EDITOR’S NOTE: Melanie Edwards is a 1999 graduate of Mount Si High School who we asked to write an account of her time in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck in late August.

Before I delve into the experiences I have gone through, I would like to say that I am truly blessed. God flooded the earth for 40 days, only allowing Noah to take two of every animal. Katrina was only a seven-day horror, which I survived. Everything happens for a reason.

Aug. 28 – I went to a good friend’s birthday party. We drank wine, ate jambalaya and watched really old episodes of “Soul Train.” It was a joyous time. We all discussed what we were going to do for the storm. None of us were worried because the last four storms were supposed to hit the city and didn’t. We all watched the news and the weatherman even said if you stay you are a fool, but he says that every August.

I made arrangements with a colleague to go east of the city to the suburbs, which are at a higher elevation than the city itself. The next morning, I got up with the sun and rode out there with him, along with my best friend Tangela (who is also from Seattle and attended Dillard) and his grandmother. We all had packed food, water and clothing.

Before leaving my apartment, I had placed my computer and television in the kitchen because I had eight huge windows and a bunch of trees. I figured if a tree were to fall, at least I could save all the stuff on my computer. Of course, that means all the music I had downloaded.

Aug. 29 – it was such a beautiful day. I arrived at my destination, which was my boyfriend Sheatiel’s sister’s apartment on the third floor. I thought that we would be OK on higher elevated land and on the third floor of a building; I was wrong.

Yet the day of the storm was beautiful. We walked to Lake Ponchitrain and threw rocks in the water. There were so many pretty sea shells; Tangalea, Amber (Sheatiel’s sister) and I walked along and collected them. We returned to the house and filled up three storage containers with water so if the power and water went out, we could still flush the toilet. We had gallons of drinking water and food for days, flash lights and a barbeque grill. We all figured the power would be out for maybe a week, but we were prepared – or so we thought. When the storm hit, we actually went outside and danced on the balcony in the rain. The wind was so strong that you had to hold on to a rail or you would literally fly away. Scared? No, we weren’t scared. We were amazed at the power of God and Mother Nature. Little did we know what they had in store.

The next morning the power was out and I called my mother in North Bend, Connie Edwards. I told her I was fine and that the street looked like I was somewhere in Italy. We laughed. I said I needed a canoe but that the water should go down in a couple of days. Once again it was a beautiful day. The sun was shining and people’s spirits were fine.

I walked through the water (anyone who knows me knows I wear flip flops on a daily basis) down to the store to get charcoal for the grill because there were a lot of elderly people who wanted us to cook their food so it wouldn’t go bad. The store was closed, however people had managed to break the window and were looting stupid things like expensive alcohol and fancy T-shirts. Amber told me not to go in, but we needed things.

At this time I realized that the storm was bad. I looked around and saw water. In my mind, I wanted to believe that it would go down in a few days, but then I saw people coming down the streets in boats and their faces were in agony. Some men told me that less than a mile down the street, the water was waist high. I went in the store and got baby wipes, toilet paper, cereal and canned goods. I began to panic. I panicked so much that I had an asthma attack and I haven’t had one of those since running track at Mount Si. Luckily, Amber had in inhaler and gave me some cold water and told me to stay out of the heat. Of coarse, I didn’t.

I walked around an apartment complex. The whole night of the storm, Sheatiel was telling me that we were on the back side of the wind and not to worry. Oh, how right he was. I walked around the corner and the whole other side of the apartment complex was destroyed. The wind literally took off the outer walls. Where there used to be a parking lot in between the buildings, there was now a river. Cars were upside down, boats were floating and I was looking in other people’s apartments.

Let me stop babbling and tell you how everything in my life and those of thousands of others was drastically changed.

The next day (I can’t tell what day this was because by this point time and days had started running together) we cooked some food on the grill. My friend started to lose it and said, “We need to get out of here. This doesn’t feel right!” We all told her to calm down, yet she hopped in her car and drove through water that was strangely rising and not receding.

Mind you, this is now two days after the storm and on both days the weather had been unusually hot and sunny. We drank some wine to calm our nerves, not knowing were my friend had gone or how bad the rest of the bayou was. Not too much longer after this a sewage truck came and the driver told us to get on. We told him we were fine and then my life was flipped upside down. He said, “Don’t argue, just get on. The levy is about to break.”

What? I voted for levee repairs. Every time I get a check, money is taken out for stuff like this. What do you mean? This is all that I could think of. I took Louisiana history in college I knew about the flood of 1938 in which thousands of people (including many black people) died because of the levies.

We were taken, along with what we could carry, to the University of New Orleans. Conditions were horrible. There was no power, no running water. At least 1,500 people were there and maybe only 20 toilets. Ignorant people began urinating in the vacant classrooms. Young girls were raped. No one could see what was happening, you could only hear the struggles. The elderly moaned from pain and lack of medication. It was hot, so very hot. There were seven of us – my boyfriend, his sister, her two children, our friend who had left earlier that we met up with at the university, Tangela and myself. We had knives and slept in a pile. We wanted to help but we had to take care of ourselves.

The next day, planes and helicopters encircled us. We talked with other people who told us that they had had to walk through water that was filled with dead bodies to get to the university. People had to break through attic ceilings to get out of their houses. I asked them where they stayed; many were from the neighborhood I had just moved out of. Gone, New Orleans was really gone.

The place in which I lived my whole adult life had been wiped out. Unreal. When you watched the news at night, they told America about the convention center and the super dome. No one knew we were at the university, no one. There was no food or help.

An officer told us that we should try and get to the lake-front airport. After having officials with assault rifles tell us that they were going to leave us to die and that the other levy was going to break; after seeing helicopters, Red Cross helicopters, circle us; after having to break into the book store to get sweaters for elderly people, children and pregnant women because it had started to rain; and after not eating or showering or being able to call home, we got out.

Dire times call for dire measures. We hot-wired our friend’s car, for she had lost her keys, and drove with seven people in pitch blackness, mist and waist-high water to the airport.

There is no way that that car should have made it though except for God. The hardest part was having to pass by people who were screaming for us to help them, and not being able to. We already had a person sitting on the hood of the ’86 Oldsmobile. Women were asking us to take their children; men desperately pushed their elderly parents in wheelchairs.

We spent a day at the ai