents and people are beginning to pick up the wreckage.
Many places flooded from the sheer devastating amount of rain that poured down, but it was far from the worst affect of Hurricane Isaac as the death toll rose to 6 on Friday, August 31, 2012.
In the coming days aid will come to those whose homes were flooded.

Slowly but surely, the affected families will piece their homes and lives back together.