I had an 8 a.m. appointment this morning in the Carrollton area and had to drive through a disaster zone to make it.
The whole area was out of power and the police and National Guard were directing traffic at major intersections. Driving down Carrollton Avenue towards the river, debris was all over the road and there were a lot of emergency vehicles moving around.
On either side of the road were twisted branches of oak trees. They were stacked up to 10 feet tall in areas. I saw branches everywhere but it seemed the trees they were torn from were far away. It wasn’t as if you could see a downed limb and look up. They were everywhere, including in places where there weren’t any oaks around. All sorts of construction materials were strewn about.
People were out and about and looking shocked.
I saw the police had an operations center set up down by the shopping center near GNO bike shop. They were also arresting a man who was pushing around a shopping cart, not sure why. He didn’t have anything in his cart.
There was a building on the city-side of Carrollton that seemed to have a lot of damage.
I rounded the corner onto St. Charles and saw a two-block stretch that looked pretty bad. More oak trees and a lot of house debris like siding, gutters and shingles. Like the trees, i couldn’t exactly place the debris to the building it came from.
I saw a man sitting on the steps of his damaged house on St. Charles looking shocked.
The radio said the swath stretches from Westwego, across the river and through Gentilly to the lake.