I was in my hotel about 5:30 p.m. Friday night in New Orleans when I heard a loud explosion. Really loud, about as loud a noise as I had ever heard. I went to the window and looked down, fourteen stories, to the intersection of Iberville and Royal. Smoke had started billowing from a large grate, filling the sky, but it was possible to catch glimpses of flame beneath the street. The response to whatever was happening seemed somewhat sluggish. Attendants from a parking garage on Iberville stopped traffic from moving forward, but that was about it.
Then the lights went out. I grabbed my cell phone and my room key and left. I risked the elevators, which were still working, and went downstairs. No one was being allowed to leave the hotel by the front doors, on Royal Street, so I went out the side exit to Bienville.
Almost twenty-four hours later, a large swath of the French Quarter is still without power. We’re in another hotel and you won’t catch me bitching about being inconvenienced by a power outage, not in this city. The problem is probably the result of heavy rains Thursday night; we heard an Entergy guy saying into his cell phone that “water got into the chamber.”
But I won’t stop thinking for a while about those first five minutes after the explosion, how tricky it was to figure out whether to go or stay. I would have been safe in my room, as it turned out, but I decided I liked the options afforded being on the street, as opposed to the single option of being fourteen floors above whatever was happening. But I can see how hard it would be to make any decision in a true emergency.
Anyone here ever have to think and act quickly with little or no information available? Did you make the best choices?
Hey Laura….Can’t think of a good example for myself but it does make me recall the family story involving my grandmother who was living in Florida when some big fire was sweeping through her semi-tropical neighborhood and what she grabbed as she fled the house was: a bunch of bananas and a cuckoo clock. The bananas we got, she was a big proponent of daily potassium intake. But the clock?
Hey, a non-sequitur question but, do i remember you touting a free story of yours online someplace, not too long ago? What (and where) was that?
Thanks and be well. Hope, you’ve had your quota of fraught moments down there…
More than 30 years ago. Mass Ave, Boston. Small supermarket. Theatre co-workers Paul, Brian and I were in line with one bottle of sauce and one pound of spaghetti. Combining our money, it was all we could afford for dinner. Suddenly a man in the next line over pulled a gun on the woman at the register. Seeing that the gunman was focused on getting the money from the register, I ran past him, out the door, and around the corner to an apartment house. I rang every buzzer and when someone answered over the intercom I begged them to call the police for a hold up in progress. My regret is not pulling my friends out of the market with me somehow, although perhaps we would have been a bigger target for the gunman. I know that they got out safely later on as we all met up again later at someone’s apartment. The police had come after the robber fled (I have no idea if the police came because of my plea for help) and questioned my friends to make sure that I wasn’t somehow part of the holdup because of my uneventful/high speed escape! I have no memory whether or not they got the spaghetti and if we ate it for dinner.
When I fled, I did not make a conscious decision. My body took over and reacted. A gun will do that to you.
–Marjorie
P.S.–When you have a chance, Laura, can you share some of your Gnawlins meals with us? Creole, Cajun, Southern? I have never found another city in the U.S. (so far) for the joy of a good meal like that one provides. And please tell me that you have had some bread pudding at some point. It is extraordinary. I have never had it’s equal anywhere else. Also if you see Sternhagen and Selden on stage doing some Williams, I would love to hear about that as well. They are both national treasures.
Hello! I’m so glad you chose right. About fifteen years ago my husband and I were watching a video, and my kids were up in bed sound asleep. It was storming and we heard what sounded like a freight train running through the backyard. We ran up and got the kids and headed for the basement, and of course, by the time we got down there, it was over. Because we were using the VCR we did not see the tornado warning on TV therefore our reaction would have been too late if the tornado had hit the houses instead of just going through the back yard. Neither of us had ever experienced a tornado, but we’ve seen the movies. We lived in a townhouse in Harford Cty. and the entire group was missing fencing and deck furniture, but luckily no one was injured.
When I was about 13, I told a dirty joke at the dinner table, my first; this was my father’s venue, not mine. He was so suprised that he laughed and choked on his bite of food. He turned red and passed out. My mother went to my father along with the youngest sister to perform the Heimlich; I went to the phone to call the squad and the middle sister ran upstairs. Later, we asked the middle sister, “Why would you run upstairs?” She stated, “That’s where my first aid book was.”
