Learning to evacuate after getting caught once in Hurricane Betsy
George Miller. Photo by David Breidenbach.
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George Miller. Photo by David Breidenbach.
TEMPESTS: Storms in the Archives
George Miller: Both my wife and I, we experienced Betsy in 1965. I was nineteen. In fact, I was staying at my grandmother's house. And that's when the [Army] Corps of Engineers actually did blow up the levee for Betsy. And it flooded the Lower Ninth Ward. They didn't really, like I said, I guess, blow it up. They actually thought they could blow the levee and control the water with a barge. But the barge went through the levee. And I walked in water up to my chest and promised that if I ever had the opportunity to get out of there alive, I would never, ever get caught in a storm. And my wife and I were talking the other day. I guess in my forty-something years of working, we figured that we evacuated, oh, something like thirty-five times. Sometimes you might evacuate two or three times a season. So when you say thirty-five times, it sounds like a lot. But if you do it every three or four times a year. And the reason why, because both of us got caught in Betsy. So we knew exactly what we were up against.