OK, as blogs go, this one may be a bit more painful than most. And as I sit today, comfortably in the A/C, at the Airlift Productions Studios in NOLA, it’s hard to believe that as I write this, we’re a decade down the road.
Frankly, I do not have enough fingers and toes to count all the people that I know personally who lost everything – homes, cars, all the worldly possessions of a lifetime – through the aftermath of this one storm.
Folks who, like me, packed-up the car with enough clothes and necessities for a 3-day evacuation, convinced we’d be back home, snug in our own beds by Tuesday.
Mother Nature … and that Mother Katrina had other ideas.
As the ‘homes’ they returned to were buried to the rooftops in Katrina & Lake Pontchartrain’s floodwaters!
And as if ‘things’ weren’t enough to lose, I even had friends who – in fits of despair and hopelessness – chose to end their very lives.
Like I said. A blog more painful than most.
Yet, as the Ten Year Anniversary rolls around – Katrina roared into town August 29th, 2005 – it’s time for NOLA and the Nation to reflect. Reflect on where we’ve been. And where we are.
Through the past couple weeks I’ve had the pleasure of working with Paul Atkinson, producer/videographer with Versatile Productions, who hired me to record my old pal Norman Robinson for a documentary he’s working on about the storm, the aftermath, and repairs made – to both our infrastructure … and New Orleans’ collective human spirit.
While it was good to work with Norman again, and meet Paul, at times the sheer weight of the project loomed rather heavily in the Airlift Productions Studios.
Give a LISTEN to just a bit of what went down at the Airlift Productions mics on this project, remembering Hurricane Katrina….
** Norman Robinson records Katrina Documentary VoiceOver at Airlift Productions, New Orleans – August 2015 **
Through ten very painful – and yet encouraging – years of rebuilding, along with all it’s survivors, I’ve heard all the aphorisms and cliches, but the one that reverberates most true is the classic – “That which does not kill us only makes us stronger”.
If indeed that’s true, to readers of this blog from around America, come on down! Come bring your tourist dollars, appetites & senses … and feel the muscle of America’s most fascinating & resilient city ~ New Orleans, LA!
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“No recording studio I have worked with has given such personal attention toward perfecting the ‘science of sound’ than Airlift Productions in the hands of Micheal Ziants. I thank him for the many voice-overs and sound effects he produced for my syndicated television shows “MORGUS PRESENTS”! ~ DR. MOMUS ALEXANDER MORGUS, aka Sidney Noel Rideau
