indiana territory

WAWK - JANUARY 20th

WAWK radio 1140am on your dial comes from here in Kendallville - and I remember back in the winter days when my son was in high school at East Noble. WAWK is a dawn to dusk station and in the winter if you tuned in and it was on it meant one thing - school delay announcements.

Now, I can catch them on the bottom of the TV screen or a page on the Internet - but I still remember those mornings when Mike Schultz' voice stirred hope in my son's chest.

Don Moore owns the station and his son Don jr. - who is in the Indiana Guard - spent time on the Gulf Coast. The following article appeared in the Kendallville Mall.

Deer season was about to begin and Don Moore jr. was out sighting in his rifle here in Noble County when the call came. It was from the National Guard; he had a job to do. And that job had a name, Operation Raging Bull, which was associated with another name – this one feminine, this one memorable, this one: Katrina.

So instead of the camouflage clothing used in hunting, Moore was soon in military uniform and driving a Hum-Vee in a convoy heading to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It was an 1100 mile trip that took two days and, grinning, he says the speed was a steady 48 –52 mph.

When they got to the end of that 1100 mile trip, they were still 100 miles from the coast – in Purvis, Mississippi - and yet the signs of destruction were everywhere. Moore has an album of pictures he snapped during the time he left and returned. The earliest are of the natural geographical features of the area through which the highway runs and then the pictures change and there seems to be nothing natural about Nature. There are shots of woods where all trees are snapped off, reminiscent of tornado damage seen here, but on a much bigger scale. During the time was Moore was on mission, his unit moved closer and closer to the sea until his pictures show empty land that was once a neighborhood. Along the roadsides is debris, herded by bulldozers into chaotic piles of bits of everything from golf clubs to furniture to parts of houses.
In the center of one picture is a crumpled up yellow Corvette.
In the center of another picture is a child’s pink stuffed animal.

That is the true impact of Katrina, according to Moore, the bits and pieces or people’s lives, the personal things, ripped apart and blown or washed away. The album is full of the things he saw, but as much as it shows, it cannot encompass the enormity of the event. He says, “It’s nothing like CNN,” and refers to the sounds and smells – and the oppressive heat.

He talks of being in the Humvee in calm air by the Gulf and then being hit with the smell of death. In Biloxi, they came upon a two square block area of sewage. Barges have been washed ashore, spilling the big metal shipping containers used in moving the countries goods and produce. Some were filled with frozen chicken; now there is the stench of rot and little chicken bones strewn about. “That was a bad, bad smell,” he says. Some containers are floating just offshore. The barge of a casino has been pushed onto land and twisted – this was one bet the house lost.

The word house itself takes on a different meaning in what Katrina left behind. Moore tells of meeting an older woman who told him to go on into her house and look around. “No, ma’am,” he replied, “I can’t do that.” She insisted, “Go look.”


When he went into the first floor, there was nothing there, except studding and a staircase. Upstairs he found the kitchen . . . and a water mark high on the kitchen cabinets. He has another picture or another house, only this one does not show skeletal remains of a first and second floor – you see, instead, a roof resting on a foundation. The floors which were made up of the room is which people lived . . . are gone.

Some of the houses were built on stilts and Moore has a picture of what was left of one: 2 and a half of the stilt poles.

Do you remember when the new Wal-Mart was being built east of Kendallville and it was nothing more than a huge shell of a box? Moore talks of another new Wal-Mart on the Gulf Coast. He says you could stand in what was the parking lot and look right through the store, no shelves, no stock. Nothing but the shell was left.

Moore says the area from the shore to four miles inland was “completely gone” and asks people to imagine the land which reaches east to west from the shore of Bixler Lake to Highway 3 and north to south from Fort Wayne to Sturgis being devastated. The sea had come in at 18 feet over normal level with a washing machine action.


He asks, “How would you feel if you were told to leave and could only take a few things and maybe your dog, and when you came back . . .?” You can’t imagine. “Anxious” is a word that addresses the overall feeling of people “coming home.” Reactions ranged according to situation and personality and he remarks about one man who, when he found a tree on his Blazer, cut the roof off, stuck a boat in the back and was driving around. By the remains of one house was a sign: “I’M OKAY, DANIELLE, LOVE YOU, DAD.”

Asked about meeting people who had ridden out the storm, he answers, “ Anyone who stayed, I didn’t meet . . . They were in one of the freezer trailers FEMA had brought.”

In the time he was there, Moore saw changes: houses were already being rebuilt, FEMA trailers were coming in for people to live in, the Red Cross was bringing supplies and providing vouchers and/or checks and churches were up and running.

He estimates 99% of the people were thankful to see the soldiers there, especially as protection against looting. They set up a checkpoint and allowed people in on the basis of a drivers license. They found the stop signs easily. Moore says they were lying all around. The Manager’s Office sign they placed on top of the tarp was picked out of the woods where it had been blown.

He said you don’t get used to the surroundings and that it is going to take a long, long time for things to get back to normal.

He mentions figures about Hurricane Katrina: 33.4 billion dollars spread out over six states; two million people displaced and 1.6 million insurance claims. And somewhere in a place where there are no longer recognizable landmarks . . . one small pink stuffed animal.

posted by Jody @ 8:49 AM