It was one very weird August in 2005, let me tell you.
My wife and I, plus our three kids, had just moved into a new house in northeast Ascension Parish. I can clearly remember walking through it (we had been living in an apartment during construction). Even with everything we owned already moved in, it felt really BIG. And empty.
“We’ll never fill this place up!” I remember thinking. Have I ever been more wrong.
Shelter from the Storm
As the reality of Hurricane Katrina began to set in toward the end of that month, I looked to my wife’s relatives, scattered in Metairie and the West Bank of New Orleans. We started trying to get them to come visit us, just for a few days.
By Aug. 27, looking at a Category 5 storm heading for the city, on the perfect line to project massive storm surges into Lake Pontchartrain and test the levees for the first time since 1965, I was very worried. A few family members came, and others evacuated in different directions. After the storm hit and New Orleans flooded, we opened our doors. Before I knew it, we had 23 people, 10 dogs and a bird filling our new house. Breakfast meant me opening the “Hurricane Café” every morning and cooking huge pots of grits, huge skillets of scrambled eggs, huge pans of biscuits and all the bacon and sausage I could find. Nobody went hungry.
They came to us, for the most part, scared and confused. It took months before they could figure out if their homes were even still there. Two of the families living with us had homes in St. Bernard Parish that were totally wiped out. One family was in Algiers. They didn’t flood, but a huge tree fell and cut their house cleanly in half. It just went on and on like that.
Here’s a picture of our Katrina Krewe in early November 2005, after a few had left.
Louisianians Supporting Louisianians
Thank God I worked for Louisiana Blue when Katrina happened. I had just started in November 2004. My newly adopted company was proactive and serious about helping.
First, our company has always maintained very strong reserves. These are a literal rainy day fund to make sure we can take care of everyone in times of crisis. And boy, were those funds needed after Hurricane Katrina. In late 2005, we had lost track of almost 60,000 members and had no idea where they were. Until they went to a doctor or filled a prescription and a claim was filed, we couldn’t find them!
Our board decided that the right thing to do was to keep our members insured in spite of the challenge of locating them. We made a decision as a company to keep all members on the books until we knew for sure what happened to them, whether they paid their premiums or not. These folks would need care and medication wherever they landed, and we sure didn’t want lack of insurance to slow them down. Gradually, the claims started trickling in from Texas, Georgia, Utah even Minnesota! Truly our Louisiana family had been scattered by the storm. And our board of directors and whole organization took care of them 100%.
This was a unique thing that only a not-for-profit company would dare to do, but that was just the beginning of the generosity I experienced as a new employee of this company.
Word began to spread that many Louisiana Blue employees were hosting evacuees at their homes, possibly for a long time. Louisiana Blue’s management began registering employees who were housing folks and how many they were housing, including ages, genders, pets and special needs. They started asking other employees to help however they could.
Before I knew it, gift cards started showing up on my desk. Hundreds of dollars in assistance, some from the company, some from anonymous donors.
People at work began to contact me, and before I knew it, the trunk of my car was filled with food, toys, medication, even pet supplies! And it wasn’t just me. We had hundreds of employees hosting folks, and EVERYONE at Louisiana Blue pitched in to help these families sustain themselves. I don’t think we EVER ran out of food to help all the people who came to live with us. At one point, when we hit the 23-person threshold, I realized that 10 of the folks living with us were people I had never met. They were friends and relatives of friends in dire straits who came to live with us. They are people I still keep in touch with today. Even after they started to trickle out to rebuild their lives, 10 of them stayed with us an entire year to get back on their feet. Louisiana Blue’s employees never balked at helping us, not once. Amazing place.
Forming Lasting Friendships
Another very important thing that happened to me during that time was my introduction to Rod Teamer, another recently hired Louisiana Blue employee who had to evacuate from New Orleans.
When I met Rod, he was struggling. He had lived in New Orleans almost his entire life. He and his beautiful family had never really lived anywhere else, and his home was completely flooded and destroyed. He was trying to resettle them somewhere near Baton Rouge while they determined their long-term plan. He had little experience with the area (had not lived here since college) and no idea where to go or what to do. He and I became friends, and I tried to help him get everyone resettled here until he could rebuild. We talked almost every day. It was an education you couldn’t buy in any school, and it changed my life.
Mike and Rod in 2025.
He probably doesn’t know it, but I owe Rod a lot. Talking to him every day allowed me to understand what people who lost everything in this storm were going through, especially people of color. I suspect that even now he thinks I was helping him, but in reality he was helping me, and still does. We are friends in ways I cannot describe, even though our backgrounds are about as different as they can be. Rod eventually resettled back in New Orleans. He’s still with Louisiana Blue just like me, 20 years later, and we still talk whenever we can, but now the topics are a bit different: grandkids, our kids’ shenanigans, career changes, cars, aches and pains, and most importantly, how Louisiana is changing for the good and the bad.
The Straight Talk is, Louisiana Blue impressed me during those years. Beyond anything I had ever seen working in the for-profit Fortune 500 corporate world.
My mom always says you have to find the positive in every tragedy to go on living. So I think about the positives around Hurricane Katrina. My life has been built up because of knowing Rod. I have new family because of the people I housed. And without Katrina, none of those things would have happened. And I also have the blessing of working for a company that went above and beyond to do the right thing when the situation was at its worst.
At this 20th anniversary of one of the worst tragedies in American history, I would welcome your thoughts and stories. Feel free to let us know, in the comments below, what your Katrina experiences have left you with, good and bad, so that we may all share them together. Without that togetherness, we have very little hope of moving forward.
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