I remember once – many (many) years ago, when I was 3rd Assistant Manager(!) at a supermarket, which meant I closed the place at 11 pm. One night after hours when I was heading for my car, I noticed that the hotdog place on the other end of the same shopping center appeared to be filled with fog.
My only real thought was something like “huh”; the place was dark, and there was no other sign of fire -but the place was filled with a fairly solid cloud….of smoke? “Huh”. (I think I was 18 or 19, at the time).
This was before cell phones, so finally I decided to walk back to my store, unlock the door, and call 911 (Memory Project challenge! I THINK I dialed 911. Did that exist in 1980? Unless my memory is betraying me, I say ‘yes’)…when I told the operator my story, and emphasized that it could all be NOTHING – and asked if she could possibly send someone to “take a look”, she memorably and decisively brushed my reluctance aside with the firm declaration that “We’ll handle it”. I’ll never forget that; I still didn’t believe there was really trouble, and now things were ‘in motion’
And I’m not kidding – within seconds of leaving my store again, I could hear sirens piercing the night air – and no less than 4 fire trucks and several police showed up. The very first thing the fire fighters did was take a big axe and smash out the glass door of the hot dog place, and go into the building.
At that point, I was praying that there WAS a fire….and sure enough, they told me that a bucket full of greasy rags in the back of the place had ignited (presumeably after smoldering for some time).
So I came that close to becoming a sort of latter-day Mrs O’Leary, saying “Huh” and going on home, as the shopping center where I worked burned in my rear-view mirror!
Laura, Sounds like you did the right thing. I was in a foster home in 1964 and the night of my 18th birthday the sawdust burning furnace blew up in the basement igniting many things. I grabbed my Beach Boys album, picture of my boyfriend and the two year old who was supposed to be sleeping on the couch but was sleeping in the hall. We all got out and the house was gutted. I got sent to stay in the funeral parlor where they had an extra bed; everyone else went to a hotel. But that’s another story.
But, Leslie….was he okay? And do you remember the joke (not that you have to tell it here)?
–Marjorie
Marjorie,
My culinary adventures in New Orleans were pretty low-key, although I had a great dinner at Clancy’s. And a wonderful breakfast at a place called the Blue Plate, although I decided that an egg white omelet was the better part of valor. Sometimes, just reading about chocolate chip pancakes is quite sufficient to make one happy.
Wow. That’s pretty scary, Laura. I’m not so good at thinking and acting quickly. My closest brush with a natural disaster was when I went on a business trip to Germany for a few weeks. Being a single parent, I’d been busy right up till the moment of departure, frantically making arrangements for my battling kids to stay with different families, helping them pack, writing out schedules for them, wrangling transportation for them to their activities, boarding the dog, etc. Oh, and also finding someone to fill in on my second job, teaching night classes for Bell Atlantic.
So I was pooped by the time I finally got to bed in the hotel. Sometime in the night, I half-woke, feeling myself being rocked back and forth in the bed. Flopping around, I thought I’d kill (er, yell at) my daggone sister for putting a coin in the Magic Fingers machine while I slept. What a dirty trick! There were voices in the hallway, but I was soon asleep again.
The next morning I thought it must have been a dream, until I came down to breakfast and my colleagues asked if I’d been scared by the earthquake, the first one in that part of Germany in two hundred years. So, yeah, not the best choices. Lucky it didn’t bring the building down around me. I guess if I’ve had any other near misses, I must have slept through them, too.
By the way, enjoyed your talk at the Enoch Pratt. It’s good of you to support the library by appearing there and drawing such a large and enthusiastic crowd.
Marjorie – How typical of a teenager’s memory to forget to tell the END of the story and only tell about the individual heroics of us all! Yes, Pop was fine, the Heimlich worked and the joke is a visual joke that he had never seen or heard of . . . about the Jolly Green Giant . . .
Leslie,
I am so glad that there was a happy ending to your story! Thanks for letting us know.