That's my house in the middle - the one with all the roof damage. In that front left corner of the house the entire ceiling had collapsed onto the floor making it almost impossible to open the front door. We had to break out the glass and shimmy through the window in the door.

This is me in front of the house modeling the full Katrina clean-up uniform of rubber boots, rubber gloves, respirator mask, and cheap Walmart clothes that were thrown away daily rather than washing. The bushes I'm standing in front of used to be magnificent light pink azaleas. You can see in this shot where the mold has totally taken over all the wood on the house. We removed the awnings and window boxes prior to evacuation but they were on the floor in the house so they got ruined anyway. It's hard to look at this picture and remember my quaint little cottage the way it was on August 28th.

This is the right side of the house as you're looking at it from the street. I took this shot to show how all the vegetation is dead. There used to be a 7' wood fence standing that would have blocked the view of the bottom part of the surviving cypress tree. We planted that tree as a 1 foot seedling shortly after we started dating 17 years ago.

This is my back yard. All the fence boards have fallen on top of all the stuff that got washed out of the house into the yard. Notice how the rust is already setting in spots on the back door. Amazingly, the simple wire fence built with steel rods and zip-ties that surrounded my garden is still standing.

Discarded appliances on my street (Demontluzin Street).

This is my street (Demontluzin Street). I took this to show the strange film and powder left on all the cars.

Another shot of Demontluzin Street a few blocks down (and closer to the lake) from my house.

This is my desk at the bike shop. We found things in the office that were on the other side of the store and had to travel through doorways and down hallways to land here.

It wasn't uncommon to see messages written on houses about pets that were left behind. I looked for three days for this black cat, all the time in contact by phone with the owner who had relocated to Oklahoma City. Sadly, I didn't find it.

This is how we left our house. We had removed most of the valuables and things of sentimental value that survived. We boarded up the door and put plywood over the broken windows then I used the plywood as a message board for crews to feed the feral cats that I had spotted under or around the house. Animal rescue crews are still going through the worst-hit neighborhoods leaving food and water for animals and trying to trap them to take them to a shelter.

These are the markings left on each house - one by the rescue crews and the other by the SPCA.

This is West End Blvd. a couple of blocks from the marina. That boat had to travel down 3 streets to end up where it did.

This is on Pontchartrain Blvd. showing the debris holding areas. This used to be a beautiful green parkway with a jogging path running through it.

This is a close-up of one of the debris piles on Pontchartrain Blvd.

I'm not sure where I took this shot, but it was in New Orleans. All the awkwardly pointing poles in the air are actually sailboat masts.

This is the median (in New Orleans we call a median a neutral ground) at a major intersection crowded with plastic signs for everything imaginable: mold abatement, home drying services, roofing, building contractors, and a lot of probably shady building loan offers. Every intersection looked like this.

This was a very ironic shot. I was reading the book "Rising Tide" about the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 where thousand died in Louisiana and Mississippi. When we got to the bike shop I found it on the 4-foot high counter in this condition. It just seemed funny to me to I had to take a photo.