Hurricane Katrina: Has it really been 15 years?

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Not an anniversary I want to celebrate. Instead, I prefer to celebrate today as the anniversary of the day we started to clean up the mess Katrina left behind..

Because my wife and I lived in Hattiesburg, Mississippi at the time, we saw only a small portion of the devastation left in the aftermath of the hurricane. But 80% of the streets in our city were impassable because of all the trees, mostly pine, that snapped and fell across the roads. (Thanks to all the chainsaw cowboys and cowgirls who went to work, some as soon as the storm passed, to cut up the trees and move them off the roads.)

And it took weeks for electrical crews to get the electricity to our home back up and running. (Thanks to the crews who came from all around to help across south Mississippi and Louisiana.)

I took photos of the destruction, the power line crews, people cleaning up, carrying cases of water, evacuations at the local hospital, but my favorite is the photo above of three sisters singing together. They were part of a worship service that took place on the street in front of the Lighthouse Apostolic Pentecostal Church about two weeks after the storm. The church was gutted, but the congregation continued to worship on the side of the road in the sun.